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Take a deep breath. Inhale. Exhale. How does it feel to know that the air we breathe is being privatized? The atmosphere is becoming the private property of industry and governments through something called “carbon trading.”
Carbon trading creates units of pollution in the form of metric tons of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases, and sells them on stock markets called carbon markets.
The trade of these permits to pollute, known as carbon credits allows polluting industries and countries to cheaply and easily get out of obligations to reduce pollution at source. Carbon trading lets polluters off the hook. Carbon trading is premised on the takeover, commodification, privatization and sale of nature by financial markets known as the “financialization of nature” that underpins what is being called the “Green Economy”.
The ‘Green Economy’ is the umbrella for all kinds of ways to sell nature including REDD+, the Clean Development Mechanism, carbon trading, PES (Payment for Environmental Services), the financialization of nature, the International Regime on Access to Genetic Resources, patents on life, TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), natural capital, green bonds, species banking and state and business ‘partnerships’ with indigenous peoples. Under the Green Economy, even the rain, the beauty of a waterfall or a honey- bee’s pollen may be reduced to a barcode price tag and sold to the highest bidder. At the same time, the Green Economy promotes and greenwashes environmentally and socially devastating extractive industries like logging, mining, and oil drilling as ‘sustainable development’. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Carbon trading was invented by Richard Sandor and others in the 1980s5 and is conducted by stock markets as well as under the auspices of the United Nations, its UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Kyoto Protocol. Carbon trading under the UN is on the “mandatory market” because it is done to comply with legally binding commitments to reduce emissions, and, hence, mandatory.
But individuals, companies and states can also buy and sell carbon credits outside the UN on the “voluntary market.” Polluters use the voluntary market to accumulate carbon credits in anticipation of future requirements to reduce emissions, to “greenwash” their image or because they think it reduces global warming. There are carbon markets in Europe, Africa and Brazil and there are also many cases of carbon speculation, carbon fraud and even carbon “criminals”.6
Under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), carbon credits can also be obtained from projects in the Global South which supposedly reduce, avoid or capture carbon dioxide (CO2) in order to compensate for or offset pollution elsewhere. These emissions compensations are called carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are generated from projects such as hydroelectric dams or tree plantations. The CDM outsources the obligation to reduce emissions to the Global South and has been denounced as carbon colonialism.
Trees absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen thanks to photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the premise of carbon offsets with forests. Ostensibly REDD is a mechanism to deal with climate change and protect forests by providing incentives through carbon offsets. The basic idea behind REDD is simple: developing countries that are willing and able to reduce emissions from deforestation should be financially compensated for doing so.
REDD developed from a proposal in 2005 by a group of countries in the UN called the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. In June 2015, after ten years of negotiations, the UN finalized REDD.7 It is expected that REDD will be included in the outcome document of the UN’s World Climate Summit held in Paris in December 2015.8
According to REDD Monitor, “The devil, as always, is in the details. The first detail is that the payments are not for keeping forests, but for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. This might seem like splitting hairs, but it is important, because it opens up the possibility, for example, of logging an area of forest but compensating for the emissions by planting industrial tree plantations somewhere else.”9
Some of the key technical problems with REDD are leakage, additionality, permanence and measurement. These terms basically refer to all the tricky ways that REDD does not work because deforestation can be displaced; there is no way of proving a forest was going to get logged unless you can foresee the future; trees do not store carbon dioxide forever; and because no one really knows how to measure tree carbon let alone fully understands and can track and quantify the atmosphere’s carbon cycle.
Leakage refers to the fact that while deforestation might be avoided in one place, the forest destroyers might move to another area of forest or to a different country.
Additionality refers to the near-impossibility of predicting what might have happened in the absence of the REDD project.
Permanence refers to the fact that carbon stored in trees is only temporarily stored. All trees eventually die and release the carbon back to the atmosphere.
Measurement refers to the fact that accurately measuring the amount of carbon stored in forests and forest soils is extremely complex – and prone to large errors.” 10
