Activists interrupt carbon trading conference

Today in Amsterdam at 9.30am, a conference designed to inform and
educate would-be carbon traders was stormed by local climate
activists. The opening session, where BP´s Head of Climate Change
Mark Akhurst was speaking, was interrupted as activists danced into
the room in bright blue wigs, blowing horns and whistles and
storming the stage. The activists shouted messages like "Trading in
pollution is not a solution" and threw carbon credits to bewildered
conference participants.

After the room was occupied by the locked-on protestors and declared
a lost cause for the conference events, all potential carbon traders
were moved into the lobby area, where they discussed the interruption
to the otherwise, fairly dull morning. The day had begun with an
unenthusiastic introduction from Point Carbon CEO, Kristian Tangen.
The difficult part in these types of events is trying to follow what
is an extremely technical subject, full to the brim with assumptions
of prior knowledge. However the numbers that Tangen threw at the
audience soon pricked up a few ears. In 2002, Point Carbon estimate
that the carbon market will be worth a mean average of $489 million
USD. Six years before the actual international market formulated in
the Kyoto Protocol is set to begin. Tangen described 2002 as "a very
interesting year for carbon trading" with "unprecedented
opportunities".

Then enter Mark Akhurst, BP´s head of climate change with his sets of
facts and figures. Akhurst stated that his company had already
achieved 5% reduction in CO2 emissions, half of their voluntary
commitment to 10% reductions below 1990 levels. All this with the
aid of emissions trading which made it cost effective to make such
dramatic cuts. BP´s emissions trading scheme also managed to earn
them $650 million USD in extra profits as most reductions were
achieved through energy efficiency and reducing gas flaring. So, for
BP, the solution to all our climate-related problems is to implement
emissions trading schemes based on their model. And now they´ve had
a few years to practice, they can be the Pied Piper of the market.

Emissions trading may well be the Holy Grail of uniting business and
the environment. But before leaping to that conclusion, a closer
look a the idea and its propagators is needed. First the ´pioneers´
of emission trading - BP. While BP champion themselves as a climate-
friendly company, their continued membership in groups like the
American Petroleum Institute throws some doubt to their greener than
green claims. The API´s position in the UN climate talks has been
one of "our actions in the next 10 or 15 years will have little
impact on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in the year 2050
or 2100." So why are BP remodeling themselves as ´Beyond Petroleum´
whilst supporting a lobby group with an anti-action position? Is
there real concern for the environment at the core of the BP
emissions trading scheme or a cynical attempt to cover all the
angles, just in case? As well as make a tidy little profit in the
process.

As for emissions trading itself, what became clear from the BP
presentation was that the business units involved in their internal
scheme were self-monitoring. Akhurst admitted that measuring
reported emissions is "never 100% accurate". There is an obvious
conflict of interest for players in the market buying and selling
carbon credits, while measuring their own emissions and being
responsible for the accounting involved. A case in point is the
recent scandal involving Enron energy trading company and Arthur
Andersen accountancy firm, where Andersens checked the books for the
company whist auditing them for government. It doesn´t take a genius
to realise that the potential for corruption is huge and inevitable,
and that is what happened. Arthur Andersen have also been big
players in formulating emissions trading systems and former employees
of Enron could be found all over the energy corporations in the
carbon conference in Amsterdam. A solution to this would be to have
independent monitoring of emissions trading. Unfortunately the big
corporations are way ahead of government and are traditionally
opposed to state intervention in markets and unfriendly to
regulation.

Trading in emissions is not just a business solution to climate
change, it is the brainchild of big corporations. Small businesses
are remarkable by their absence from both today´s conference and the
history of the development of emissions trading which has been pushed
forward by large transnational companies, best positioned to benefit
from it. With that realisation comes a need to consider wider issues
of corporate-driven policy choices which affect social and
environmental problems. Emissions trading, if implemented in a
strictly regulated way on a national scale, could reduce emissions.
But it can not work internationally considering the huge global
diversity of economies and markets, as well as the technical
difficulties of reporting emissions accurately and verifying credits.

Finally, and what was ignored by the carbon traders and only
remembered by the activists, it will do nothing to challenge the might of the
corporations who already have too much say in the decisions that affect the survival
of the planet and its peoples.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)