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

‘made in the usa’ – a short history of carbon trading 49Climate Change (UNFCCC). The treaty finally came into force on16 February 2005, having been ratified by 127 countries responsiblefor 61 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.The Protocol binds 38 industrialised nations to reducing their emissionsan average of 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012.But there are loopholes. Countries unable or unwilling to achievethese modest targets are allowed to ‘compensate’ for their failurethrough three trading mechanisms, or markets.Which are?First, they are allowed to buy emissions rights from countries thathave permits to spare. Countries that were able to win very lax targetsto begin with, such as Russia and the Ukraine, are likely to haveplenty of permits with which to supply this market.And second?Second, industrialised countries can also escape the need to reduceemissions by putting money into carbon-absorbing forestry or soilconservation. 71And third?Last, and most important, the industrialised North can escape its obligationsto reduce at home by investing in special, UN-approved‘greenhouse gas-saving’ projects abroad.What are these foreign-based projects?They fall into two categories. Clean Development Mechanism(CDM) projects are carried out in the South, in countries not subjectto the emissions ‘cap’ on industrialised nations.Joint Implementation (JI) projects are similar, but are set up in otherindustrialised countries, in practice mostly in Eastern Europe.Such trading mechanisms had been tried out nowhere in the worldoutside of the US. By and large, they had failed even there (see Chapter3). But support for them from the Bill Clinton regime set in motiona politics that eventually prevailed over both European andSouthern opposition 72 (see box on page 52, ‘International ClimatePolitics: Some Recent Highlights’). As climate expert Michael Grubbnotes, the ‘dominance of US power, and the continuing weakness offoreign policy… elsewhere’ has ensured that the negotiations followingthe Kyoto Protocol – as well as the Protocol itself – have been‘very much as sought by the US administration’. 73