11th January 2010
“If you wondered whether capitalism could ever produce the perfect weapon of its own destruction, try this heady mix of carbon fuels, the trade in financial derivatives, and more than a dash of neo-colonialism, and boom!” This is Professor Stefano Harney, University of London, commenting on a new book: “Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets”. The book, which can be downloaded (or ordered) here, is edited by Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi from the University of Essex, UK. The book includes case studies and critiques from around the world, “showing how the scam of carbon markets affects the lives of communities.” It suggests alternatives to carbon markets and includes a chapter by me, looking at some of the problems behind trading forest carbon.
read more »
1st December 2009
The first thing that you need to know about “forests in exhaustion” is that they are not forests. According to the Clean Development Mechanism, the photograph on the left is a forest. All of it. The eucalyptus monoculture plantation in the background is a “forest” because it is bigger than 500 square metres and more than 10 per cent of it is covered with trees taller than two metres, thus meeting CDM’s definition of a “forest”. But the muddy wasteland in the foreground? Well, in UN-speak, that’s a “forest in exhaustion”. While it’s clearly not a forest, it certainly looks exhausted. Bloody knackered, more like.
read more »
9th October 2009
In 1988, Applied Energy Services (AES) was constructing a 183 MW coal-fired power plant in Connecticut. AES hired World Resources Institute to find a forestry project to “offset” the 14.1 million tons of carbon that would be emitted over the power plant’s 40 year life. The following year, AES signed an agreement with the NGO CARE to fund an ongoing agroforestry project in Guatemala. It was the world’s first forestry project funded explicitly to offset greenhouse gas emissions. CARE describes the project as a “success”, generating “a wealth of direct and indirect benefits for the people of Western Guatemala”.
read more »
16th September 2009
Yesterday Greenpeace launched a spoof website: Carbon Regulatory Offset Committee (C.R.O.C.). C.R.O.C.’s philosophy is simple: “do something good for the environment, then do something bad to it!” The timing is perfect. The US Congressional debate on the Waxman-Markey bill is heating up. And last week, the UN suspended SGS UK, the largest auditor of clean development mechanism projects, calling into question the legitimacy of the US$100 billion carbon trading market. A Public Service Announcement from C.R.O.C. is posted below, with an email from C.R.O.C.’s Carl Cardova.
read more »
30th June 2009
On 23 June 2009, the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee interviewed Kevin Anderson, Research Director at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Anderson is one of the UK’s leading Climate Change scientists. The interview is available here.
It is highly recommended listening. Anderson points out that the UK government’s planned carbon cuts would have a “50-50 chance” of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2°C. He notes that this is not really an acceptable level of risk, given the dangers involved of runaway climate change.
read more »
24th June 2009
Friends of the Earth released a new report during the recent UN climate negotiations in Bonn: “A Dangerous Distraction – Why offsetting is failing the climate and people: The Evidence“. The report examines the record of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and asks what the effects are likely to be of expanding offsetting as proposed in the UN climate talks, including through proposed offset-based REDD mechanisms. “Offsetting is now a dangerous distraction,” Andy Atkins, Executive director of FoE England, Wales and Northern Ireland writes in the introduction to the report. “Negotiators must recognise that it does not work, will not work and that it must be scrapped.”
FoE explains that “Offsets are a swap of an emissions cut in developed countries for a cut in developing countries. But action in both is needed.” The report recommends that governments should “Reject plans to introduce REDD offsets, and instead negotiate effective and fair mechanisms to protect the Earth’s forests that do not involve offsetting.”
read more »
16th April 2009
A year ago, members of the Durban Group for Climate Justice produced a photo essay “to highlight the serious flaws associated with RED/D and to give a voice to communities faced with confronting colonialist top-down policies”. The photo essay brings some historical context to the REDD proposals that are currently being foisted on communities and forests in the global South. Although much has been discussed about REDD since the photo essay was produced, the critique has lost none of its relevance to ongoing discussions about REDD.
read more »
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.
read more »
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”?
read more »
|
|
|
