Climate Expert Blasts Emission Trading Scheme

by Danielle Knight

"International emission trading schemes are really wrong-headed when it comes to global warming," said Ross Gelbspan, a well-known author on climate issues. "They are impossible to monitor and there is no agreement on enforcement mechanisms," he says.

Such schemes, he cautioned, will also allow wealthy industrialized nations to buy their way out of real carbon reductions at home and in turn increase the amount developing nations will have to spend to reduce their emissions in the future.

Gelbspan, a former reporter and editor with the Boston Globe, wrote the book, "The Heat is On," that alerted the public on the severity of global warming.

Most scientists believe that global warming is caused by mostly carbon-based gases emitted when fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal are burned.

Already these gases have been blamed for heating the deep oceans, fracturing Antarctic ice shelves and fuelling more intense El Nino cycles. To deal with these threats, industrialized nations hammered out an international agreement known as the Kyoto Protocol in which they pledged to reduce emissions by five to seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Part of the Protocol included the concept of international emissions trading, which, strictly defined, would take place only between industrial nations. But Gelbspan says that the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Protocol would permit industrial nations to buy inexpensive reductions in developing countries.

Supporters of these so-called "cap-and-trade" mechanisms -- including the U.S. government, industry and even some larger environmental groups, like the Environmental Defense Fund -- argue that similar trading plans have worked domestically.

Gelbspan agrees that the U.S. program to reduce acid rain-causing sulphur dioxide emissions has worked relatively well in reducing the amount of acid rain in northeastern states. But it succeeded because it was easy to monitor and enforce, he argues.

"About 80 percent of U.S. sulphur dioxide emissions belched from 2,000 smokestacks in the Midwest, which was a manageable number of sources to monitor," he says. The program, moreover, was subject to understandable systems of national regulation.

International carbon trading, either between industrialized nations or between industrial and developing nations, cannot work since carbon is emitted from millions of sources all over the world and would be impossible to monitor.

International cap-and-trade mechanisms are also unfair to developing countries, says Gelbspan.

"First, there is a profound dispute between industrial and developing countries over how to allocate emission rights," he says.

The industrial nations want each country to be allocated a percentage of its 1990 emissions levels to ensure continuity of their economies, while developing countries say that only a per capita allocation is fair and democratic.

"But if the emissions quota for each U.S. citizen were the same as each citizen of India, the U.S. economy would dramatically shrink," he says.

Under the 1990 baseline established for industrial countries, nations like Russia, whose economy contracted sharply after the break-up of the Soviet Union, have large quantities of emissions rights to sell -- even though it is emitting far less today than it did previously.

Anil Agarwal, head of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi, argues that the "cap-and-trade" schemes under the Protocol are inequitable since they would allow industrial nations to buy limitless amounts of cheap emission reductions in poor countries and to bank them indefinitely into the future.

This would mean that when developing nations eventually become obligated to cut their own emissions, they will be left with only the most expensive options, says Gelbspan.

"This clearly constitutes a form of environmental colonialism," he says.

Even if all the problems of monitoring, equity and enforcement were solved, the "cap-and-trade" mechanism would still be inadequate to achieve the 70 percent reduction scientists say is required to pacify the inflamed atmosphere, says Gelbspan.

"At most, international carbon trading should be used as a fine-tuning instrument to help nations attain the last 10 to 15 percent of the 70 percent emissions reductions required to allow the climate to restabilize," he says.

Instead of trading schemes, industrialized nations should be focusing on reducing government subsidies away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy technologies, like wind and solar, argues Gelbspan.

The U.S. government spends about $20 billion a year subsidizing oil, gas and coal, in the form of tax breaks and other market incentives. Globally, the annual subsidy for carbon fuels has been estimated at $300 billion.

"The removal of those subsidies and the creation of equivalent support for renewable technologies would provide significant incentives for the major energy companies to aggressively develop fuel cells, solar and photovoltaic energy, and wind power," says Gelbspan.

A small portion of those subsidies should be retained for low-income fuel assistance as well as for job retraining for displaced coal miners, he adds.

Gelbspan is also calling on parties to the Kyoto Protocol to adopt a progressively more stringent fossil fuel efficiency standard (FFES).

"If every nation began at its current baseline to increase it efficiency by specified amounts at designated intervals, that would sidestep the equity controversies embedded in international emissions trading," he says.

FFES monitoring would simply involve calculating changes in the ratio comparing a nation's annual carbon energy use to its gross domestic product, he argues.

Gelbspan also supports the creation of an international fund, which would be based on a tax on international currency transactions.

First conceived by the Nobel prize-winning economist James Tobin, the quarter of a penny tax per dollar on such transactions would yield $200 to $300 billion annually that developing nations would need to purchase, produce and deploy climate-friendly energy sources.

"The result of these combined strategies would be a worldwide energy transition, which would expand developing economies in much the same way as the Marshall Plan revitalized the economies of Europe after World War II," he says.