Emission Control, We Have a Problem

This is a Very Long lecture-thingy, anyone who doesn’t like it can go and google “britney and kevin” or something.

A good while ago I asked, what is Carbon Trading? After a month of looking at it from as many angles as I could, I really wish I’d never asked, because it turns out that Carbon Trading is like piling all the deck chairs onto the up end of a sinking ship and sipping cocktails while pretending it’s not sinking. It is a great delusion, and probably the most ambitious business scam in history.

It works like this:

We on planet earth have something called the greenhouse effect, a natural heating system that is necessary for life on earth as we know it, but which in excess is harmful to life as we know it. Certain human activities have pushed the limits in this regard, by releasing far larger amounts of the relevant gases than would naturally have been released. This isn’t a good idea right now – as yet, we have nowhere else to live. A bunch of countries got together in the early nineties to see what could be done to mitigate snowballing of the greenhouse effect. Some stuff was decided. All participating countries had legally binding Reduced Emissions Targets to meet. The targets were inadequate, but it was a start.
Also, a plan was devised which, among other things, allows CO2 and other greenhouse gases to be traded. The idea was that the more you intended to emit, the more expensive it would be for you, in theory penalising the worst offenders where it hurts them most – in the pocket. (In practise, of course, the more the big money spends itself the bigger it gets)

Very simplistically: say you normally use 150 emission units, that is; you emit x amount of greenhouse gas. It’s been decided that this is too much and you are given an amount of 100 units that you may not exceed. Your neighbour is in credit, though: he uses only 50 units because he has far less industry than you do, but is also allowed to use 100. You yourself can’t actually get by with only 100 and still live the way you’re used to living, but if you want to you can buy 50 of your neighbour’s unused units (with money or trees or good deeds, it’s quite flexible) and use them for him on your own behalf. He’s happy, you’re happy, everyone’s saving the world and making money into the bargain. What is being traded here is, literally, hot air: and look - you are still making exactly the same amount of emissions as you were before. So is your neighbour. And mostly, the Kyoto Protocol becomes a farce.

Carbon Trading, AKA the Emissions Market, is a forked-tongue arrangement for ‘offsetting’ greenhouse gas emissions. It will allow poor and underdeveloped nations to remain poor and underdeveloped while under licence to rich overdeveloped nations who will continue as before, in real terms not reducing emissions at all, just spreading them around a bit.

Carbon Trading has many rabbits in its hat, but has trees as its star crowd-pleaser. The theory goes like this: trees remove CO2 (one of the greenhouse gases) from the atmosphere, and store the carbon molecules. Therefore, if we plant new forests* in poverty stricken countries, they will function as global CO2-sponges and carbon-containment-fields (officially known as carbon sinks). The development of genetically modified super-trees is also proposed, which may soak up even more CO2 and store even more carbon. An amazing offshoot of this is that the poor get to benefit from it, through infrastructure investment and through the trees themselves, which can eventually be harvested and used in wondrous ways.

It sounds okay if you’re too busy with the daily grind of life to be paying proper attention, which is mostly the case. A closer look suggests that this kind of mopping up and storing is temporary. The theory is, at best, wishful thinking and at worst, outright deception.
The loco logic of Emissions Markets (google it – the money-numbers are staggeringly huge) says that it’s okay - we can keep releasing carbon that took millions of years to lock down in fossil deposits, if we just plant trees which will mop it all back up again. Instantly. Well it’s not that simple. The way they put it, we’ll have a planet full of people thinking that Carbon is the devil and only trees can save us, halleluiah. Carbon and Carbon Dioxide are not the same thing. Carbon itself isn’t a “greenhouse gas”. Carbon’s not the problem – it’s the conversion of it into extra CO2 by releasing too much of it into the air that’s the problem. Fossil deposits like oil, coal, peat and chalk are the most efficient carbon sinks of all - they can store carbon for eons while trees cannot. Stripping fossil deposits and replacing them with trees is like smashing a ruby and replacing it with a red glass bead – only much, much worse.
The Carbon Trade marketing pitch uses the sentiments of reasonably educated people to dishonestly plug for the “welfare” of the less fortunate. “It will help all the poor people so much,” the schpiel goes. “It’s win-win! We will plant trees that the poor will benefit from and the poor in turn will benefit the whole earth by allowing us to do so! Why, you too can offset your own greenhouse footprint, Joe Public - just plant a tree for every X amount of air-miles that you do. We have seen the light, and it’s trees.”

