Bolivian president, Evo Morales, spoke yesterday in New York about climate debt: “In Copenhagen we should enter into a thorough analysis of what countries are the ones that are hurting the environment the most. And we should consider those damages and focus on the countries that bear a major responsibility for the payment of this climate debt, this obligation.” That seems to me like a reasonable suggestion. (Morales comes about 6 mins 30 secs into this Democracy Now! video.)

I don’t like markets, I’m not a big fan of the fraud or the risk vs profits game played on the sharemarket. I do think the carbon market has a place, but I tend to look at it from the voluntary side rather than a compliance mechanism. From a voluntary side, using myself as an example, hopefully without sounding like a holier than though %&/ -apologies if I do, I use 3 kWh of electricty/day, I ride a bike to work, I’m vego, catch the train rather than flying etc. Rather than purchasing a solar panel for my 3kWh/day and riding for three weeks instead of catching a bus can I not pay a fraction of the cost of a renewable energy power plant somewhere in a developing country? Or is that subjecting myself to the evils of the market solution?

I do like watching the redistribution of the money to the developing nations using this method – it’s better than a world bank loan.

Anyway, seems like you’ve done a nice summary of the corner house’s

1) The climate market has not had the crash of the financial market simply because the levels of ‘abstraction´and derivatives don’t exist.
2) A lot of the ‘new green deal’ packages had some form of ‘weaning’ off fossil fuels in them, mainly through energy efficiency which tends to employ more people, and pays for itself. A lot of it went into coal and other ·$% , but that’s not the green deal’s fault, it’s just greenwashing.
3) Markets that cannot distinguish between fraud and non-fraud? What market is this? The carbon market is not a single market and there are various schemes with various credibility out there but there are certainly many, many people who understand the rules and logic behind them. It is not nearly as complex as derivatives and derivatives of derivatives or whatever other scheme was used to skim money off people for the last ten years. A carbon credit is one tonne of carbon dioxide removed or not emitted from the atmosphere that would not have been removed or would have been emitted without the project creating that carbon credit occuring. There are many methodologies and schemes, but that underlying principle is simple and is the backbone of every reputable scheme. REDDs, in general, do not align with this principle.
4) the carbon market is more like the gold market than a derivatives market. Can you regulate the gold market? yes.

skip to number 9)
a) Obviously the climate problem is a problem of concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, not emissions. How do you want ot tackle this without measuring and focussing on emission levels? The rest of the greenhouse gases are already there, and we put them there.
b) Larry doesn’t offer much of an argument in his article against this point. Small targets and carbon trading do nothing, but small targets without carbon trading also do nothing. Get enough political will to set the targets high enough and fossil fuels will phase themselves out.
c)Again, not much of an argument there from Larry. Purchasing CDM credits from ‘Southern’ countries assists projects from across a large range of sectors. There’s a lot of energy efficiency, a small amount of renewable energy and thankfully hardly any refrigerants anymore. Larry argues that these projects have emissions? Of course they do. Living a life using wind powered electricity has more emissions than sitting in a field eating grass all day, unless your a ruminant, but I would still rather use the wind power.

10) I agree wholeheartedly. I’m Australian and we are doing much worse than the EU is. Imaginative accounting about the amount of trees we DON’T cut down anymore and we might meet our target of 108% of 1990 levels. Blah! and now they aim for only a 5% reduction on 1990 levels by 2020 with up to 45% of the credit money raised going to the large polluters as compensation, and tell the public here that we’re leading the world in this stuff? rubbish

i hope that all made sense… There’s a thousand carbon offsets i wouldn’ buy, but I feel the ones i would buy do have place in the grand ‘solution’ that has been critiqued in the above blog post.

goodnight.

As much as the ‘technical’ reasons why carbon trading is probably not such a good idea for forests, the most damaging impact that I have noticed already from this entirely ideologically driven market approach has been that, as with any dogmatically applied ideology, it has stunted and suffocated creativity, imagination and true entepreneurship in finding real workable solutions.