A new article by Heidi Blake in the NewYorker is worth your time because is helps explain the massive capitalist scam (aka “perverse incentives”) that is is Cap & Trade and/or carbon emissions trading and how markets can be designed for (marginal) failure and evade the Climate Crisis goal. Her AES corporate example shows how international capital exploits energy markets in the greenwashed name of profits. The cliche of selling swampland as suburban estates in Florida still applies in the 21st Century.
Rent and Rentiers run riot in neoliberal markets and pricing schemes are not the answer. Neither are offset markets which are no different than the auctioning of property rights. Major environmental concerns cannot be fully mitigated through emissions trading, much like a hydrogen-based energy economy will require fossil fuels. For example, carbon offsets in California's cap-and-trade program appear to deliver far fewer climate benefits than claimed.
One among many texts have traced the potential problems of carbon markets is Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets edited by Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi (2009). Like the FTX scam, the problem is trying to trace the speculative manipulation. Blake allows us to see the cash for carbon hustle which as a commodity is no less abstract than a ‘pork belly’. What happened is that investments in the Global North lost track of accountability in the Global South, where the social benefits would have been received. It may be by definition impossible to create standardized commodity-like contracts under capitalism.
Is there a “a true carbon pricing scheme to ensure incentives to turn green are maintained no matter fiscal and social conditions. An emissions trading scheme, in theory, controls the level of emissions reduced, but a price collapse like the one in Europe can reform economic signals and confuse markets. A stable, high price of carbon under a pricing scheme provides clear signals to the private sector about how to optimize profits, providing a strong economic green hand.”
While they control how far emissions will be reduced — and at what prices — carbon markets fail to align the speed of reductions with the speed needed to maintain 1.5℃.
Even with “true” pricing, the carbon offset market sans regulation remains a prime example of the failure of capitalist institutions.
Carbon offsets are widely promoted as a strategy to lower the cost of emission reductions, but recent findings suggest that offsets may not causally reduce emissions by the amount claimed...The opposite of a carbon tax — a renewable credit — works within the market to lower the costs of renewable alternatives and was at the core of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. Home and business owners now see investing in solar panels and greening their operations as cheaper, reducing the barrier of upfront switching costs.
www.gcjlab.com/...
carbon financing through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
This controversial and increasingly discredited finance mechanism, which enables countries and companies in the Global North to buy offset credits from projects in the Global South, has become an emblem of the wider climate injustice being exacerbated by the Kyoto Process.
The proposed scheme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation (and possibly degradation) in Developing Countries, is known as REDD. ... aims at operating as a financial incentive for reducing deforestation rates by paying Southern countries with tropical forests for doing so
While Northern governments do what they can to avoid making commitments to the necessary adaptation and technology transfer funds, the World Bank and industry lobby groups such as the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) will be out in force in Copenhagen extolling the virtues of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and looking for opportunities to expand and deregulate the market. In Poznan, a World Bank representative took the floor in a plenary and said that ‘in order to maintain the successes of the CDM, we need to expand it and make it more flexible.’ The demand for offsets credit is increasingly dramatically in order to meet national commitments and for countries and institutions that are taking part in various existing and proposed carbon markets, and so the expansion and deregulation of the CDM process will be necessary in order to meet that demand.
The proposed expansions include technologies that are controversial, such as nuclear power, and unproven, such as Carbon Capture and Storage, while IETA has presented a set of recommendations to the CDM Executive Board with the intention of speeding up the approval process and relaxing rules around ‘additionality’ and ‘absolute assurance’. And even industry insiders are frightened at the impact that the enormous volume of potential credits under the various REDD schemes being proposed could have on the carbon market.
www.gbv.de/...
The role of carbon markets should be to enable payment for the service of directly removing carbon: actually touching the carbon cycle. The sketchy accounting and tactics described here are made possible by paying for something very abstracted from the underlying carbon cycle.
False equivalency is the load-bearing lie that breaks the system. Much of what's been sold as an environmental benefit is worthless or damaging, but the traditional carbon brokers and registries can't acknowledge that: doing so would remove their justification for existence.
Here, Verra’s methodology enabled false equivalence: by approving credits from a bad project, they now must stretch the truth further and further to make these credits appear legit: not simply to preserve the commission they receive, but as a misguided notion of market integrity.
This problem is enabled by issuing credits "ex-ante": artificially pre-crediting something that hasn't yet occurred, but is supposed to occur in the future. That sets up the incentive to make it appear as though carbon removal is occurring, instead of making it happen.
There is no hope of curbing the worst effects of climate change without saving our remaining forests. Earth’s three trillion trees absorb nearly a third of humanity’s carbon output, yet they continue to be destroyed at an alarming rate, releasing those stores back into the atmosphere. Forest-based offsetting rests on a simple premise: if this carbon payload can be sold, it becomes more lucrative to leave trees standing than to cut them down.
