Smells Like, a Scam!

Right now, the leaders of business and government are meeting in Nairobi to discuss the world’s next steps on climate change. They’ve got a lot of work to do, but their record doesn’t offer much hope.
In 1992, the world recognized that climate change was real, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted, and has since been signed by 189 parties. It led to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Kyoto calls for the most industrialized countries to voluntarily reduce their emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. These are called the Annex-1 countries, because delegates at Kyoto correctly recognized that making a country like Honduras reduce its emissions to below 1990 levels would cement global inequality of industrialization. Under Clinton, the U.S. signed Kyoto, but never ratified it. George Bush has stated that it is too costly and unfair — he claims it will take billions from American industry and that the U.S. should not be penalized while China is allowed to pollute without limits. The world’s largest polluter thus told the world, “eat it.” In doing so, it rejected Kyoto’s two tracts — mitigation (lowering emissions) and adaptation (adjusting to and preparing for climate change).
Since Bush and the U.S. rejected Kyoto, Australia pulled out, and even countries like Canada that signed and ratified the treaty haven’t reduced. In fact, Canadian emissions are up 27 percent over 1990 levels. Most countries are polluting more, except for countries whose economies have contracted, like the Russian Federation, and some in Northern Europe, who are proving that reducing doesn’t require recession. But Kyoto isn’t a panacea for several reasons.
The first and worst flaw in Kyoto is its primary vehicle for mitigation: clean development mechanisms (CDMs), or carbon trading. Carbon trading is a scam, and the guys who want to make it global and permanent (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, George Bush) have something in common — they represent Northern businesses, and don’t want to upset them for the planet’s benefit. Carbon trading is the silly idea that we can use the market to alter emissions. Basically, it’s a rich neighbor who wants to drive a Hummer paying his poor neighbor to ride a bike. Even though it was the free market and absence of effective regulation that got us this far, the carbon trade advocates want you to believe that it’s the cure.
What they hesitate to tell you is that carbon trading does not reduce emissions. Northern companies who don’t want to change their businesses can pay someone in the South to plant an invasive species to store carbon (a huge eucalyptus plantation in Brazil), or install a natural gas pipeline instead of burning coal. The hypothetical “reduction” in global emissions from Brazil or South Africa then “offsets” the smelter in Canada that’s giving lots of kids asthma. Investors can buy “carbon credits” from the “clean industries” and sell them to your power plant.
Supposedly, these CDMs will facilitate India’s industrialization without India becoming like America — a smokestack. If the record of CDMs were better, that might be true, and in Nairobi, hundreds of delegates have vociferously criticized carbon-trading, arguing that indigenous rainforests in Brazil should not be expropriated to Northern polluters. Others, like South Africa’s Sajida Khan, are sickened by the process. During Apartheid, Indians in Durban were only allowed to live next to refineries and garbage dumps, and that legacy hasn’t changed since 1994. Seventy percent of Khan’s neighbors have cancer because of the toxins seeping out of Africa’s largest landfill, but a group of investors persuaded the World Bank to fund a CDM project there — keeping the dump open for decades to convert some of its methane into electricity. Business leaders throughout South Africa applauded, while Khan fought the project. For her, carbon trading makes people in the South provide the air, land and resources to abet Northern emissions.
What might be even worse is Kyoto’s record on adaptation. Everyone but Bush agrees that the science is conclusive, the effects are immutable and the less we mitigate the more we imperil the future. It’s an unlucky twist of nature that the place producing the world’s fewest emissions (Africa), will be the most affected by our industries and cars. Most predictions indicate that Northern Europe will get a little warmer, but sub-Saharan Africa could be decimated. Some predictions consider 200 million deaths this century likely. Endless droughts, increased malaria, flooding, food insecurity and extreme water shortages are just a few of the things we know are coming to different parts of the Continent. With this in mind, Kyoto created an Adaptation Fund, and a few European countries dropped a few million into it. Most of its current revenue comes from a tax on CDMs — making the South pay for its own adaptation. Bush is right, this isn’t fair at all. Some economists say that this century’s climate change will erase every gain against poverty, yet the interests of Exxon shareholders are thus far trumping Ethiopia’s.
So last week, when the British Government predicted the economic costs of climate change, many in the South and elsewhere were disappointed. The Stern Report advocates carbon-trading, and mainly argues for Northern action because climate change — which it recognizes is real and devastating — will hurt specific economies. It considers that 550 ppm of CO2 is a stable level; many in the South dryly replied “that level will kill us.”Adaptation funds are needed now, as many are already dying from the effects of climate change. Small island states are already drowning, and new strains of malaria are proliferating. The Stern Report is most honest when it calls climate change the world’s worst externality — every time we drive our cars, forget to turn off the lights or pay someone to do it for us in Brazil, we’re passing on a cost, externalizing it. These costs will come back to us all, though to some more than others. How long can we keep sitting on our hands and revving the gas? Our nation’s rep in Nairobi, Harlan Watson, the man Exxon-Mobil recommended for the job, says a decade. But, common sense and conscience tell us he and his backers are fanatics playing games with the human species.
Jeff Purcell is a graduate student in Africana Studies. He can be reached at jlp56@cornell.edu. Brutal Honesty appears Mondays.