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

302 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingDoes that mean that for the time being, Kuyasa will have to be dependent onthe kindness of taxpayers and politicians?Yes. Unfortunately, it’s not as if government has no other fundingpriorities. Housing activist Peter van Hausen notes, for example, thatthere is currently a backlog of 260,000 houses that need to be built inCape Town, and 20,000 more are required each year. 175 This backloghas almost doubled since 1994. In the long term, it is a lot to ask ofpublic authorities that they spend tax money on energy upgrades forpeople who already own their homes when hundreds of thousandsdo not. 177Thus, while Kuyasa is exactly the type of project that many people hopedthe CDM could deliver, now that it exists, the carbon market simplycannot support it. Carbon credit buyers will naturally gravitate towardsmuch less environmentally and socially desirable projects such as BisasarRoad, Bellville or Sasol – assuming any of them come on line.‘The rich developedcountries have emittedmost of the greenhousegases currently in theatmosphere and nowthe more enlightenedof them are prepared topay to further polluteour atmosphere, or moreexactly, they will providemoney so that they cancontinue their pollutionwhile we decrease ours.’ 176South African ClimateAction Network, July 2002Brazil –Handouts for repression as usualIn a carbon project in MinasGerais, eastern Brazil, carbontrading institutions have usedand exacerbated coercive powerrelations in yet another attemptto produce an imaginary carboncommodity. As in Ecuador andUganda, the Forest StewardshipCouncil (FSC) has played a bigrole and, as in South Africa, theWorld Bank as well.VenzuelaColombiaPeruBoliviaArgentinaParaguayBrazilIs this another tree plantation project?Partly, but it’s a good deal more complicated. The company claimingto be saving carbon and helping the climate is a pig iron-producingand plantation management company called Plantar S.A.How is Plantar helping the climate? Is the pig iron it makes produced by solarenergy? Or is it perhaps used to make solar cells?