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you’re right Kevin, it’s the only way to buy-off all the relevant stakeholders, which is necessary lest you want to resort to communist-esq coercion.

I’m just glad the relevant stakeholders are largely all on board, now it’s just about educating the public about cap-and-trade, but also noting the bad apples out there as you do at carbon trade watch

but you shouldn’t pigeon-hole the entirety of cap-and-trade based on a few bad apples. and fwiw, the US will not accept the non-additional Chinese Hydro projects which aren’t reducing emissions, they’re merely subsidies! We want sectoral based crediting!!

all other policies are simply not what the relevant stakeholders want, so we can bitch all we want about cap-and-trade but it won’t get us anywhere. I suggest the above posters try the third-way, work w/in the confines of the system—b/c y’all simply lack the power to do anything else…

For more on this, see Gar Lipow’s post on Gristmill http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/2/18/205116/813 about the chequered record of pollution trading schemes of this type.

This is even discounting the social injustice they have perpetuated, from the various toxic hot-spots they have created in the US, to the vast sums being channeled in the form of carbon financing to many of the dirtiest corporate entities in Southern countries.

It’s not a question of criticising carbon trading because its not ‘perfect’ – at every step of the design and implementation of such schemes they are more vulnerable to corporate influence than more traditional forms of regulatory measures. The Wall Street Journal confirmed last March that emissions trading “would make money for some very large corporations, but don’t believe for a minute that this charade would do much about global warming.” The paper termed the carbon trade “old-fashioned rent-seeking . . . making money by gaming the regulatory process.”

“Carbon trading schemes also allow ‘business as usual’ for Northern polluters with continued reliance on fossil fuels, and provide no encouragement to change patterns of conspicuous consumption.”

The whole point of cap-and-trade is that it puts a price on carbon. This is not business-as-usual. As the cap gets tighter over time, the price goes up. This is just the same as if we had a carbon tax that was increasing. When firms are forced to either reduce emissions or buy carbon credits, it changes their behavior (as long as the cap is tight enough). It’s premature to point the finger at Kyoto and the European Trading System and say it has failed. It’s a complex problem and the ETS is just getting started. Please don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

To many arguments to go into here.. I would refer people to an excellent briefing paper put out by FERN

http://www.fern.org/media/documents/document_4074_4075.pdf

Seeing ‘RED’? ‘Avoided deforestation’ and the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities

Thoughts?

Your objections to getting carbon offsets from developing countries – “land rights, North-South inequalities, local struggles, corporate power and colonial history” – area all essentially different sides of the same objection. That is, that we shouldn’t pursue greenhouse gas reductions in developing countries because it’s akin to stealing their resources in order to excuse our climate sins.

I couldn’t disagree more. While it is completely true that the developed world is primarily responsible for most of human-caused global warming, that doesn’t mean that the solution must necessarily leave out the developing world. In fact, paying land-owners in developing nations NOT to cut down their forests is one of the most cost-effective ways to fight global warming, not to mention a textbook example of using 1st-world wealth to PREVENT the exploitation of 3rd-world resources.

You advance a related objection, using the Coca-Cola initiative as an example, that big corporations only support environmental projects to rejuvenate their image. I have heard this objection in many forms: that individuals are just paying off their “carbon guilt,” or otherwise absolving themselves of their sins. In response, I would say that I don’t care what your motive is, so long as the CO2 is reduced.

Admittedly, this position offends some people’s sense of justice. These people rightly want to hold big business accountable for past sins. That’s fine. But I want to say to big business: now is the time to help us solve this global problem. And if it take $20 million to buy rainforest in a developing country, I don’t care if that $20 million comes from hippie environmentalists or from corporate executives. So long as the land is protected.

I call this position: the CO2 bottom line.