This Changes Everything (36 page)

It should hardly be surprising that so many questionable offset projects have come to dominate the emissions market. The prospect of
getting paid real money based on projections of how much of an invisible substance is kept out of the air tends to be something of a scam magnet. And the carbon market has attracted a truly impressive array of grifters and hustlers who scour biologically rich but economically poor nations like Papua New Guinea, Ecuador, and Congo, often preying on the isolation of Indigenous people whose forests
can be classified as offsets. These carbon cowboys, as they have come to be called, arrive bearing aggressive contracts (often written in English, with no translation) in which large swaths of territory are handed over to conservation groups on the promise of money for nothing. In the bush of Papua New Guinea, carbon deals are known as “sky money”; in Madagascar, where the promised wealth has proved
as ephemeral as the product being traded, the Betsimisaraka people talk of strangers who are “selling the wind.”
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A notorious carbon cowboy is Australian David Nilsson, who runs a particularly fly-by-night operation; in one recent incarnation, his carbon credit enterprise reportedly consisted only of an answering service and a web domain. After Nilsson tried to convince the Matsés people in
Peru to sign away their land rights in exchange for promises of billions in revenues
from carbon credits, a coalition of Indigenous people in the Amazon Basin called for Nilsson to be expelled from the country. And they alleged that Nilsson’s pitch was “similar to 100 other carbon projects” which were “dividing our people with non-existent illusions of being millionaires.”
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Some Indigenous
leaders even say that it is easier to deal with big oil and mining companies, because at least people understand who these companies are and what they want; less so when the organization after your land is a virtuous-seeming NGO and the product it is trying to purchase is something that cannot be seen or touched.
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This points to a broader problem with offsets, one that reaches beyond the official
trading systems and into a web of voluntary arrangements administered by large conservation groups in order to unofficially “offset” the emissions of big polluters. Particularly in the early days of offsetting, after forest conservation projects began appearing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, by far the most persistent controversy was that—in the effort to quantify and control how much carbon
was being stored so as to assign a monetary value to the standing trees—the people who live in or near those forests were sometimes pushed onto reservation-like parcels, locked out of their previous ways of life.
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This locking out could be literal, complete with fences and armed men patrolling the territory looking for trespassers. The NGOs claim that they were merely attempting to protect the
resources and the carbon they represented, but all this was seen, quite understandably, as a form of land grabbing.

For instance, in Paraná, Brazil, at a project providing offsets for Chevron, GM, and American Electric Power and administered by The Nature Conservancy and a Brazilian NGO, Indigenous Guarani were not allowed to forage for wood or hunt in the places they’d always occupied, or even
fish in nearby waterways. As one local put it, “They want to take our home from us.” Cressant Rakotomanga, president of a community organization in Madagascar where the Wildlife Conservation Society is running an offset program, expressed a similar sentiment. “People are frustrated because
before the project, they were completely free to hunt, fish and cut down the forests.”
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Indeed the offset
market has created a new class of “green” human rights abuses, wherein peasants and Indigenous people who venture into their traditional territories (reclassified as carbon sinks) in order to harvest plants, wood, or fish are harassed or worse. There is no comprehensive data available about these abuses, but the reported incidents are piling up. Near Guaraqueçaba, Brazil, locals have reported being
shot at by park rangers while they searched the forest for food and plants inside the Paraná offset project hosted by The Nature Conservancy. “They don’t want human beings in the forest,” one farmer told the investigative journalist Mark Schapiro. And in a carbon-offset tree-planting project in Uganda’s Mount Elgon National Park and Kibale National Park, run by a Dutch organization, villagers
described a similar pattern of being fired upon and having their crops uprooted.
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In the wake of such reports, some of the green groups involved in offsetting now stress their dedication to Indigenous rights. However, dissatisfaction remains and controversies continue to crop up. For example, in the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras, some owners of palm oil plantations have been able to register
a carbon offset project that claims to capture methane. Spurred by the promise of cash for captured gas, sprawling tree farms have displaced local agriculture, leading to a violent cycle of land occupations and evictions that has left as many as a hundred local farmers and their advocates dead as of 2013. “The way we see it, it has become a crime to be a farmer here,” says Heriberto Rodríguez of
the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán, which places part of the blame for the deaths on the carbon market itself. “Whoever gives the finance to these companies also becomes complicit in all these deaths. If they cut these funds, the landholders will feel somewhat pressured to change their methods.”
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Though touted as a classic “win-win” climate solution, there are very few winners in these
farms and forests. In order for multinational corporations to protect their freedom to pollute the atmosphere, peasants, farmers, and Indigenous people are losing their freedom to live and sustain themselves in peace. When the Big Green groups refer to offsets as the “low-hanging fruit” of climate action, they are in fact making a crude cost-benefit analysis
that concludes that it’s easier to
cordon off a forest inhabited by politically weak people in a poor country than to stop politically powerful corporate emitters in rich countries—that it’s easier to pick the fruit, in other words, than dig up the roots.

