On 5/19/2013 7:47 AM, Gar Lipow wrote: > ... > There are other problems with carbon trading. These are not even > neccesarily th e most important ones, just ones that can be expressed > fairly succinctly. If Patrick Bond and Larry Lohmann choose they can > probably point you towards some of the ones the require longer discussion.
Do these make sense? The eight I usually dwell on are: · the idea of inventing a property right to pollute is effectively the ‘privatisation of the air’, a moral problem given the vast and growing differentials in wealth inequalities; · greenhouse gases are complex and their rising production creates a non-linear impact that cannot be reduced to a commodity exchange relationship (a tonne of CO2 produced in one place accommodated by reducing a tonne in another, as is the premise of the emissions trade); · the corporations most guilty of pollution and the World Bank – which is most responsible for fossil fuel financing – are the driving forces behind the market, and can be expected to engage in systemic corruption to attract money into the market even if this prevents genuine emissions reductions; · many of the offsetting projects – such as monocultural timber plantations, forest ‘protection’ and landfill methane-electricity projects – have devastating impacts on local communities and ecologies, and have been hotly contested in part because the carbon sequestered is far more temporary (since trees die) than the carbon emitted; · the price of carbon determined in these markets is haywire, having crashed by half in a short period in April 2006 and by two-thirds in 2008, thus making a mockery of the idea that there will be an effective market mechanism to make renewable energy a cost-effective investment; · there is a serious potential for carbon markets to become an out-of-control, multi-trillion dollar speculative bubble, similar to exotic financial instruments associated with Enron’s 2002 collapse (indeed, many Enron employees populate the carbon markets); · as a ‘false solution’ to climate change, carbon trading encourages merely small, incremental shifts, and thus distracts us from a wide range of radical changes we need to make in materials extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal; and · the idea of market solutions to market failure (‘externalities’) is an ideology that rarely makes sense, and especially not following the world’s worst-ever financial market failure, and especially not when the very idea of derivatives – a financial asset whose underlying value is several degrees removed and also subject to extreme variability – was thrown into question. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
