Thanks for bowing out from this debate.

Surely, you could not be so aloof and detached from the real world and divorced of any commonsense that you have to take this debate back to more than 3 decades and want someone to prove that it works.

Surely, you dont think that the negotiations conducted over 25 years by close to 100 nations and work by over 5,000 scientists with unanimous support from academia have all somehow got it wrong when they created cap and trade and compliance mechanisms and want the compliance targets to get more aggressive.

You are so out of the mainstream that I have serious doubts on your ability now to create any meaningful impact on anything – You are like a 10 people cult in a 100 million devout catholic populace.

You are so removed from any sense of balance by questioning the 30 years worth of work by the global community which is almost next to unbelievable for any person with a tiny bit of understanding on this subject.

You are infact a blinkered man on a mission who cannot be reasoned with. I bow out from this debate.

You are truly impressive.

As far as which company I work for, work with, provide finance for, invest in, consult for , consult with and what I had for breakfast isnt relevant.

Based on your history, only a fool will provide you his work details.

JM

Further discussion is pretty futile, because you’re convinced you are correct but seem incapable of providing any evidence to back up your position. So, I have two questions for you:

1. Do you agree that carbon trading will not reduce emissions? If not, could you please provide concrete evidence that CDM or any other form of carbon trading has reduced emissions.

2. What is your line of work and what is your interest in carbon trading? Perhaps you could provide a link to your company’s website, as Brett Pritchard asked you to, in a comment here.

The world mobilised resource to fight GFC because there was a more than 90% consensus amongst the nations to act, from within and outside.

No cause however noble or worthy of a fight will cause nations to act until there is consensus that can be reached. But you and your mates are not into consensus building otherwise you wont be able to paddle your interests the way you do now.

For almost 30 years, the only consensus the world has reached to fight global warming is to respond via carbon economy and carbon trading.

When you quote a single quote from Economist, why do you forget that it has over 100 contribuotrs globally and has always published pro-carbon economy articles. Search for the last 12 issues on google and you will find at-least 6 pieces advocating higher targets under the current mechanisms and ramping up climate change efforts.

You like your mate Lord Lang-ton will then go and cherry pick one quote from one contributer (which might be his personal opinion and not the publication’s) to forward your blinkered and bordering on insanity approach and to tell the world, “Look, even economist believes carbon trading does not work”.

Sir, look for the majority opinion that form majority consensus. From Wall Street Journal to Financial Times and New York Times to Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune and Science and Nature all are advocating stronger targets within the cap and trade mechanism. You are believe they are all out of their depth as do 50 + senators in US who are putting the final touches to Kerry-Lieberman bill as does all the academia that has been supporting this mechanism and majority of NGOs and governments across the globe.

They are all wrong and you and Lord Lang-don and a few other fringe loners are right, living in a time-warp capsule, unable to compromise, ready to fight with anyone and everyone to hammer your blinkered, faith driven approach to this mad mad money hungry universe, no consensus, no margin of error, the perfectionst, the Jihadist , the crusaders

You guys are true ideological-cowboys in the very essence of what cowboys stand for ! You are ideological-cowboys because you just wont give in to what is possible but to go for the impossible. Fighting for a noble cause and never to give-up.

Go on comrade. Save the world. You and Lord Lang-don and a few dozen fringe dwellers fight this war against this mad world and win it.

May you succeed in your noble unreachable, delusionary and faith driven blinekred appraoch to all things climate change.

Yee Haaa

Oh dear, if only you would read what you write before you hit the ‘Submit Comment’ button…

So now you accuse Redd-Monitor of being ‘obsessively-compulsive in hammering your blinkered approach’, but then you write that “Carbon Trading and carbon economy is the worlds response to climate change – Period!”.

It doesn’t get much more blinkered than that. You know, you would make a much more convincing argument if carbon trading had actually managed to prevent increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, but actually, err…

So, you accuse people passionately concerned about climate change of being as bad as climate-deniers, simply because they don’t agree with your pro-market stance, but you demonstrate yourself to be even more like the climate-deniers, because you simply won’t acknowledge the evidence in front of your nose.

Fortunately, not all ardently pro-market advocates are quite as blinkered as you – even the likes of Lord John Brown, and the Economist magazine, have come to the conclusion that carbon trading is at best a stop-gap measure, and almost certainly an inadequate one, and that carbon taxation is a more promising way foward.

