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220 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingAnd now a new group is on stage: communities facing the new‘carbon - saving’ projects that generate the credits bought and sold inthe carbon market. Such projects – tree plantations, industrial gas destructionprojects, and many others – not only help perpetuate the oldproblems of coal, oil and gas; they often bring new problems as well.In order to generate carbon credits from trees or energy crops, plantationcompanies have to maintain their hold on land that ordinarypeople may need for other purposes. In order to generate carboncredits from burning the methane bubbling out of landfill sites, authoritieshave to fight to keep them open. In order to keep track ofthe carbon their agroforestry schemes generate, rural developmentorganisations have to divert resources from their traditional work. Inorder to get carbon credits for halting fl aring, oil companies have togo on drilling and polluting.And all the while, new strip mines continue to be opened, oil continuesto be spilled, and chemical pollutants continue to waft overpower-generating plants. Every Clean Development Mechanism orJoint Implementation project set up under the Kyoto Protocol, or‘carbon offset’ scheme launched by a private firm, helps perpetuatethe fatal flow of fossil carbon out of the ground and into the air just assurely as any drill bit or transcontinental pipeline.The fossil fuel economy’s new frontier, in short, has become a newbattlefield. Added to classic local confl icts over extraction, pollution,‘Middle East nationscall oil the “blood of theearth”. No resource ismore critical to [US]industry, security, andfreedom… Let’s openup the Arctic NationalWildlife Refuge todrilling…pump out ofthe Strategic PetroleumReserve… clear theway for exploration onthe Outer ContinentalShelf… Tell SaudiArabia, Kuwait, and thesheikdoms of the Gulfthat if they do not begin topump enough oil to cut theprice to USD 20 a barrelby fall, they can lookelsewhere the next timewar clouds descend overthe Gulf.’Patrick Buchanan,US presidential candidate,2000