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

offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 283than the grid average used by the project’. This is in spite of the factthat the authority’s figures were a subject of hot dispute in Thailandand carbon intensity per year varies by about 20 per cent. 130It all sounds a bit too much like guesswork, given that the object is the calculationof a precise number of tonnes of CO 2 saved. How can they possibly be surethat if the project didn’t exist, exactly that amount of electricity would havebeen generated through nothing better than the current ‘average’ fuel mix?They can’t. But it’s a procedure that’s acceptable in principle to the UN.I assume the consultancy also factors in how much additional use of fossilgeneratedEPDC electricity the project might encourage in Japan?No.Why not? If the project helps reassure electricity consumers or investors inJapan that it’s OK to keep using coal-generated electricity there, doesn’t thatadd to the carbon debit of the project?Yes, it does. But Kyoto carbon accounting tends to ignore such realities,not that they could be measured anyway (see Chapter 3). SoDNV was under little obligation to present an answer to the questionin any of the hundreds of pages of highly technical documents on theYala project. Assessing the many indirect carbon or climatic effects ofthe project, according to DNV, ‘is not necessary in our opinion’. 131Let me ask another question, then. If the project was going to be built anyway,then what exactly does it ‘save’ that deserves a climate subsidy? It’s just businessas usual.That’s right, and the CDM rulebook demands that CDM projectsprove that they are not business as usual. As a result, the Yala project’sproponents have had to produce some evidence that it isn’t businessas usual.How have they done that?With difficulty. At first, project proponents claimed that, withoutcarbon credit sales, the project’s return on equity would be lowerthan ‘desirable’ or ‘normal’ but that the good publicity associatedwith a climate-friendly project would make up for this. When NGOspressed DNV to provide evidence for these claims, DNV said that itdid not have permission to make public the ‘confidential’ financialanalysis the project proponents had given it. Project proponents alsoasserted that the planning needed for the project was a ‘barrier’ thatrequired carbon finance to overcome, and that the project was tech-