[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Traded Away

[Bill Totten]

A cunning new loophole has wrecked the government's Climate Change Bill.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (July 24 2008)

For the past two years I have been fretting over a mystery. Though
Labour seems to have done everything possible to ensure that it stays
out of office, there remains a possibility that it might form another
government at some point between now and 2050. This means that its
climate change bill, which will become law in the autumn, could come
back to haunt it. Despite its evident flaws, this is radical and
unprecedented legislation. It imposes a legal obligation on future
governments to cut carbon dioxide pollution by sixty per cent or more by
2050, with binding interim targets every five years.

The government has some good climate policies. It also has some bleeding
disastrous ones, which appear to commit the United Kingdom to high
carbon pollution for the entire period covered by the bill. A future
Labour government would find itself snared by its own current policies.
Surely it wouldn't be foolish enough to set such a trap for itself?

One policy alone seems to doom future governments to prosecution: the
planned doubling of the capacity of the UK's airports by 2030. Using the
Department for Transport's projections, I estimate that by 2050
aeroplanes will account for 91% of all the greenhouse gases the country
should be producing. Under the less optimistic figures published by
Defra, the environment department, the proportion rises to 258% {1}.

Until now this hasn't been a problem: the government has refused to
include aircraft pollution in the 2050 target. But following an
amendment in the Lords, the draft bill imposes a duty on the government
either to include it or to explain to parliament why it hasn't done so,
within five year  {2}. The government claims that it might not be
possible to add these gases to the UK's carbon budget because, "in the
absence of an internationally agreed methodology", no one knows how to
calculate what proportion of this pollution belongs to us {3}.

It's a knotty problem, isn't it? If you were the government and you knew
that 67% of the passengers using UK airports were residents of this
country {4}, could you work out what proportion of aircraft emissions
should be counted in the UK's carbon budget? No? Me neither. Wouldn't
know where to begin.

This ridiculous excuse can't be sustained for much longer. At some point
aircraft gases will have to be included in the carbon target. Throw in
the government's road-building programme and its intention to approve
new coal-burning power plants and you can see that it has a problem.

The only factor now holding down carbon emissions is the price of
energy. They fell by two per cent last year, and the government admits
that this "was largely explicable in terms of price relativities" {5}.
In other words, it has again become cheaper to burn natural gas in power
stations than to burn coal, while the cost of oil has encouraged people
to drive less. The two per cent reduction means that the UK's carbon
budget is now a grand total of 0.8% smaller than it was in 1997 {6}. The
government can post a sixteen per cent cut in greenhouse gases since
1990 only because of the accidental reductions made during the dash for
gas under the Tories and the sharp reduction in methane and nitrous
oxide from rubbish dumps and industry. Neither of these cuts can be
repeated.

But this doesn't even begin to describe the government's problem. Its
new climate change report contains a tantalising figure. It is expressed
in such a back-handed way that you have to perform half a dozen small
calculations to discover what it means. The report boasts that even when
emissions in countries exporting goods to the UK are taken into account,
"the total annual reduction of UK greenhouse gas emissions since 1990
was around 240 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent [MtCO2eq]
below business as usual" {7}. The government says that "business as
usual" would have led to an increase of forty per cent in emissions
since 1990. This gives us a figure of 1079 MtCO2eq {8}. Subtract 240
from 1079 and you get 839, or 187 MtCO2eq above current emissions {9}.
This means that instead of declining by sixteen per cent since 1990, as
the government insists, the greenhouse gases for which the UK is
responsible have risen by nine per cent.

When I finished this sum I sat still for quite a long time. The UK's
entire climate change programme is based on a statistical artefact. The
only reason our pollution appears to have declined is that we have
outsourced our emissions. A fair account of our carbon emissions would
include those we import minus those we export: a balance that can only
worsen in a post-industrial economy.

So how can the government reconcile its energy policies with future
political hazard? Well the mystery has at last been solved. The key to
the puzzle is found in a minor briefing note just published by Defra. It
explains that, during the latest stage of the bill, the government
"remov[ed] the quantified limit on the use of internationally traded
credits in meeting the UK's targets" {10}. In other words we could buy
the entire cut from other countries.

Given that we are outsourcing some of our greenhouse gases, you might
think it makes sense to outsource our carbon cuts as well. But there are
three problems. The first is that we are exporting emissions that are
difficult to address and importing, through carbon trading, the easiest
and cheapest cuts.

The second is that while the emissions we export are certain and
verifiable, the cuts we buy through carbon credits are often fraudulent.
For example, as the writer Oliver Tickell documents, 96% of the carbon
credits from hydroelectric dam construction were issued after
construction had begun: the dams would have been built without the
carbon market, so no additional cuts have been achieved {11}. Around
thirty per cent of all carbon credits comes from the sale of
trifluoromethane cuts by Chinese and Indian companies making
refrigeration gases. Many of them are still producing this pollutant
only because they make so much money from cleaning it up: the carbon
market pays them 47 times more for these cuts than the gas costs to
remove {12}.

Behind these problems lurks a much greater one, which is mathematically
impossible to resolve. You can trade your way out of trouble when the
cut you are trying to achieve is a small one. But when the global cut
required to prevent two degrees of warming is sixty or eighty or ninety
per cent, then every rich nation must reduce its emissions by roughly
the same amount. Otherwise half the world would have to buy credits
equivalent to 180% of the emissions produced by the other half.

The government will have to impose some kind of cap on carbon trading.
But I bet it will be set high enough to cover any failures in domestic
policy, as measured by the rigged accounting methods civil servants use.
This means that successive governments will have no legal incentive to
change their energy policies. The carbon trading provision torpedoes the
useful content of the entire bill.

But at least the mystery has been solved, and it will no longer keep me
awake at night. Now I can focus on the real nightmares.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. The calculations are explained here:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/12/19/preparing-for-take-off/

2. Draft Climate Change Bill, as amended in public bill committee, part
29.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmbills/129/08129.11-17.html#D002b

3. Defra, 15th July 2008. Climate Change Bill: Update following House of
Commons Committee Stage.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/legislation/pdf/080715-CC-Billupdate.pdf

4. Sally Cairns and Carey Newson, September 2006. Predict and Decide:
aviation, climate change and UK policy. Environmental Change Institute,
University of Oxford, page 8.
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/energy/downloads/predictanddecide.pdf

5. Defra, July 2008. UK Climate Change Programme. Annual Report to
Parliament, July 2008, page 17.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/ukccp/pdf/ukccp-ann-report-july08.pdf

6. The figure for 1997 was 548.1 MtCO2. The provisional figure for 2007
is 543.7 MtCO2. See Table 2, Defra, July 2008, ibid.

7. Defra, July 2008. UK Climate Change Programme. Annual Report to
Parliament, July 2008, page 18.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/ukccp/pdf/ukccp-ann-report-july08.pdf

8. The 1990 figure was 770.8 MtCO2eq. Table 2, Defra, July 2008, ibid.

9. The latest figure (2006) for all ggs is 652.3 MtCO2eq. Table 2,
Defra, July 2008, ibid.

10. Defra, 15th July 2008, ibid.

11. Oliver Tickell, forthcoming. Kyoto2: how to manage the global
greenhouse. Zed Books, London.

12. ibid.

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/07/24/traded-away/


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