Get totally serious about spending serious money on searching for alternative, clean, sane, renewable energy? Stop over-consuming insane, dirty energy in the meantime? By the Gods, why bother? Let the leftover mutants huddled around the North Pole as the century ends worry about that stuff. Let them trade bread if they want to. If they can find any. OK let them trade nuts and berries then. If they can find any. For now we’ll just trade carbon credits because it’s so lucrative. Live in the moment. No worries, eh?

Genuine ethics would probably not smile upon carbon trading with its potential for abuse and corruption, and its ability to deflect attention and money away from a committed search for alternative energy sources. (It’s not just energy either – we do so many things in excess that are harmful, for example, we mine peat on a large scale so that we can use it as a medium to grow table-mushrooms in. We want millions of mushrooms on our plate right through the year and so this is how we do it)
The Emperor always needs a new suit and the tailors will always have a job. And, since the world-pool of generally acceptable things is increasing exponentially (in the interests of runaway-train-freedom-of-speech and freedom-of-whatever-whenever, all that), we might soon get some new Reality TV: once a week, all the little kids who tug at mummy’s skirt and say “But the Emperor has no clothes on!” will be lined up against the wall and shot. Pour encourager les autres, as Lynne Truss would say.

Maybe the planet has a plan of its own and maybe we’re part of it. Maybe it consciously wants us to keep turning up the heat and become extinct so that it can have a new era, experiment with some novel and interesting life forms. The runaway greenhouse effect is not necessarily bad for the actual planet (which seems to relish changing its look and feel from time to time); it’s only bad for humans and quite a few other species. But I believe** that the Earth itself will survive us. As important and powerful as we think we are, I don’t think we actually have the ability to vapourise the planet, even if we childishly nuked it one day just to see what would happen.

* Not actually forests. More accurately, they plan large scale monoculture tree plantations. There are big differences, for example: An established forest has a generational spread of young, mature, old and dying plants, as well as a variety of species both fauna and flora. All the species support different cycles within the whole while interacting, the system is robust because natural disease etc has less chance of bringing down the entire system when there’s a variety of species with different immune responses. Detritus is quickly broken down by myriad organisms and becomes compacted as humus on the forest floor – sealing it layer by layer and, if undisturbed, trapping carbon molecules in the medium to long term. A natural mature forest is one of nature’s own carbon sinks… etc… etc. Whereas a plantation consists of a single species and generation, vulnerable to various scourges, humus is not effectively formed, carbon molecules only trapped in actual trees for as long as they stand – short term… etc…etc.

**Belief: You can only believe something you do not know to be true. Whatever cannot be verified or proven in the present must simply be believed, or not believed. You don’t have to believe in tax, for instance, because it exists and can be proven. But you have to believe in fairies, god, human kindness, etc because no proof exists.
Some believe in Virgin Birth, even against proven biological facts to do with humans and their ridiculous inability to wind-pollinate. But then, we know very little verifiable stuff about Angels at this point. Perhaps in the future it might be proved that they can in fact do it without doing it, and sceptics will have to apologise. Maybe cloning is not so much a new technology as a forgotten art, and back in 0000 they were using it all the time. Could artificial insemination qualify as immaculate conception? In the hands of the right Marketing People, yes absolutely.
Belief is a wonderful tool. You can believe, or not believe, in absolutely anything you want to. There are no limits and no boundaries with belief. It’s very much like Marketing, actually.