Will Carbon Trading Work?

Recommend (0) Comments (1)

Carbon trading assumes that the climate doesn't care where we make a one million ton cut in carbon dioxide emissions. If Lahore can cut a million tons more cheaply than LA, then let Lahore do the work and LA can pay for it. The market saves everybody money by abstracting from how and where emissions cuts are made, and by whom.

The problem is that no one can actually know whether the cut in Lahore is going to be as climatically effective in the long term or not. The more expensive cut in LA might be just the one you want from the perspective of 20 years hence, because it helps lead to a step change away from fossil fuels, whereas the easy cut in Lahore does nothing of the kind. The calculations can't be made.

It gets worse. Suppose you want to delay or avoid reducing your fossil fuel use. Carbon trading allows you instead to buy pollution rights from companies planting trees in Uganda, building dams in India, burning off methane from coal mines in China, or setting up wind farms in Argentina. All these "carbon offsets" are supposed to be climatically equivalent to cutting your coal, oil or gas use.

But you can't prove that. You can add up how much greenhouse gas your offset "saves" only if you assume that without it, only a single world would be possible. This assumption has no scientific basis. Researcher Dan Welch sums up the difficulty: “Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.”

Another dirty little secret: carbon trading needs exact measurements of emissions at hundreds of thousands of locations. Few countries are capable of making these measurements. In fact, they're not being made even in Europe. No one knows for sure how far European countries really are from meeting their Kyoto Protocol targets.