Online debates demonstrate public skepticism about carbon trading

Michael Wara of Stanford, together with Kevin Smith of Carbon Trade Watch
and Platform and others, have won the Economist magazine's online debate
on carbon offset trading against Henry Derwent of the International
Emissions Trading Association, businessman Mark Trexler and others.

Some 55 per cent of readers voted in favor of the resolution: "This house
believes that carbon offsets undermine the effort to tackle climate
change"

Emma Duncan, the moderator, had this to say:

"It is no great surprise that the proposition was carried. From the
beginning of this debate, the voting pointed in that direction, and it was
clear from the comments that a majority of the audience shared Michael
Wara’s concerns with both the principle and the practice of offsetting.
The opposition put up a strong fight, and the gap between the sides has
shrunk somewhat during the course of the debate, but it never looked like
winning.

"Reading the speeches, the guest statements and the comments, I reckon
that three points counted strongly against offsets. The first was
additionality. Many people struggled with the notion that it is possible
to build a system on the basis of an unknown counter-factual: what would
have happened without a market for offsets. Henry Derwent, for the
opposition, pointed out that offsets have this in common with all sorts of
government schemes—anything involving handing out grants, for instance—but
that did not satisfy everybody.

"The second big objection to offsets was about innovation. While Mr
Derwent’s point that offsets can at least in principle allow for the
lowest-cost emissions reductions was broadly accepted, some reckoned that
this efficiency had a downside. The more low-cost offsets rich-country
companies can buy, the less incentive they have to develop the
technologies necessary to moving the world on to a low-carbon path. And
without those technologies, cutting emissions would mean politically
unacceptable cuts in growth.

"The third problem which some people have is a moral one. There is a sense
that offsets let rich countries off the hook—that, somewhat like papal
indulgences, they let the wealthy buy their way to redemption instead of
changing their behaviour. I don’t have much sympathy with that view—I’m
more interested in solving the problem than in punishing the guilty—but
this debate has made me focus on the other two issues far more clearly
than I had done before.

"The politicians and officials at the centre of the climate-change
negotiations need to take these concerns into account. As everybody
expected, Poznan has come and gone, leaving barely a ripple behind it. Now
preparation starts for the conference that actually matters, in Copenhagen
in December 2009. The question of how to get emerging countries involved
in cutting emissions, and how to transfer funds to them to encourage them
to do so, will be central to replacing the Kyoto Protocol. Our debate has
demonstrated that a specialised and well-informed audience is deeply
sceptical about the ability of the United Nations’ Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM) to achieve those two aims effectively. The people running
this process therefore need urgently to do one of three things: to
convince people that the CDM works, to improve it or to replace it."