PHA-Exchange> Climate agreements & emissions trading

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**Memorandum on emissions trading systems and international climate agreements**
now on The Corner House website, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk.


The UK Parliament's Environment Audit Committee is at present conducting an Inquiry into the "International Challenge of Climate Change: UK Leadership in the G8 and EU." 

The Corner House and two other groups, SinksWatch and Carbon Trade Watch, have submitted written evidence to the Inquiry on the feasibility of emissions trading systems as a framework for negotiating a post-Kyoto Protocol international climate agreement.

Its principal conclusions are that:

* International emissions trading systems as currently conceived are not feasible. 

* ALL trading systems in which the state allocates large quantities of free emissions rights to business are prone to a contradiction that renders them climatically ineffective. They are also unlikely to be politically sustainable due both to their inegalitarian allocation of property rights and inegalitarian structural tendencies.

* MIXED trading systems involve an additional regressive global redistribution of land, water, air, forests and other goods, which also renders them politically and environmentally unsustainable. (Mixed trading systems treat as exchangeable (a) allowances for the emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion; and (b) credits for carbon sequestration, "avoided emissions", "emissions reductions" or baseline-and-credit projects generally.)

* CONTRACTION AND CONVERGENCE involves a nominal egalitarian pre-distribution of private property rights in the earth's carbon-cycling capacity and overcomes some political difficulties associated with current trading systems. It reflects the need for effective climate action over realistic time periods. 

* But insofar as Contraction and Convergence allows mixed trading systems, it would be climatically ineffective and prone to set off conflicts over land, water, air and other goods in local areas. Moreover, insofar as it appends itself to current neoliberal regimes of commodity trade and national sovereignty, problems of inequity in practice need to be considered. 

* Numerous more effective, more efficient, and more egalitarian alternatives exist both to emissions trading systems and to the particular types of emissions trading system currently in vogue. 

* The UK government should promote a public debate on the issue, halt the rush into emissions trading systems, and redirect research and development toward more realistic, non-market-based schemes. 

* Even more important, the government must halt subsidies for continued exploration, extraction, exploitation and burning of fossil fuels. Instead, it must support and foster communities' and local authorities' existing attempts to follow low-carbon ways of life; institute deeper cuts in carbon use; respect regional decisions to exclude mining or refining of fossil fuels, power production, and so forth; and support energy efficiency, renewables, non-fossil-fuelled technologies and responsible tree-planting without trading them for continued fossil fuel extraction.

* The UK should exercise leadership both in the G8 and the EU on all these scores. As a first step, it should abjure reliance on carbon credits of type (b) and on all mixed trading schemes.

* Currently, the policy of different UK government departments is united around the objective of maximizing the flow of fossil carbon from underground to above-ground biophysical systems, whether through subsidies for fossil fuels or, indirectly, through emissions trading. Government policy must be turned around so that the work of different departments is joined up around a different objective. The ending of subsidies for fossil fuel extraction and exploitation must go hand in hand with an abandonment of emissions trading, particularly mixed trading systems, and with new support for efficiency, renewables, and community-based sustainable energy.  



**Memorandum on emissions trading systems and international climate agreements**
now on The Corner House website, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk in html and PDF (40 pages) formats with colour illustrations.

best regards

Larry Lohmann/Nicholas Hildyard/Susan Hawley/ Sarah Sexton
The Corner House
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