"Making and Marketing Carbon Dumps:
Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change 
Mitigation"
by Larry Lohmann

http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/carbdump.pdf

(This article appeared in Science as Culture, Volume 14, issue number 3, 
September 2005, published by Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09505431.asp)


After Hurricane Katrina devastated the US city of New Orleans in August 
this year, climate change became a hot talk show topic. It was again in 
the news in December, following the latest round of international 
climate negotiations in Montreal, attended by 10,000 people.

Despite all the news coverage, however, there is little open public 
discussion about the structure and prospects of the main current 
international initiative for tackling climate change - the carbon market 
created by the Kyoto Protocol.

In 1992, the United Nations promulgated a Framework Convention on 
Climate Change. Five years later, in December 1997, representatives of 
more than 160 countries met in the Japanese city of Kyoto to negotiate 
limits for developed countries on their emissions of greenhouse gases, 
now generally acknowledged to be the major cause of global warming.

The resulting Kyoto Protocol came into force on 16 February 2005. 
Binding more than 30 industrialised countries to modest emission 
reduction targets, it also instituted a worldwide trade in emissions 
permits and credits. Although the Protocol has still failed to gain the 
support of the United States, the country by whom and for whom it was 
largely written, environmentalists, politicians and journalists 
elsewhere generally hail the agreement as a crucial "first step" toward 
more serious efforts to address global warming.

Yet the Protocol and associated schemes such as the European Union 
Emissions Trading Scheme are in fact not designed to do what any 
constructive approach to global warming must do: check the upward flow 
of fossil carbon into the atmosphere, oceans, soil and vegetation. 
Instead, they grant lucrative rights to this global carbon dump to heavy 
fossil fuel users while attempting, against the best scientific wisdom, 
to develop speculative new carbon dumps -- also for elite use.

This approach is confused, regressive and divisive, argues this article. 
It is squandering science and technology on scientifically-impossible 
programmes while taking the climate issue out of the hands of the public 
and sowing the seeds of future social conflict. Its incoherence can only 
be countered by a broad popular movement.

"Perhaps the best paper I have read on any aspect of climate change," 
said UK environmenal journalist George Monbiot recently. "Anyone reading 
it could not fail to be swayed by your arguments and your examples. It 
has changed my thinking -- thank you."