The added irony is that many of the people being sacrificed for the carbon market are living some of the most sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles on the planet. They have strong
reciprocal relationships with nature, drawing on local ecosystems on a small scale while caring for and regenerating the land so it continues to provide for them and their descendants. An environmental movement committed to real climate solutions would be looking for ways to support these ways of life—not severing deep traditions of stewardship and pushing more people to become rootless urban consumers.

Chris Lang, a British environmentalist based in Jakarta who runs an offset watchdog website called REDD-Monitor, told me that he never thought his job would involve exposing the failings of the green movement. “I hate the idea of the environmental movement fighting among itself instead of fighting the oil companies,” he said. “It’s just that these groups don’t seem to have any desire to take on
the oil companies, and with some of them, I’m not sure they really are environmentalists at all.”
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This is not to say that every project being awarded carbon credits is somehow fraudulent or actively destructive to local ways of life. Wind farms and solar arrays are being built, and some forests classified as offsets are being preserved. The problem is that by adopting this model of financing,
even the very best green projects are being made ineffective as climate responses because for every ton of carbon dioxide the developers keep out of the atmosphere, a corporation in the industrialized world is able to pump a ton into the air, using offsets to claim the pollution has been neutralized. One step forward, one step back. At best, we are running in place. And as we will see, there are
other, far more effective ways to fund green development than the international carbon market.

Geographer Bram Büscher coined the term “liquid nature” to refer to what these market mechanisms are doing to the natural world. As he de
scribes it, the trees, meadows, and mountains lose their intrinsic, place-based meaning and become deracinated, virtual commodities in a global trading system. The
carbon-sequestering potential of biotic life is virtually poured into polluting industries like gas into a car’s tank, allowing them to keep on emitting. Once absorbed into this system, a pristine forest may look as lush and alive as ever, but it has actually become an extension of a dirty power plant on the other side of the planet, attached by invisible financial transactions. Polluting smoke may
not be billowing from the tops of its trees but it may as well be, since the trees that have been designated as carbon offsets are now allowing that pollution to take place elsewhere.
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The mantra of the early ecologists was “everything is connected”—every tree a part of an intricate web of life. The mantra of the corporate-partnered conservationists, in sharp contrast, may as well be “everything
is disconnected,” since they have successfully constructed a new economy in which the tree is not a tree but rather a carbon sink used by people thousands of miles away to appease our consciences and maintain our levels of economic growth.

