While leaders like Kenyan Environment Minister Kivutha Kibwana may be sincere when they express fear that poor nations will "bear the brunt of nature's wrath," they also are very eager to get their hands on funds that they believe will generated when rich countries impose limits on CO2 emissions on themselves and begin trading emissions permits. Those markets will channel funds into clean development projects in poor countries as a way to offset CO2 emissions at home. Kofi Annan predicted that "international carbon finance flows to developing countries could reach $100 billion per year." Is this plausible? Currently, total overseas development aid amounts to $80 billion per year.
Although the new funds would be devoted to projects to offset CO2 emissions, the experience of foreign aid over the past 50 years is sobering. During that period rich countries have spent more than $2.3 trillion dollars on aid and due largely the kleptocrats that have run many of the world's poorest countries, their people are poorer than ever. Unless that changes, pouring money into Africa and other developing countries to offset carbon emissions will produce neither development nor actual reductions in carbon emissions.
How to get carbon markets to operate more effectively was addressed by another panel today sponsored by the International Emissions Trading Association. Pete Carl, the director general of the European Commission's Environment Directorate, argued that "all advanced countries have to go for a 30 percent reduction in emissions by 2020" after the Kyoto Protocol commitments ended in 2012. Jonathan Pershing from the World Resources Institute pointed out that nine northeastern states in the US had signed a compact in which they pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent below their 1990 levels by 2020. And California promised to cut them back to 1990 levels by 2020. Talking with him later, Pershing said that there was no chance that the US would agree to Carl's proposed goal of a 30 percent reduction by 2020.
Brice Lalonde, former French environment minister, declared that the ultimate goal is that "anybody who takes carbon from the earth's crust has to pay to put it back." He also suggested that Europe should impose a border tax on goods coming from countries that do not limit their carbon emissions. We'll see how this brave talk stands up in the face of the fact that last month most European countries issued far more carbon emissions permits than there were actual emissions. As was pointed out, if governments don't create a shortage in emissions permits, there will be no market for them. No carbon markets mean no billions for development projects.
Tomorrow, I may look in on sessions updating the state of play in Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme and see what the World Bank has to say about sustainable development in a carbon-constrained world.
Disclosure: I gratefully acknowledge that the International Policy Network in Britain is paying my expenses to cover the conference in Nairobi. Here’s what the folks at Exxonsecrets say about IPN and here’s what they say about me.
Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
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