28th July 2009
A fascinating discussion is going on at “the Masalai blog” about carbon trading in Papua New Guinea. It is particularly interesting because Dave Sag, co-founder and Executive Director of Carbon Planet has answered some of the accusations against his company.
Sag is a software programmer, who has found himself “at the forefront of Internet software development since 1993,” he writes on his website. In 1998, he won an Australia Day Council Award for services to Australian Business. He was nominated as one of Australia’s top 40 achievers under 40 years of age. Sag describes himself as “a serial entrepreneur. Right now my main focus is saving the world via Carbon Planet”. He’s even had his photograph taken with Al Gore.
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27th July 2009
“When is ‘saving’ our global forests a hideous idea?” The question comes from Duff Badgley in recent article about REDD, published in the e-zine of the Green Party of Washington State, “Greener Times“. Badgley’s answer? “When it’s REDD.”
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24th July 2009
For several weeks, Papua New Guinea has been embroiled in a forest carbon trading scandal. Kevin Conrad, talks about “carbon cowboys” descending on PNG.
Ilya Gridneff, a journalist with the Australian Associated Press, has been digging deeper into PNG’s carbon trading mess. It seems that not all of the “carbon cowboys” came from outside PNG (although some of them did). None of what Gridneff has found bodes well for the idea of financing REDD through carbon trading.
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15th July 2009
On 26 June 2009, the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and Energy and Climate Secretary, Ed Miliband, visited London Zoo to launch “The Road to Copenhagen“, a report outlining the UK’s vision of the climate deal to be agreed in Copenhagen in December 2009. The report claims to be setting “ambitious” goals: “The UK believes that the over-riding goal of the Copenhagen agreement is to limit climate change to an increase in global average temperature of 2°C. This means the deal needs to establish a credible trajectory for reducing global emissions by at least 50% on 1990 levels by 2050.” But as George Monbiot points out in The Guardian, “a global cut of 50% offers only a faint-to-non-existent chance of meeting their ultimate objective: preventing more than two degrees of warming.” The 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that to have a high chance of limiting climate change to 2°C requires global cuts of 85% by 2050.
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9th July 2009
Kevin Conrad, Papua New Guinea’s Special Envoy and Ambassador for Environment & Climate Change, has spent much of the last three years travelling around the world promoting REDD and carbon trading. So what does the man that Time magazine calls a “Hero of the environment” and UNEP a “Champion of the Earth” have to say about the current REDD credits crisis in Papua New Guinea? On 6 July 2009, Conrad was in London, speaking at a Chatham House event, “The Politics of Climate Change Agreement“. Natasha Loder, a journalist with The Economist, was there and has writes about Conrad’s speech on her blog.
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2nd July 2009
Last week, Theo Yasause, the director of Papua New Guinea’s Office of Climate Change, was suspended while an internal investigation of the office is carried out, reports Australian Associated Press. For several weeks, the government of Papua New Guinea has been embroiled in a scandal over the issuance of a series of REDD credits, in the absence of any policy or legislation. Yasause denies having done anything wrong.
Two journalists have been covering these REDD developments in Papua New Guinea: Natasha Loder is based in the UK and works for The Economist; and Ilya Gridneff, works for the Australian Associated Press in Port Moresby, PNG. This post is an attempt to summarise their stories so far. Please visit their blogs for more information. Loder blogs on Overmatter: Leftovers from the science desk at The Economist and Gridneff on Papua News Guinea.
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7th June 2009
On 4 June 2009, Reuters reported evidence of a multi-million offer from carbon brokers to PNG’s Office of Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability. Reuters also reported on sale of carbon credits from an area of forest in PNG that has not been validated. REDD-Monitor has found (on the internet) some of the documents that Reuters has seen and is sharing these documents, in the interest of transparency.
12 June 2008: Theo Yasause, executive director of OCCES, signed a government memo asking PNG Prime Minister Michael Somare to counter-sign a certificate allowing two carbon brokers, Earth Sky and Climate Assist PNG, to sell US$500 million worth of forest carbon offsets. “The (two brokers are) prepared to put in 10 million Australian Dollars [US$8 million] to assist the establishment of the Office of Climate Change,” Yasause wrote in the memo. In addition, OCCES would earn 20% of any proceeds from carbon sales.
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11th May 2009
Australia’s carbon pollution reduction scheme includes a nightmare vision of REDD. It would create a loophole big enough to allow Australia’s greenhouse gas pollution to continue and even expand.
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10th April 2009
The carbon trade is a derivatives market which may eventually be bigger than the credit derivatives market which collapsed so spectacularly in the current financial crisis, notes a new report by Friends of the Earth U.S. Despite this, most proposed climate legislation bills rely on cap-and-trade systems which fail to address the complexities of the carbon market and fail to address carbon trading as a massive new derivatives market. FoE U.S. warns of a “giant regulatory gap”. Regulation of secondary carbon markets, which are far larger than primary markets and are dominated by speculators, is effectively non-existent.
The report, “Subprime Carbon? Re-thinking the world’s largest new derivatives market”, can be downloaded here.
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8th April 2009
On 6 April 2009 at a press briefing at the climate negotiations in Bonn, the executive secretary of the UNFCCC, Yvo de Boer, was asked a question about carbon markets and REDD. In his response, he acknowledged two problems with incorporating REDD into the carbon markets: the science (measurement and permanence); and the impact on the carbon markets of trading forest carbon.
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8th April 2009
Indigenous Peoples have not developed a position on emissions trading, either for or against, because it is up to local communities to decide their own position, said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and Executive Director of Tebtebba, at a side event in Bonn last week.
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6th April 2009
During the climate negotiations in Poznan, Brazil pushed for “forests in exhaustion” to be included under the Clean Development Mechanism. Currently, any plantation established on land that was forested after 1 January 1990 is excluded from the CDM. Brazil hopes to overturn this ruling by arguing that severely degraded logged-over forests store little carbon and that the only way of storing more carbon on the land is by planting trees.
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1st April 2009
“Including forest protection measures in carbon markets would crash the price of carbon by up to 75 percent and derail global efforts to tackle global warming,” says Greenpeace in a new report released on the sidelines of the U.N. climate talks in Bonn.
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23rd January 2009
On 11 December 2008, the Brazilian government organised a side event in Poznan to explain the National Plan on Climate Change and to present the Amazon Fund. The National Plan on Climate Change was launched on 1 December 2008 by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The timing was interesting. Coinciding with the first day of COP 14 in Poznan, the country with the largest area of forest in the world announced its climate change plans, which include reducing deforestation but excludes the possibility of trading the carbon stored in its forests.
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15th January 2009
On the final day in Poznan, a dispute took place between Saudi Arabia and Brazil over the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Saudi Arabia wants carbon capture and storage to be included in the CDM. Brazil wants carbon credits for “forests in exhaustion”. Saudi Arabia’s motivation is obvious. It wants to continue extracting and selling oil. But what is Brazil’s motivation? And what, exactly, are “forests in exhaustion”?
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