Carbon trade bandwagon

With the Democrats rise to power in Washington, climate change has risen up the agenda in the form of carbon trading. Michael Dorsey critically examines emerging US climate policy.

The post-Bush political landscape
in Washington could swing from a
'head in the sand' approach to
climate change to embracing an
untested and unproven global
carbon market - with all the
incentives and opportunities that
this would offer to international
institutions, venture capitalists
and even green groups.

Previously, US environmental
regulators paid little attention to
carbon trading. As Democrats
formally take over Congress, this
position is set to change. Nancy
Pelosi, the newly anointed first
woman speaker of the House of
Representatives has publicly
committed to having hearings on
climate change.

Machinations are already afoot
to forge alliances to develop a
framework ready for the eventual
change in the federal attitude
towards the global carbon
market. In mid-November the
largest US environmental pressure
group, the Sierra Club,
convened a gaggle of carbon
trading advocates, including
former vice president Al Gore,
who is now a co-partner, with ex-
Goldman Sachs chief executive
David Blood, in a business
venture called New Generations
Investment.

Industry leaders and NGO
executives also attended the
event, which an internal Sierra
Club blog dubbed 'A Climate
Exchange' - a cute double
entendre underscoring its tacit
endorsement of the creation of
unproven markets in the chief
greenhouse gas. According to the
blog, the panel's chief recommendation
included 'the urgency of
setting a "carbon price" on greenhouse
gas emissions.'

US environmental groups are
not just convening 'heavyweights'
to promote the carbon market.
Groups like Environmental
Defense (ED) and the Sunoco Oil
Company-funded Pew Center on
Global Climate Change are going
to great lengths to play up the
viability of carbon trading, despite
growing evidence of its failings.

Just before Christmas Charlie
Miller, the director of communications
at ED, phoned me up.
'Look,' he said, 'I need to have a
list of all the successful carbon
trading projects. Is there such a
list?' I told him that no one actually
tracks all carbon trading
projects. 'Well,' he quipped, 'I
don't want to know about all of
them, just the successful ones.'

This year ED is set to release a
report profiling 'just projects that
work' to 'get around those that
are questioning trading.'

At the Montreal climate talks in
December 2005, the Pew
Center's executive director, Eileen
Clausen, presented the findings
of its Pocantico Climate Dialogue
- a document that, among its
many recommendations, argues
that future multilateral dialogues
over climate change should
include only corporations and
governments.

There may be a further, financial
incentive to hype carbon
trading, even if volumes of
evidence are mounting against it.
These include the analyses gathered
in the Dag Hammarskjöld
Foundation report Carbon Trading:
a critical conversation on climate
change, privatisation and power
(see 'Temperature Gauge',
November 2006).

Back in 2005, Google cofounder
Sergey Brin acquired,
through a third-party, an 'initial
offset purchase [that] corresponds
to eight years' worth of
emissions from specific sources
related to Google's operations.'
The offsets selected were from
the Greenhouse Gas Credit
Aggregation Pool (GG-CAP),
assembled by the private
brokerage company Natsource.
While NatSource would not
confirm this directly, sources
close to the deal put Brin's
purchase at approximately $100
million-in a pool valued at $550
million.

Why might this influence environmental
NGOs? In October
2005, Google inaugurated its long
awaited foundation, Google.org,
and endowed it with three million
Google.com shares - now worth
about $1.42 billion - and 1 per
cent of annual profits. In a July
2006 interview, Larry Brilliant, the
foundation's executive director
told Wiredmagazine that
Google.org has 'three big areas:
climate crisis, global public heath
and global poverty, not necessarily
in that order.' Green NGOs
hope to get a piece of the action.

After years of stalling in Washington,
both the new ruling
Democrats and US green organisations
are desperate to do
anything on climate change-
even if 'anything' means
becoming strange bedfellows in
dubious schemes whose results
are far from clear.

The question on the table is
not 'Is carbon-trading bad or
good?' but who will get rich quick
promoting it? And will we be able
to find out if it is effective in
reducing greenhouse gases
before dangerous climate change
occurs?

Michael Dorsey, member of the Durban Group for Environmental Justice, is professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College

Published by Red Pepper