Yet it is extraordinarily difficult to quantify how much carbon these schemes really save. To do so, you must demonstrate that the forest would have been razed without protection—a counterfactual that is nearly impossible to prove. There are also issues of “leakage”: even if the agents of deforestation are driven out of one area, they may cut down trees someplace else. Then there is the question of permanence. Greenhouse gases can linger in the atmosphere for thousands of years—but forests are vulnerable to wildfires and other calamities, and most protection schemes last no more than a few decades. Twenty years after Applied Energy Services funded the Guatemalan tree-planting project, researchers found that it had largely failed. (A.E.S. disputes this.) The enormous amount of land and labor devoted to forestry had led to food shortages, and arguments had broken out; some farmers had simply refused to plant the trees. In the end, the researchers calculated, the program had offset only about ten per cent of the emissions from the coal plant in Connecticut.
The U.N.’s carbon system allowed offsets in a variety of categories, but it excluded forest-carbon projects, because of the particular challenges of verifying their benefits. U.N. officials had deliberated over an assessment framework called redd (REDD)—“reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries”—to distinguish the worthwhile forest-carbon projects from the boondoggles. But, from the beginning, there was controversy over the science, and concern over the human cost of a forest-carbon boom. White developers had begun buying up forestland in the Global South, and reports emerged of “carbon cowboys” using violence and trickery to drive Indigenous people from their territories.
Though the U.N. carbon-trading system never implemented the redd framework, it was taken up by a rival source of accreditation: a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., launched by carbon-industry players. The agency, which became known as Verra, had adopted the U.N.’s accounting methodologies, promising to apply them with a lighter touch.
Verra allowed developers to choose among several different ways to calculate the credits that their projects would generate. That alarmed critics, who warned that developers would simply select whatever model yielded the most credits. The agency’s longtime chief executive, an environmental entrepreneur named David Antonioli, acknowledged the problem but told me, “If you require perfection, you’ll have a hundred million dollars’ worth of climate action. If you’re more pragmatic about it, you might have two billion or five billion.”
www.newyorker.com/...
To everybody’s nobody’s surprise, it turned out that carbon offsets were one of the bigger grifts of the bubble-hype-markets-thing that just happened. But is simply discarding these markets going to help climate change?
Undoubtedly, no. Carbon offsets might not be the end-all, be-all solution to climate change, but they can still play a valuable role. Making them useful means focusing on the flaws in the mechanisms that control verification. Or in normal parlance: carbon has to be purged of bullshit.
You see, it turns out that trust in this market isn’t just nice to have; it’s essential. Carbon’s 90 per cent price plunge and 32 per cent supply contraction of deforestation projects over two years are testament to a crisis of credibility.
www.ft.com/...
2010
Stabilising climate requires restoring our planet's energy balance. The physics is straightforward. The effect of increasing carbon dioxide on Earth's energy imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of ocean heat gain. The principal implication is defined by the geophysics, by the size of fossil fuel reservoirs. Simply put, there is a limit on how much carbon dioxide we can pour into the atmosphere. We cannot burn all fossil fuels. Specifically, we must (1) phase out coal use rapidly, (2) leave tar sands in the ground, and (3) not go after the last drops of oil.
[...]
However, fossil fuel addiction can be solved only when we recognise an economic law as certain as the law of gravity: as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy they will be used. Solution therefore requires a rising fee on oil, gas and coal – a carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies at the domestic mine or port of entry. All funds collected should be distributed to the public on a per capita basis to allow lifestyle adjustments and spur clean energy innovations. As the fee rises, fossil fuels will be phased out, replaced by carbon-free energy and efficiency.
A carbon fee is the only realistic path to global action. China and India will not accept caps, but they need a carbon fee to spur clean energy and avoid fossil fuel addiction.
Governments today, instead, talk of "cap-and-trade with offsets", a system rigged by big banks and fossil fuel interests. Cap-and-trade invites corruption. Worse, it is ineffectual, assuring continued fossil fuel addiction to the last drop and environmental catastrophe.
www.theguardian.com/...
For Marx, the purpose of prices in capitalism, as in all commodity production systems, is to facilitate the reproduction of individual commodities in the context of the reproduction of the economic system. In capitalism the reproduction of the system also implies its expansion. Capitalism is a commodity production system characterised by the existence of a surplus product which assumes an exchange value or money form and is appropriated by producers in relation to the exchangeable worth of inputs advanced to undertake production. The inputs advanced are capital, and include outlays on labour power. The surplus product permits an expansion of the system by enabling an expansion of inputs used in production (and encouraging technological change).
link.springer.com/...