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lessons unlearned 137The special problems ofcarbon projectsSo far this chapter has explained why current large-scale attempts atsetting up a market in allowances to emit greenhouse gases don’t constitutean effective approach to climate change.But – as explained in the last chapter – trading in allowances to emitisn’t the only kind of carbon trading. Commerce in credits generatedby special pollution-saving projects is also growing fast.Remind me. What are these projects? How do they work?From the beginning, private firms, Northern governments and theUnited Nations have been fretting that big fossil fuel users in richcountries won’t be able to afford even the small cuts in fossil fuel userequired by emissions trading programmes such as that of the KyotoProtocol. As a result, they’ve hunted around for ways of allowing industryto continue to burn fossil fuels while still keeping their emissionsunder mandated ‘caps’.The main solution private industry and governments have turned toconsists of special carbon-saving or carbon-sequestering projects –schemes that capture greenhouse gases, put them out of harm’s way,use fossil fuels more efficiently, and so on. Instead of cutting off flowsof waste into the overflowing world carbon dump, they’ve proposedbuilding ‘extensions’ of the dump to handle the overflow. Acquiringcertificates of ‘ownership’ of such ‘dump extensions’ entitles big pollutersto emit more greenhouse gases than they have emissions allowancesfor.It’s a classic ‘end of pipe’ solution to pollution. Instead of cutting flowsof a raw material into an industrial process, you fi x the problem afterthe resulting waste is already coming out of the pipe.How do these new projects fi t into the world of trade?The allowances and the special credits created by carbon-savingprojects are all thrown into a big pot and traded one for the other.Everybody is supposed to benefit. Polluters save money by not havingto stop polluting, and builders of new carbon dump make money byselling the new dump space they create.What kind of carbon dump extensions are we talking about?