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

‘made in the usa’ – a short history of carbon trading 61Globalisation and Carbon Trading: Two Complementary Views‘The response of global business to newlegal frameworks is creating new relationships… the carbon market can be easilygrafted onto powerful financial marketsthat can bring amoral scale… Considercolleagues of mine at Climate ChangeCapital, an Australian woman who builtexperience in the carbon market at theWorld Bank, a Hungarian educated in theUS who founded an organisation in histwenties to work on the climate change issue,working together with a Chinese plantmanager in a hard hat during endless dinnerswith unusual foods, vast amounts ofalcohol, explaining how international lawworks and why we must have English lawgovern the contract and at the end there isopportunity for wealth to be created herein cosmopolitan London and the rapidlydeveloping world.’ 118James Cameron, Vice Chairman,Climate Change Capital, 2005‘A lot of “offsets” are produced by consultants.Example: you own a steel plant in apoor country that turns scrap metal intonew steel. It is an old-fashioned basic oxygenfurnace (BOF), and it is finally completelyworn out. A rebuild won’t do thistime; it needs to be replaced. There is hydroelectricpower in your area. You cansave a lot of money by buying an ElectricArc Furnace (EAF) and using that forprocessing your scrap metal. But you knowthat EAF is a lot cleaner and greener thanyour old BOF. Isn’t there some way youcan get paid for this? Why, yes, there is.Call in a certified carbon market consultantand pay him a nice fee. He will produce astudy certifying that you could have gottenten more years out of that old BOF, andthat the only reason you are investing in anew EAF is carbon credits. Voila! The carbonmarket will examine the report, findit convincing, and a new annual producerof offsets is born – which a “green” rockband can buy to justify burning petroleumin planes and buses. “Mommy, where docarbon offsets come from?” “Well, you see,honey, when a polluter and a consultantlove money very, very much, they cometogether in a very special way to producean extremely long piece of paper.”’ 119Gar Lipow,systems analyst and peace activist, 2006In addition, the small circle of private carbon consultancies that helpdesign and, with the permission of the UN, validate, verify and certifygreenhouse gas-saving projects in the South have little incentiveto question the effectiveness of the carbon projects they workon, since to do so would be to jeopardise their chances of gettingfuture work. It could also jeopardise their relationships with theirother clients. For example, the Norwegian-based Det Norske Veritas(DNV) consultancy, under contract to the World Bank’s PrototypeCarbon Fund (PCF), recommended the controversial Plantar scheme(see Chapter 4) as a CDM project. Yet DNV also has significant consultancycontracts with two of the PCF’s investors, Statoil and Norsk