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

offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 305rate of return for planting new trees today is not attractive in absenceof the sale of CDM credits’.Meanwhile, the World Bank and its consultants admit that there areseveral possible ‘land management scenarios for the Curvelo ranch inthe absence of the carbon project’. 186That means that there are several possible baselines with diff erent carbon profi les.Yes.That means that there are several diff erent fi gures for how much carbon theproject might save.Yes.That means that there can be no single number of carbon credits generated bythe project.No, there can’t.Doesn’t that bother the project accountants?No. They simply choose the baseline scenario they claim is ‘mostplausible’ and discard the others.So there’s actually no scientifi c basis for assigning any particular number of carboncredits to the project?No. It’s essentially arbitrary. What’s more, even if Plantar could provethat it was avoiding the use of a quantifiable amount of coal in MinasGerais, it would still have to prove that the coal would not be usedsomewhere else for 10, 50, 100 or 300 years. Or it would have to quantifythe extent to which its local avoidance of fossil fuels was helpingindirectly to build an alternative, non-fossil energy econ omy worldwide.In the end, it’s anybody’s guess how Plantar’s carbon credits arerelated to climate.Revealingly, even those technocrats who are committed to the idea ofcarbon-saving projects are beginning to be uneasy about companies’demands to be given carbon money for what they are doing already. InJanuary 2003, the CDM Methodologies Panel rejected the claim of another‘avoided fuel switch’ carbon project located adjacent to Plantar’sthat it was an improvement on ‘business as usual’. 187 In November 2003,the project submitted another accounting methodology. But the Panelwas still unsatisfied. Could carbon-saving projects that merely continuecurrent practice really be ‘ additional’? The panel decided that the claimthrows up problems of ‘moral hazard’. 188