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

194 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingsor Lisa Heinzerling points out, the US Congress didn’t debate howmuch emissions should be cut or how badly sulphur dioxide was affectingforests, streams and lakes. Instead, Congress merely acceptedthe emissions cut originally proposed to it and occupied itself withdividing up the rights to pollute that it was giving away in a waythat would best satisfy influential business interests. Along the way ithanded out special favours to, among others, the high-sulphur coalindustry, a powerful lobby group, by providing extra incentives touse scrubbers – thus contradicting the claim of trading enthusiaststhat the scheme would give polluters the freedom to choose means ofcontrolling their pollution. As Robert Glicksman and Christopher H.Schroeder note, legislators seemed to see ‘little distinction betweenthe Clean Air Act and a fight over which defence installation to close,or an appropriation for public works project. The pork tastes as good,from whichever barrel it comes.’ 452 Alternatives to giving rights awayfree to high-polluting corporations were also little discussed, thoughif they had been, the controversy could have been intense.As noted above, discussion of social goals has also taken a back seat tohorse-trading during the implementation of the EU Emissions TradingSystem. And the market in CDM and JI credits is likewise unfriendlyto democratic discussion of social goals, including emissions cuts.Unfriendly in what ways?Well, for one thing, anyone wanting to comment on planning documentsfor CDM projects (for example) has to learn English, find acomputer, log onto a website, register, and then navigate hundreds ofpages of technical jargon, usually under a tight deadline. CDM commentforms provide no spaces for discussing the reliability of the implementingcompanies or the indeterminacy and scientific ig norancethat stand in the way of the projects’ being verifiably climatically effective.Nor are there spaces for questioning the ubiquitous assumptionthat such projects produce ‘emissions reductions’. 453 As one Indiansocial activist remarked on being confronted with an officialUN form for submitting comments on a CDM project, ‘the form forpublic input is so full of technicalities there seems to be no space forgeneral comments’. 454By their sheer bulk and repetitiveness, such documents entrench a‘mainstream’ discussion about climate change that sidelines thinkingabout how to halt the flow of fossil fuels out of the ground and limitsthe political choices a society can make to small, incremental variationson business as usual. As Adil Najam and colleagues concludedin 2003, ‘There is a danger that Kyoto has now become so much of amechanism for managing global carbon trade that emission cuts for