The growing debate over what to do about climate change promises to heat up
further this week with the publication of an exhaustively-documented new book
that says that the dominant "carbon trading" approach to the problem followed
by the Kyoto Protocol and the EU Emissions Trading Scheme is both ineffective
and unjust.

The book, published by Sweden's Dag Hammarskjold Foundation together with the
international Durban Group for Climate Justice and the UK-based NGO The Corner
House, argues that carbon trading slows the social and technological change
needed to cope with global warming by unnecessarily prolonging the world's
dependence on oil, coal and gas.

Carbon trading "dispossesses ordinary people in the South of their lands and
futures without resulting in appreciable progress toward alternative energy
systems," said Larry Lohmann of the Corner House, the book's editor. "Tradable
rights to pollute are handed out to Northern industry, allowing them to
continue to profit from business as usual.1 At the same time, Northern
polluters are encouraged to invest in supposedly carbon-saving projects in the
South, very few of which promote clean energy at all."2

Most of the carbon credits being sold to industrialized countries, Lohmann
explained, come from polluting projects that do nothing to reduce fossil fuel
use, such as schemes that burn methane from coal mines or waste dumps. The bulk
of fossil fuels must be left in the ground if climate chaos is to be avoided,
the book warns.

Carbon credits, added Jutta Kill of Sinks Watch, another contributor to the
book, can't be verified to be mitigating climate change. Carbon trading, she
said, "impedes the further development of already-existing positive approaches
such as conventional regulation, public investment in energy alternatives,
taxes, and movements against subsidies for fossil fuel extraction."

"This is the most absurd and impossible market human civilization has ever
seen," said Indian activist and researcher Soumitra Ghosh, a contributing
author of one of the book's nine detailed case studies on carbon projects in
the South. "Carbon trading is bad for the South, bad for the North, and bad for
the climate."

Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and
Power is available for download at http://www.dhf.uu.se and at
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk. A paper edition will be available from the
Dag Hammarskjold Foundation in November and can be ordered from them or from
larrylohmann@gn.apc.org.