You are right to worry that such systems will take forever to get up and running, but think of it this way: seeing as how carbon trading is making almost no difference whatsoever to climate change anyway, then we may as well start working on other systems, no matter how long they take to establish. But in fact, also look at the speed with which the international community mobilised resources around the last great market failure, pulling out trillions of dollars and masses of political capital over a period of a few months; look at the way, for example, that the UK government has just announced plans to slash about 25% off government expenditure within a few weeks of coming into office. You would have to agree that major changes in economic policy are possible – but probably not if government’s are wrongly encouraged to believe that some half-a*sed measures like carbon trading are adequate to fix the problem.

Open your eyes, Justin: history is littered with far too many exmaple of mega-disasters caused by the inability of people to see past their ideology to the reality of the situation.

Argue against it, deny it, find quotes from your mates, be obsessively-compulsive in hammering your blinkered approach or use these sites and tools to scaremonger participants in carbon economy. Nothing that you will do will add to any positive change. You know why..?

Because it has taken bloody long time in face of severe opposition from an industry which was hellbent on even accepting global warming exists, right wing parties who would rather save 10,000 jobs today than accept the potential reality of perishing of millions of specie of biodiversity in 50 years, massive disagreements and agendas, lobbying and pressure from multiple interests, scientific community etal to FINALLY agree on a system that offers more than a glimmer of hope. What you are now preaching is called as throwing “Spanner in the works”…

Because you claim to know better.

When UN, Europe, Asia, South America and Africa unanimously accept the existing mechanisms as less than adequate but significant step in the direction of change, you dont believe any of them. You have your own agendas, because the world community is foolish. The world community piss-farted around for 25 years to bring about a solution (however imperfect in its current form) that at least takes the first step towards creating a system that penalises polluters and somewhat rewards mitigators/ reducers.

Can it be bettered..? Absolutely. How bloody long it takes to get agreement and consensus. Going by history the answer is ‘eternity’ or for what is required and how urgent the changes are required, definitely close to eternity otherwise it will be too late.

Does criminality exist in selling alcohol, selling apples, trading shares, bonds, derivates, prostitution, manufacturing, building, you name it , it is there. Does the world then shut up the shop and decides that it would create a communist society where no one would be able to profit from any activity..? NO – they create systems and processes which wont be 100% but they work majority of the times. Does criminality exist in carbon trading..? yes, but it does not even equate to less than 0.1% of the transactions to-date. Is it a reason to shut up the carbon shop globally..? Only a fool will prophesise that.

Mr Lang, what you propose might be better than what we have. What you propose however will not HAPPEN because what you propose is a very very fringe thought and will never get currency amongst masses of nations. If it was possible, it could have been done years ago.

What you propose is perhaps abolition of this market based industry. You shut-up carbon trading and rest assured that you will not get agreement for any new mechanism for another 30 years. It takes on average 5 years of dialogue and negotiations to negotiate a treaty between 2 nations in western world. It takes decades to embark on a solution that needs agreement from at least 50 nations.

Please dont be a spanner in the works. Your pipe dream will stay as a pipe dream for decades but in the meantime all you are doing is providing fodder for deniers of climate change. You are driving private investment off. You are scaremongering and hounding. You have your head buried in the sand.

You owe it to future generations to help and not hinder the fight for the survival of our planet. What you have done to date is sheer hinderance.

JM

We both agree that climate change is a serious problem. And we agree that action is required urgently.

Yet instead of talking about what action is needed (reducing emissions, leaving oil in soil, emissions caps without trade, for example), we are disagreeing about carbon trading.

You are convinced that carbon trading is a worthwhile exercise. The trouble is that your argument in favour of carbon trading boils to little more than “It’s all governments can agree on,” and “You sound like Lord Monckton”.

I’ll have to repeat myself, I’m afraid. Carbon trading does not reduce carbon emissions. For every seller of a carbon credit there is a buyer who will use that credit to continue polluting. The net result is zero emissions reductions.

Can we agree that carbon trading does not reduce emissions? If you believe that it does in fact reduce emissions, could you please provide concrete evidence that it has done so.

I think the best way of dealing with climate change is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Presumably you agree with me that the emissions targets proposed under the Copenhagen Accord are inadequate.

