The Carbon Credit Scam
World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011 | Posted
by admin
Source: Upside Down World, February 11, 2009
Title: “The World Bank and Climate
Change: Sustainability or Exploitation?”
Author: Mary Tharin
Student Researchers: Victoria Masucci and Christine WilsonFaculty Evaluator: Elaine Wellin,
PhD
Sonoma State University
Global Warming And
Carbon Tax Credits
In the name of
environmental protection, the World Bank is brokering carbon emission trading
arrangements that destroy indigenous farmlands around the world.
The effort to coordinate global action
to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions began with
the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in 1997 and now has been ratified by 183
nations. While many of the strategies
established in the protocol are encouraging, some are proving to have fatal
flaws. One such program, known as Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) investment, has become a means by which industrialized
countries avoid reducing their own emissions through the implementation of
“emissions reduction” projects in developing nations.
In accordance with the Kyoto
Protocol, many governments have established “caps,” or limits, on the
greenhouse gas emissions that can be produced in their countries. Industries
can respond to these government-imposed limits by responsibly reducing their
emissions, or they can bypass this process entirely by purchasing “carbon
credits” from other industries in other parts of the world who,
through CDM investment brokered by the World Bank,
trade emission reduction “credits” in order to “offset” excessive emissions. Joris den Blanken, a climate
change specialist with Greenpeace, says, “Offsetting means exporting
responsibilities to the developing world and removes the incentive for industry
to improve efficiency or to invest in renewable energy.”
While the World Bank claims
that this system “supports sustainable development . . . and benefits the
poorer communities of the developing world,” the program in reality has become
little more than a corporate profit-boosting enterprise. In fact, many
transnational corporations are using cap and trade programs not only to avoid
emissions responsibility, but to further profit by developing environmentally
and socially destructive industries in less developed countries.
In Latin America, where a long
history of corporate exploitation has already taken a steep toll,
environmentalists and indigenous communities are beginning to speak out about
the dangers of the CDM. Because of a myopic focus on greenhouse gas reduction
only, and a lack of accountability to local communities, many projects are
producing other environmental and social ills that are diametrically opposed to
the program’s stated objectives.
Nevertheless, the United Nations
Environmental Program reports that, to date, 4,364 projects have been
approved for CDM funding, and the movement
continues to gain momentum. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the number of
new project proposals has risen drastically in just a few years, from less than
ten per month in early 2005 to about 100 per month in 2007.
Wood and pulp industries have shown
great interest in harnessing the carbon market to justify and finance projects
that involve expropriating indigenous farm and grazing land for planting of
enormous monospecific plantations. These plantations
threaten the area’s biodiversity and can severely deplete water resources.
Author Mary Tharin warns, “From an ecological
standpoint, planting large-scale plantations of non-native species in this area
is clearly a step in the wrong direction. From a societal standpoint, this
could spell cultural genocide.”
According to a 2008 report by Japan
Overseas Plantation for Pulpwood (JOPP), entitled
“Feasibility Study of Afforestation CDM for Community Development in Extensive Grazing Lands in
Uruguay,” the land that would be used for the JOPP’s
“afforestation projects,” is currently used for
“extensive grazing” of cattle and sheep. The report, which elaborates on “land
eligibility,” makes no mention of the people who own, live on, or make a living
from the use of the land in question. The only allusion to this issue is the
brief assurance that all displaced cattle would be “sold on the open market.”
Despite the fact that “cattle and sheep production has been the traditional
rural activity in the project area and all the surrounding regions since the17th Century,” the report contends that the
establishment of plantations would be a more cost-effective use for the land
than pasture. The question then becomes: cost-effective for whom?
The World Bank touts the CDM as an “integral part of the Bank’s mission to reduce
poverty through its environment and energy strategies.” However, in Latin
America as in other parts of the developing world, the global carbon market is
proving to be largely detrimental to the indigenous and the poor. With little
or no input on how a project is conducted, local communities have virtually no
control over how their land, water, and resources will be affected.
In a recent documentary by Carbon
Trade Watch, villagers explained that the massive plantations—which cover about
100,000 acres—are diverting water from local streams, causing a sharp decrease
in fishing and killing off medicinal plants. In an interview, one local woman
lamented that corporate plantations “continue
destroying our community, destroying our citizens, destroying our fauna,
destroying our flora, and nobody does anything [to stop it].”
