A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

lessons unlearned 175How?The pollution prevented by RECLAIM’s programme of destroying decrepitcars would have been spread over a wide four-county region. Butthe industries that bought the resulting ‘offsets’ are densely clusteredin only a few communities, or ‘hot spots’. So the car ‘offset’ schemeeffectively concentrated more pollution in communities surroundingstationary sources, particularly those associated with the four oil companieswho were the biggest buyers of the offset credits generated byscrapping cars: Unocal, Chevron, Ultramar and GATX.All these companies used their ‘offsets’ to avoid installing pollutioncontrol equipment that captures toxic gases and vapours released duringoil tanker loading at their marine terminals, including benzene,which can cause leukaemia, anaemia, respiratory tract irritation, dermatitis,pulmonary oedema, and haemorrhaging. 398 The surroundingcommunities were overwhelmingly Latino, three of them populatedbetween 75 to 90 per cent by people of colour (compared to a figureof 36 per cent for the entire South Coast Air Basin). 399Much of the historical pollution burden of these underprivileged communitieswas thus maintained through a programme advertised as ‘controlling’pollution. 400 In a trade of like for unlike, the continued releaseof highly toxic chemicals into certain communities was exchanged forsmall area-wide reductions in much less toxic chemicals.Nor is this case unique. A trading programme in the San Francisco area‘unfairly gave up toxic emissions reductions from a petroleum refineryin a community of colour facing high cancer risk, in exchange forcredits from reductions in auto use throughout the Bay Area’. 401How offsets block changeIf trading in carbon credits worsens the problem of hot spots, it alsoadds to the forces blocking the technological and social innovationneeded to address climate change. Again, this is a pattern evidentfrom ‘offset’ projects in earlier US pollution trading schemes that isbeing repeated in today’s carbon-‘saving’ projects – including theKyoto Protocol’s CDM.What’s the US experience, then?One example is, again, the RECLAIM pollution market set up in LosAngeles. 402 Beginning in 1997, the local air quality management authorityoffered to award marketable credits to businesses or individualswho repaired emissions-related components in high-emitting vehicles,bought clean buses or other vehicles, electrified truck stops and tour bus