Carbon Trading
Does it work?
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Andreus Andreopolis, the Administer of Greek group Frog Boiled. He is walking from Copenhagen (he is pictured here in the busy Bela Center) to Greece to highlight Climate Change, and hopes to get a lot of people to join him on the way.
Copenhagen...I think I am finally getting my head wrapped around it, and what is just beginning to eek into my brain is this. There is a strong disconnect between what I have seen on the ground, in forests, and what I witnessed and have heard at the conference. Many of the policy makers do not have a strong understanding of the intricacy of the issues being discussed and decided. When they do have a good grasp of them they often fail to see how those issues will be implemented outside the corridors of their offices. This is not only their failure, but a failure of those of us who report on these subjects.
Last night I went to the Earth Journalism Awards. They were presented by famous BBC World journalist Lyse Doucet from prime time television, and had a Nobel Prize winner, high level ministers from the around the world and many others help hand out the gorgeous prizes in one of the most beautiful buildings in Copenhagen. There were very few media people there. It was the least attended media event I have been to during the conference.
Either the organizers had failed to get the word to even ten of the three thousand journalists here in the city, or no one cared to cover it. My experience in getting stories of this kind published in the mainstream press makes me think that the latter is the truth. Environmental journalism does not get exposure in the media. It’s looked at almost like that slightly geeky guy who says all the right things at the wrong times at a college party.
In the hack and slash world of the current press cutbacks, it is unlikely that this will change, but even in the “old days” when there were budgets, I often, very often, had many of my friends and colleagues from various international newspapers ask me to stop suggesting environmental stories. They felt, and so did (and do) many of the editors we work with, that they are simply not hard news.
The problem with environmental reporting is that it’s expensive, it requires research, it requires skill and thorough knowledge. It requires money. So most of what is out there is like my documentary at the moment. Self produced, released through a limited niche market, and therefore not widely read or watched, and there is not a lot of it.
So the Earth Journalism Awards are an attempt by the pioneering press group Internews to raise the profile of these stories and get them out to more people. Go to the website and check some of them out, they are great. One of my favorites is Trash Is Cash by Lilian Tende. It was released on YouTube. Many of the others were web-only productions or pieces of writing. Some of the winners have not made money, and some have not even covered their costs from the projects.
There is a clear need for a much greater understanding of these very important issues in the months and years ahead. If the terrible coverage of this very important event was any indicator, the mainstream media is still way behind in supporting and sustaining clear and relevant news on environmental issues that matter to us all. How to redress this imbalance is not easy, but it was good to see a group like Internews, who helped foster cross-border relations during the cold war, tackling the issue and working to put these environmental journalists and their very good stories in the spotlight.
A Hardwood Forest in Mozambique in danger of being cut down by loggers.
Its important to understand the very basic basics of Carbon Trading. It is not complicated. Lets say I am a big stinky polluting utility company. I throw out thousands of tons of carbon and other noxious greenhouse gasses like methane every day. You are a forest, and you suck up carbon emissions like mine. Essentially I pay you to suck. The emissions. That I produce. This is the essence of the system.
That makes me carbon neutral, I pay your forest to stand and suck the carbon I produce in excess of a proscribed amount (like the proposed United States' Cap and Trade system). That makes me carbon neutral, but it also stops you from cutting down your carbon sucking forest. I think its pretty strait-forward. But sadly the Kyoto Protocol was not made to support standing forests. The Kyoto protocol was made to prevent a nasty polluting company from doing more damage.
So its relatively easy to get carbon credits for say, stopping pollution by putting on scrubbers to my smokestack (then I can sell Carbon too!) but very very hard to get credits by keeping or planting a standing forest. So Carbon Trading as most people see it today is not working. The rules are so convoluted that it is impossible (or almost) for a forestry project to get certified.
The Kyoto protocol allows for polluters to get carbon credits for cleaning up their act, it does not make much allowance for forests that actually remove the carbon from the air to get Carbon Credits. The numbers say everything. Only two….yes that’s right, only two whole forestry projects in all of Africa have gotten certified to sell carbon credits. More than two hundred have attempted or applied. One of them is the Green Resources project in Tanzania.
Before launching into what is essentially the gist of my documentary, and showering my poor readers with lots of acronyms and carbon-science related gobbledy-gook, I would like to de-mystify one very important term. The Clean Development Mechanism, or CDM. Learn it, know that term by heart. Repeat it three times in your head. Without this term you will be forever lost in acronym hell. Whenever you hear or read the term CDM, just think THE RULES. Within this mechanism are all the rules and jargon and simply everything to do with the current carbon-trading system. CDM is the bible of Carbon Trading.
If your project is not CDM certified, then according the Kyoto Protocol, you have a limited ability to sell your carbon, no matter how good your science is, no matter that you planted five million trees this year and want people to buy your carbon, which you clearly have, if your project is not CDM certified, then you cannot sell it freely on the open market.
If you have CDM certification, you have carbon to trade, if you don’t have CDM certification, you may trade in carbon but just not on the open market. I am banging on about this because it is important. It is the crux of the biscuit, as Frank Zappa famously quoted.
According to Eco-securities, one of the biggest carbon trading companies in the world, the amount of money and total carbon credits earned from CDM-certified carbon trades in Africa is a paltry 3% of the world-wide total.
So much for Carbon Trading uplifting developing countries. That number represents a total failure of the system, since that was one of it’s founding edicts, to uplift developing countries. So how did this system fail so spectacularly? How can success be hornswoggled from the jaws of defeat?
Article by Jeff Barbee
Our new World