Lack of accountability to local
populations is a fundamental flaw in the way CDM
projects are presented, evaluated and implemented. The official “Project Design Document Form”—which the CDM Executive Board uses to approve or deny funding—largely
disregards the impact of projects on local communities. The document contains
no binding legal language, asking only for a “report on how due account was
taken of any comments received” by local stakeholders. In their assessment of
four CDM projects carried out in Brazil and Bolivia,
the EEP found that “participation of local community
members was found to be limited.”
While the World Bank pays constant
lip service to the importance of sustainability and poverty alleviation in the CDM, it continually fails to deliver positive results for
either the environment or disadvantaged communities in the developing world.
The global carbon market is proving to be simply another weapon used by
multinational corporations to accelerate their incursion on the rights of
indigenous peoples and small-scale landholders in Latin America.
The irony of this situation takes on
an especially tragic hue since many of the communities at risk have been living
in a sustainable manner for centuries and thus should be seen as models in the
fight against environmental degradation and climate change. Instead, the World
Bank has adopted a system that inadequately addresses one pressing
environmental hazard at the expense of other important environmental issues and
the wellbeing of the world’s most vulnerable, and often most knowledgeable, of
populations.
Janet Redman at the Institute for
Policy Studies says, “Farmers [in the global south] are trading communal land
rights and their ability to feed themselves for the whims and price
fluctuations of the international carbon market.”
Update by Mary
Therin
As governments, environmentalists,
and industry leaders gear up for UN Climate Change Conference this December in
Copenhagen, the debate over carbon offsets has taken center stage. Groups
including the European Commission have acknowledged the many shortcomings of
the Clean Development Mechanism and are calling for reform. In late April 2009,
delegates from all over the world attended the Indigenous People’s Global
Summit on Climate Change, producing a declaration which called on governments
to abandon “false solutions to climate change that negatively impact Indigenous
Peoples’ rights . . . such as carbon trading, the Clean Development Mechanism,
and forest offsets.”
Unfortunately, the CDM Executive Board, instead of addressing issues of
transparency and accountability, has proposed an expansion of some of the
carbon offset scheme’s most problematic aspects. The board has put forth plans
to expand its forestry mechanism and ease the funding application process.
According to Oscar Reyes of Carbon Trade Watch, these reforms would drastically
expand CDM while “lowering the already inadequate
checks on environmental sustainability and social justice.”
Meanwhile, the Clean Development
Mechanism continues to expand. In May 2009 alone, 132 new CDM
projects were submitted for approval, marking an all-time high in the
application process. At the same time, more evidence is cropping up all over the
globe that many “emissions reduction” projects in the developing world are
doing more harm than good. In June 2009, the UK-based Daily Mail published an
exposé on a UN-funded chemical plant that has poisoned
the local water supply in Gujarat, India. According to Eva Filzmoser
of CDM Watch, large hyrdo
and gas projects are the most damaging receivers of CDM
funding. These projects, she argues, rarely save additional emissions and in
fact provide perverse incentives to expand environmentally degrading industries.
In the United States, debate over
carbon offsets and cap and trade schemes has erupted since the American Clean
Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill, was passed by
the House Energy Committee in May 2009. While many environmentalist groups are
heralding the bill as a huge step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions in
the United States, others point to the prominence of carbon offsetting in the
bill as a way for corporations to skirt any real commitment to emissions reductions.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS),
up to 2 billion tons of carbon (about 30 percent of current US emissions) could
be purchased as offsets under the legislation, half of which would come from
developing countries through programs like the Clean Development Mechanism.
While most of the mainstream media
and many environmental groups have jumped on the cap and trade bandwagon,
organizations such as the Institute for Public Studies, Carbon Trade Watch, and
CDM Watch continue to boost public awareness on the
dangers of cap and trade. A number of voices, including The Economist, have
come out in favor of a Carbon Tax as a more effective way to motivate emissions
reductions. These groups are calling for people in the developed world to take
the lead by shrinking our own carbon footprints, and demanding a real solution
to climate change that starts at home.
Source: http://www.sikharchives.com/?p=1283