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

lessons unlearned 185pet schemes, even if its overall tendency is destructive. After all, there aren’t allthat many opportunities to get funding for renewable energy around, and I’vegot to take them where I can fi nd them.If you still think this market is going to provide support for the painstakingwork you do, good luck. As one Dutch banker involved in thecarbon credit market put it recently, ‘[F]ew in the market can dealwith communities.’ Economic carbon projects are not going to be theecologically- or socially-beneficial ones.The problem is not just that only 2 per cent of CDM money is goinginto renewable energy. It is also, as Ben Pearson stresses, thatthe CDM is diverting finance that should be going into renewableenergy into easier projects that merely prop up an outdated, fossilfuel- dependent industrial structure. As a renewable energy developer,you stand to lose from the CDM in the long term.All right, let me adopt an even more cynical attitude. Suppose I’m not a responsiblerenewable energy developer but rather a Southern government. Surely theCDM will be useful to me and my ministries as a source of new investment in mycountry. The investment may not do any good for global warming, and it may beeconomically and socially useless. 434 But it might, if I’m lucky, at least provide afew new capital fl ows to development projects – and my business sector.It’s hard to argue this point. But notice that we’ve now left the climatedebate behind entirely, by admitting that the CDM has nothing to dowith tackling global warming. The fact that the conversation has collapsedinto a general discussion of international investment and developmentshows to what extent the institutions concerned have takenover and diverted the climate debate. And that should give us pause.Even if CDM projects are considered merely as ‘foreign direct investmentthrough construction’ with no climatic benefits, they still holdthe same sort of risks as any other foreign direct investment. As YinShao Loong and Ben Pearson point out, these include ‘shift of capitalownership from domestic to foreign and high transfers of surplusaway from host countries’. 435If carbon credit investors are mostly interested in high-volume industrial projects,or those with low transaction costs, doesn’t that mean they’re going towind up discriminating against smaller, poorer Southern countries anyway,and favouring only a few, well-prepared ones?