Carbon trading is a dangerous distraction to addressing climate change, because it gives the impression that governments and corporations are attempting to do something. They are doing something, but they are not reducing emissions. Unless we reduce emissions dramatically we face runaway climate change.

Here’s what I think governments have to do in order to prevent runaway climate change: stop digging up and burning fossil fuels. George Monbiot has a useful test to illustrate whether government are serious about stopping the climate crisis:

The test of all governments’ commitment to stopping climate breakdown is this: whether they are prepared to impose a limit on the use of the reserves already discovered, and a permanent moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Otherwise it’s all hot air.

It’s interesting to apply this to proposals to trade the carbon stored in forests. Doing so would legitimate the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

Does it concern you that in supporting carbon trading you have an almost identical position to some of the biggest polluting companies on the planet?

You can read the interview with Jeff Horowitz here. He did not respond to my question about why he favoured trading forest carbon credits (which do not reduce emissions) apart from to argue that REDD offsets would somehow encourage lower emission targets. If you think I am misrepresenting what he says, please explain how.

Below is Lex de Jong’s article originally posted on climate-l.org. Yes, he says that CDM is “successful”, but he’s not talking about it being successful in terms of reducing emissions:

Development of the CDM over time and in the future

posted on: Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
by: Lex de Jonge, Chair of the CDM Executive Board

One of the most debated, whilst also most successful, instruments under the Kyoto Protocol is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). It is fascinating to look back at how we started, and consider how far we have come. Now, even more intriguing, is the question of how the CDM will look in the future.

The Marrakesh Accords, agreed in late 2001, provided the basic framework for the CDM. Since then, much work has had to be done by the CDM Executive Board to develop the mechanism’s rules, procedures, guidance documents and, of course, methodologies. The year 2006 marked the start of a massive inflow of projects submitted for registration, starting with 438 projects in that year, rising to 553 projects in 2007 and 666 in 2008. The CDM is on track for continued growth in 2009.

A brief summary of the most remarkable developments:

In the early days a major challenge was – and to a certain extent still is – how to deal with additionality. Additionality is the cornerstone of any credible CDM project, basically answering the question whether a project is ‘additional’, or would it proceed anyway, without the CDM. Additionality has been debated for a long time; some project developers have advocated that any greenhouse gas reduction should be considered additional (environmental additionality). That approach would completely ignore that the CDM, at its best, is a zero sum game, because its credits are used to offset reduction obligations of Annex 1 countries. Hence, the Board finally decided to release the Additionality Tool, which requires counterfactual evidence that the project – without the support of the CDM – faces serious barriers, either technical, logistical or financial. After its release, the Additionality Tool was heavily criticized by project developers as being too complex and labor intensive. Yet, in time these complaints stopped. Though the basic concept of the Additionality Tool seems to be sound, reality has shown that its application can be subject to gaming and manipulation. As a result, the Board, over the years, has developed more guidance to enforce correct application and invited the public to propose other approaches. Apart from a possible shift towards standardization (e.g. application of fixed benchmarks or deciding on a positive list of technologies for certain sectors or regions), not much progress has been made here. This is surprising, since several NGOs have been criticizing the credibility of the Tool, but so far have not come forward with detailed, better proposals.

The huge inflow of projects submitted for registration was another challenge for the Board. It forced the Board to considerably expand and professionalize its main support system, the UNFCCC Secretariat, up to a level of well over 100 staff members. This was the Board’s response to those who felt that the Board itself should be transformed into a full time professional body.

Compounding the challenges posed by the high number of registration requests has been the high proportion of inadequate project design documents (PDDs) being submitted. This has led to many requests for review by the Board and quite a number of reviews, reaching a level that the Board considers unacceptably high.

However, the Board believes that environmental integrity is vital to the CDM. Thus, the Board was not, and still is not, prepared to accept any deviation from the official rules and procedures, unless properly addressed through separate procedures. There has been strong pressure from project developers to be less rigorous, which would leave the Board with the fundamental question “Where to draw the line?”, and remain credible and consistent.

