Ignore the whingers, there’s a world to be saved.
Canada’s Financial Post has a story, Carbon catastrophe, attacking the Kyoto protocol and the trading of carbon credits. Alas for the writer it’s simply wrong. I don’t usually respond to the rubbish I read in the press, knowing full well that most people just don’t buy the arguments used by climate change deniers. But this article warrants a response as, alas, unless you are intimately involved in the industry it’s harder to sift through the half-lies and distortions.
Lawrence Solomon claims that carbon trading, which he confuses with the Kyoto protocol in general, is responsible for rainforest cutting and rises in the price of basic foodstuffs, nuclear proliferation and the building of dams. I’ll go through his four points one by one.
The first is the threat to the world’s forests, especially old-growth forests which do not soak up carbon from the atmosphere. By seizing these forests, cutting them down, and converting them to carbon-intensive plantations, Third World governments and their cronies can cash in on carbon credits, to the dismay of the old-growth forests’ inhabitants.
First up you can’t generate carbon credits by chopping down old-growth forest and installing plantations. Reforestation credits can only be generated on land that was cleared prior to 1990. Secondly we are seeing the rapid emergence of avoided deforestation credits that value in-situ forests for their carbon capture and storage abilities. It’s a well accepted truth that the world’s forests are already being destroyed at a rate-of-knotts by timber corporations and beef farmers as well as all manner of corrupt business interests. Indigenous communities have been being run off their land for a very long time. But by placing a real value on their forests, indigenous people, native to the rainforests around the world currently under the gun, will be able to derive significant revenues by not allowing their native forests to be destroyed. This enables these people to preserve their unique livelihoods, cultures, languages and identities. It gives them money to physically defend their forests from poachers. Solomon claims:
Every time we buy carbon offsets to salve our consciences at flying in a jet, we are helping to dispossess someone, somewhere, by boosting the carbon-credit value of their land.
Pardon some sailor-talk but that’s bullshit. Providing communities with funds to maintain and restore their native forests, and their communities, is about the least-likely thing I can think of that would dispossess them.
The second looming catastrophe, also caused by Kyoto carbon credits, again affects the poorest of the poor — a widespread food shortage, accompanied by rising prices, as agricultural lands are turned to ethanol and other bio-fuels rather than nourishment.
It’s not carbon-credits that are driving the bio-fuels boom, it’s the bio-fuels industry itself. Yes bio-fuels compete with people for corn, and yes that’s caused the price of tortillas in Mexico to triple in recent years. But you can’t blame carbon credits for that. Environmentalists and scientists have warned of both the dangers and the impracticalities of switching over to corn based bio-fuels since long before there were carbon credit schemes. There are other crops that also produce great diesel fuel much more efficiently, and which don’t have a significant food-value. But alas I can’t see us switching to hemp based fuels too soon. Greed and short-sightedness in the bio-fuels industry are to blame for rising food prices, as well as the basic fact that our engines are simply too inefficient and we simply drive far too much.
The third and fourth environmental catastrophes involve the resurrection of large hydro-electric dams and nuclear reactors. Before the Kyoto mind-set took hold, these grandiose government-backed relics of yesteryear were struggling to get off the drawing boards of energy planners. With Kyoto’s low-carbon chic restoring their respectability, and carbon credits making them less ruinous financially, both are back with a vengeance.
It’s pure hyperbole to say that nuclear and hydro-schemes are “back with a vengeance”. There are already over 2 million dams in the USA alone, some half of them built illegally. So any new dam creation is simply business-as-usual for the river-killing industry. And nuclear? Very few nuclear reactors at all have been commissioned in the last 20 years and while some governments have been lobbied hard by the nuclear power industry, there are no plans that I know of to proliferate nuclear power.
The worst thing about Mr Solomon’s attacks on the carbon credit schemes is not that they are ignorant, reactionary nonsense, but that they offer nothing positive. How does he suggest that the widespread and ongoing violation of the world’s forests be prevented? How would he help indigenous peoples gain financial autonomy and thus enable them to protect themselves from encroaching civilisation? What is his solution to breaking free from fossil fuel use? Does he propose to tear down the dams and restore the rivers? And if not why not? Does he argue for less consumption? No he’s just another contemptible left-wing whinger whose writing does as much damage to the planet as those loony climate change deniers on the right-wing do.
Climate change, and lets face it western governments these days too, transcend the old left/right labels. There are almost no genuinely left or right wing governments any more as globalism and corporatism have taken the reins. Restructuring the global economy so that old externalities like pollution, social justice, biodiversity, water use and so forth have costs, and paying those costs channels funds to protection and harm reduction, is the only way we can avert the disaster even blind-freddy could see looming ahead.
What excites me about my job, my company and my industry is that humanity is standing at a watershed moment in history. For the first time in my adult life, well at least since I started worrying about the future of our world, I can see that things could actually get better. There is no time to tolerate the whingers, the talkers, the negative-nancies. We’ve got work to do, and species, our own included, to save. — DS
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