But the biggest problem with this approach is that carbon markets have failed even on their own terms, as markets. In Europe, the problems began with the decision
to entice companies and countries to join the market by handing out a huge number of cheap carbon permits. When the economic crisis hit a few years later, it caused production and consumption to contract and emissions to drop on their own. That meant the new emissions market was drowning in excess permits, which in turn caused the price of carbon to drop dramatically (in 2013, a ton of carbon
was trading for less than €4, compared to the target price of €20). That left little incentive to shift away from dirty energy or to buy carbon credits. Which helps explain why, in 2012, coal’s share of the U.K.’s electricity production rose by more than 30 percent, while in Germany, as we have already seen, emissions from coal went up despite the country’s rapid embrace of renewable power. Meanwhile,
the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism has fared even worse: indeed it has “essentially collapsed,” in the words of a report commissioned by the U.N. itself. “Weak emissions targets and the economic downturn in wealthy nations resulted in a 99 percent decline in carbon credit prices between 2008 and 2013,” explains Oscar Reyes, an expert on climate finance at the Institute for Policy
Studies.
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This is a particularly extreme example of the boom-and-bust cycle of markets, which are volatile and high-risk by nature. And that’s the central flaw with this so-called solution: it is simply too risky, and time is too short, for us to put our collective fate in such an inconstant and unreliable force. John Kerry has likened the threat of climate change to a “weapon of mass destruction,”
and it’s a fair analogy.
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But if climate change poses risks on par with nuclear war, then why are we not responding with the seriousness that that comparison implies? Why aren’t we ordering companies to stop putting our future at risk, instead of bribing and cajoling them? Why are we gambling?

Tired of this time wasting, in February 2013, more than 130 environmental and economic justice groups
called for the abolition of the largest carbon-trading system in the world, the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), in order “to make room for climate measures that work.” The declaration stated that, seven years into this experiment, “The ETS has not reduced greenhouse gas emissions . . . the worst polluters have had little to no obligation to cut emissions at source. Indeed, offset projects
have resulted in an
increase
of emissions worldwide: even conservative sources estimate that between 1/3 and 2/3 of carbon credits bought into the ETS ‘do not represent real carbon reductions.’ ”
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The system has also allowed power companies and others to pass on the cost of compliance to their consumers, especially in the early years of the market, leading to a 2008 estimate by Point Carbon
of windfall profits between $32 and $99 billion for electric utilities in the U.K., Germany, Spain, Italy, and Poland over a span of just five years. One report found airline companies raked in a windfall of up to $1.8 billion in their first year on the market in 2012. In short, rather than getting the polluters to pay for the mess they have created—a basic principle of environmental justice—taxpayers
and ratepayers have heaped cash on them and for a scheme that hasn’t even worked.
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In the context of the European debacle, the fact that the U.S. Senate failed to pass climate legislation in 2009 should not be seen, as it often is, as the climate movement’s greatest defeat, but rather as a narrowly dodged bullet.
The cap-and-trade bills under consideration in the U.S. House and Senate in Obama’s
first term would have repeated all the errors of the European and U.N. emission trading systems, and then added some new ones of their own.

Both laws were based on proposals crafted by a coalition put together by the Environmental Defense Fund’s Fred Krupp, which had brought large polluters (General Electric, Dow Chemical, Alcoa, ConocoPhillips, BP, Shell, the coal giant Duke Energy, DuPont,
and many more) together with a handful of Big Green groups (The Nature Conservancy, the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute, and what was then called the Pew Center on Global Climate Change). Known as the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), the coalition had been guided by the familiar defeatist logic that there is no point
trying to take on the big emitters directly so it’s better to try to get them onside with a plan laden with corporate handouts and loopholes.
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The deal that ultimately emerged out of USCAP—touted as a historic compromise between greens and industry—handed out enough free allowances to cover 90 percent of emissions from energy utilities, including coal plants, meaning they could keep on emitting
that amount and pay no price at all. “We’re not going to get a better deal,” Duke Energy’s then CEO Jim Rogers boasted. “Ninety percent is terrific.” Congressman Rick Boucher, a Democrat representing coal-rich southwestern Virginia, gushed that the bill had so many giveaways that it “ushered in a new golden age of coal.”
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