In response, over the past two years the Board has done everything within its ability – without jeopardizing environmental integrity – to streamline and increase the efficiency of procedures, provide additional guidance, increase the number of available designated operational entities and increase transparency for project developers. As a result, the CDM playing field has changed considerably and the mechanism has improved. Though the workload of the UNFCCC Secretariat is quite high, causing some delays, by far most delays in the system are now caused by poor quality submissions from project developers. So, now it is time for project developers to take up the challenge of delivering better quality PDDs. Some project developers complain about this rigorous approach and express frustration, and threaten to leave the CDM scene. In as much as these project developers probably represent the group continuously trying to “stretch and bend” the rules – which in many cases results in rejection of their projects – the Board would only welcome their departure. It should be kept in mind that still 90-93% of all projects are finally registered, which clearly indicates that the Board is on the right track and the system is working well.

A final remark about the CDM’s possible future. For sure the CDM has been a tremendous success. Yet, as part of the international negotiations, voices are heard calling for modification of the CDM, specifically a more sectoral approach applicable in certain countries, leaving a strong existing and “ready for the future” CDM for others. This is up to negotiators to decide, but there is an important point to bear in mind in this discussion. Negotiators must take into account the number of projects that the system is able to process. Though an increase to 700 or so projects should be possible, a further increase to 1000 or 2000 cases per year would not be feasible under the existing system, even after further improvements have been implemented. And, such a level of inflow may very well result from considerably increased reduction targets for existing Annex 1 Parties, let alone the impact of the US entering into the demand side of the CDM market. That’s something for the negotiators to consider seriously.

You have almost identical position to the climate-change deniers or those that oppose any practical step to achieve consensus and any solid contribution towards climate change mitigation.

Infact, the material you produce (like the above) will most certainly be considered as words of gold by the vested interests that do not want any unanimity of action and a global mechanism driven by compliance to create a tax that penalises polluters and rewards mitigators.

The only difference between you and Lord Monkton is that one is a climate change denier and the other is a believer – other than that you are both identical in terms of your (potential) influence to bring about any concrete action on global climate change and your contribution in achieving a consensus.

You can ask unrelated questions to carbon trading world head honchos and then edit the reply to tell the world that the powers-to-be do not believe in carbon trading being a tool to assist in mitigation efforts and they are there simply to make a buck. Imagine the glee of hearing these words and used by climate skeptics in their own blogs. This is exactly the hallmark of a blinkered, faith driven person that refuses to compromise in the face of evidence that such ‘nirvana’ will never exist. In this comity of more than 200 countries, there never will be consensus on a solution that Chris Lang proposes or what actually do you propose…?? besides being a negative influence on mitigation efforts.

You can interview anyone and then pick and choose 2 quotes from otherwise a 10 page interview to hammer your point. Lord Monkton does the same and so do all the right wing deniers assisted with petro dollars. Both of you are truly complimentary to each other.

You preach for fairer systems, equality, rights of indigenous communities, transparency but yet when it comes to a practical-consensus driven opportunity to actually contribute, you have nothing to contribute other than scaremongering, hounding private enterprise, denying carbon trading of being any use and seeing global temperatures soar with wildfires wreaking havoc in Russia and 20 million being displaced in Pakistan through freak weather patterns.

You will sit in your cocoon turning 10 page interviews into your choice of edited quotes to show the world that carbon trading and REDD are scams put together by powerful lobbies with vested interests yet fail to provide a solution that will find CONSENSUS globally.

You are doing a bigger dis-service to the cause of global warming fight than you realise.

There are a lot of evangelists preaching and wanting change. Then there are doers that DO take action to bring a non-perfect but consensus driven solution and then there are those like you that want positive change but on a single point mission with blinkers would not agree on anything that seems to not conform with their narrow view of the market mechanisms.

You want the most perfect system to take effect but it will be another 100 years until such time that an alternative idea can ever take root and find consensus from India and Russia to South Africa, Brazil, Europe and Australia.

Until then, keep denying and keep hounding those that have something better to offer. You might not realise but you truly are a massively negative influence and party to the fight against climate change.

Enjoy !
JM

If you look at the Clean Development Mechanism, it is the same argument (if we assume that CDM projects actually do result in reduced emissions – which is something of a moot point, as the CDM’s board seems to be somewhat belatedly realising). CDM projects generate credits, corporations buy the credits and use them to continue polluting. This is not a controversial statement. The Chair of the CDM Executive Board, Lex de Jonge, acknowledges this: “[T]he CDM, at its best, is a zero sum game, because its credits are used to offset reduction obligations of Annex 1 countries.” The words “at its best” are important, because at its worst, CDM results in increased emissions.