I had a blast reading Harper’s Magazine recently. Mark Schapiro’s article on carbon-trading was a dizzying fall into the Alice in Wonderland world of magical lies, fake science and elaborate international Ponzi schemes.
Though we now know there are very big question marks about the validity of human-caused climate change, that hasn’t stopped the carbon trading market.
Carbon trading, which is based upon the assumption that industrial activity is causing climate change, is “the fastest growing commodities market on Earth.”
As Schapiro points out, carbon is a novel commodity — “one whose value resides entirely in the promise of its absence.”
Schapiro went on a field trip to visit with an “emissions assessor.” This is a new career path that did not exist 10 years ago. This individual is charged with making intermittent trips to a worksite to prove that the carbon that would have been emitted if an industrial process had been done differently, are not there; thus whatever the new technology on site emits is evidence that something worse didn’t happen. That premise is worth lots of money.
As Schapiro found out, frequently such projects are launched and earn carbon-trading credits and real money for someone, somewhere in the world, but the actual project may founder or the industry may revert to using older, more polluting technology — but there is no process to revoke the non-existent benefits the carbon trading points are based on.
Why? Because if it were possible to revoke credits, then there would not be a market at all.
There is an enormous network of organizations and countries involved in carbon trading and it is administered by the UN.
The whole idea of carbon trading can perhaps be grossly described as global flatulence.
If I promise not to fart in your bedroom, and someone, anyone, verifies that I probably didn’t and probably won’t, then if you want to fart in the living room you can buy my right to fart in the bedroom from me. If I promise to install a new air filter, I get more points too, that your right to fart will pay for. The only difference is that at least farting can be verified by smell. Carbon dioxide emissions can’t.
Carbon trading works through the UN through 26 firms called Designated Operational Entities and they also employ “validators.” These individuals review the project to ensure that the emissions that the project sponsor say they will cut, probably could be cut through the new process or technology proposes.
Later, perhaps years later, these validators will have to come back to verify that indeed all those emissions didn’t happen.
Do you follow me? Then they have to prove “additionality” — that the renewable energy project would not happen without the capital generated by selling carbon credits.
An example Schapiro presents involves a project wherein the stated goal is to not produce 67,000 tons of carbon dioxide.
Multiply that by a current price of $22 per ton and you get carbon credits worth $1.5 million.
Carbon project developers are, not surprisingly, funded or owned by financial houses like Cantor Fitzgerald, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.
Aren’t these the same guys who just plunged the world into a global recession and bankrupted millions of middle-class Americans?
Ironically, I originally thought the idea of carbon capture in Alberta to be a fairly stupid waste of money. But perhaps putting a big hole in the ground and filling it up with invisible carbon dioxide is a grand idea because then you can “prove” you actually have it — something almost none of the other multibillion dollars worth of GHG reduction projects in the world can do.
But on second thought, maybe we Albertans are the dummies. If no one else needs to prove it, why should we?
Why shouldn’t we be just as criminally irresponsible with both the environment and other people’s money? The answer is that we — or at least the big companies involved in carbon capture — can make a fortune on the very idea carbon capture — whether it succeeds or not!
As I read the story, it dawned on me how so many well-intentioned environmentalists are just front-line cannon fodder — pawns for these backroom boys who are making real money out of thin air, and laughing all the way to the bank because there is absolutely no accountability.
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
Michelle Stirling-Anosh is a Ponoka freelance columnist.