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

306 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon trading‘Moral hazard’? What does that mean?It’s a term often used in the insurance business. By insuring houses ,for example, an insurance company, if it’s not careful, can create anincentive for its customers not to take proper precautions againstfire. Similarly, offering businesses a way of getting subsidies for whatthey’re doing already, without any way of verifying their claims aboutwhat would happen otherwise, creates incentives for them not tomake any improvements.Are there other justifi cations Plantar cites for getting carbon credits?Several. Plantar has also looked to get carbon credits for afforestation;improvements in charcoal production that minimise methanere leases; rehabilitating cerrado (savannah), the biome it itself has hadsuch a hand in depleting; and improving grasslands.Conducting research into thestory of Plantar have beenMarcelo Calazans (below)and Winnie Overbeek of theBrazilian NGO FASE-ES inEspirito Santo, assisted by aninternational team working oncarbon trading more generallyincluding, (next page fromtop) Adam Ma’anit and HeidiBachram of Carbon TradeWatch, Jutta Kill of SinksWatch, and Ben Pearsonof Clean DevelopmentMechanism Watch (and nowwith Greenpeace Australia).What do local people make of all this?They find it hard to believe that Plantar could secure extra finance foranything that falls under the rubric of ‘environment’ or ‘development’.‘We were surprised and bewildered by the news’, a group of over50 trade unions, churches, local deputies, academics, human andland rights organisations and others protested in a letter of 26 March2003. 189 They see the company as having illegally dispossessed manypeople of their land, destroyed jobs and livelihoods, dried up and pollutedlocal water supplies, depleted soils and the biodiversity of thenative cerrado biome, threatened the health of local people, and exploitedlabour under appalling conditions (see ‘Plantar vs. local people– Two versions of history’, on page 309). 190So they see the carbon scheme as shoring up an unjust and destructive socialarrangement.Yes. But local residents oppose not only the way Plantar is trying toget paid for using former cerrado and farmland for a carbon dump.They also oppose the way the carbon project appropriates alternativefutures that they are pressing for:The argument that producing pig iron from charcoal is less bad thanproducing it from coal is a sinister strategy… What about the emissionsthat still happen in the pig iron industry, burning charcoal?What we really need are investments in clean energies that at thesame time contribute to the cultural, social and economic well-beingof local populations… We can never accept the argument that one activityis less worse [sic] than another one to justify the serious negative