Skip to content
Menu
REDD-Monitor
  • Start here
  • About REDD-Monitor
  • REDD: An introduction
  • Contact
REDD-Monitor

REDD-Monitor’s “incredibly important perspective” on the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets: “The Taskforce is madness”!

Posted on 27 November 202027 November 2020
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Email this to someone
email

By Chris Lang

Earlier this month, the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets published a 98-page “Consultation Document”. Phoebe Cooke, a journalist with DeSmog UK, got in touch with REDD-Monitor for a comment on the document for an article she was writing.

Cooke’s article notes that the Taskforce was set up by the Institute of International Finance (IIF) and its members include BP, Shell, and easyJet. It’s also loaded with carbon traders (South Pole, Natural Capital Partners, Verra, First Climate, EcoAct, ClimateCare, IHS Markit), investment bankers (Bank of America, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, Macquarie, Standard Chartered, BlackRock), and multinational corporations (RWE, Unilever, Nestlé, Maersk, Boeing, Bunge, Etihad, Siemens, Tata Steel, Total).

The Taskforce was initiated by Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and ex-Governor of the Bank of England. The point of the Taskforce is to “significantly scale up voluntary carbon markets and ensure they are transparent, verifiable and robust”. The “Consultation Document” mentions the word “offset” 238 times. “Fossil-fuel” appears once.

As well as REDD-Monitor, Cooke’s article includes comments from Greenpeace UK’s Doug Parr, and Gilles Dufrasne at Carbon Market Watch. Parr pointed out that offsetting is a dangerous distraction and added that, “Offsetting is not an alternative to reducing carbon emissions — which is the real work we need to do to try to prevent catastrophic climate change, by cutting fossil fuel production.”

Here’s the bit of the article quoting me:

Chris Lang, of environmental watchdog Redd+ Monitor, described the carbon market initiatives as a “dangerous distraction from the need to leave fossil fuels in the ground”. “The Taskforce is madness, from the perspective of addressing the climate crisis,” he told DeSmog.

“Aiming for ‘net zero’ by 2050 is a cop out. We need to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels starting yesterday. Setting a ‘deadline’ 30 years in the future is meaningless in the face of the climate crisis.”

In response to the DeSmog article, Thomas Lingard of Unilever tweeted: “As taskforce member please can I urge all those quoted in this article to feed these incredibly important perspectives into the consultation.”

Obviously, REDD-Monitor is delighted that a Taskforce member considers the comment that “The Taskforce is madness” to be an “incredibly important perspective”.

Lingard also suggested “a connect next week on the taskforce”. Which is funny. The only worthwhile thing the Taskforce could do is close down with the final message that carbon markets should be scrapped because they make climate change worse.

Here, for the record, is the full comment that I sent to DeSmog’s Phoebe Cooke (obviously, I didn’t expect her to use the whole thing!):

The Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Markets is madness, from the perspective of addressing the climate crisis. The climate crisis is already happening. What we urgently need to do is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Carbon markets are a way of allowing emissions from burning fossil fuels to continue. Carbon markets were not created to reduce emissions. They were created to allow the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual – something we’re seeing with the oil industry’s interest in offsetting its emissions through Nature Based Solutions. All of this is just a way of delaying meaningful action on addressing the climate crisis.

So from the perspective of the fossil fuel industry the Taskforce makes perfect sense. Like all carbon market initiatives it’s a dangerous distraction from the need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Which is precisely why carbon trading is so attractive to polluting industry – and so dangerous for the climate.

Aiming for “net zero” by 2050 is a cop out. We need to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels starting yesterday. Setting a “deadline” thirty years in the future is meaningless in the face of the climate crisis.

Carbon markets have never delivered emissions reductions, not least because that’s not what they are intended to do. Carbon markets may reduce emissions in one place, but by design they allow emissions to continue somewhere else. A large scale carbon market is precisely what we don’t need to address the climate crisis. There is no way of “fixing” carbon markets. We need to scrap carbon markets.

 

Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Email this to someone
email

Related

3 thoughts on “REDD-Monitor’s “incredibly important perspective” on the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets: “The Taskforce is madness”!”

  1. alex kunkel says:
    28 November 2020 at 12:21 am

    cool thing!!!
    Hi Chris, just wiriting an article on coffee JAB/JDE giant. They have a special structure to gather money from other investors, the JAB Consumer Fund. Behind that are big finance companies like
    Blackrock… Some of them I dont know exactly. May I send you the list and you give a shortcut explanation? Like this “Temasek, Singapur: Palmoil-Logging, Landgrabbing, Climate Crimes”.
    Greets
    Alex

  2. fred bloke says:
    28 November 2020 at 11:38 pm

    The only way carbon markets could work would be to rapidly increase the price of burning carbon until the ppm
    started to stabilize, that would be $$$ and political suicide.

  3. Chris Lang says:
    29 November 2020 at 10:39 pm

    @alex kunkel – Thanks! Yes, send the list along and I’ll see what I can do…

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

SUBSCRIBE!

Enter your email address to receive notification of new posts.

Recent themes
Natural Climate Solutions
WWF's conservation scandals
Aviation and offsetting
Conservation Watch

REDDisms

“Deforestation accounts for over 20% of all carbon emissions. That’s a big number. That’s more than all the cars, trains, planes and ships in the world combined. It’s low-hanging fruit. If we can stop deforestation, we can find a scalable solution to climate change and we can use that as a way of bridging the gap between what it takes to do other changes that we need to do in our behaviour.”

— Jeff Horowitz, Avoided Deforestation Partners, June 2014

Recent Posts

  • Capitalism is driving us to disaster
  • How REDD greenwashes Glencore’s coal mining operations in Colombia
  • The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading
  • Book review: “Forest Conservation and Sustainability in Indonesia” by Bernice Maxton-Lee
  • Plant for the Planet: Felix Finkbeiner’s fake forests

Recent Comments

  • st john on Bar Works: The return of Renwick Haddow
  • Gordon Emery on Capitalism is driving us to disaster
  • Jonathan Price (@B3CPres) on Capitalism is driving us to disaster
  • Mrs Linda Knight on Savraj Gata-Aura sentenced to four years in prison for his role in the Bar Works investment scam
  • Chris Lang on Bar Works: The return of Renwick Haddow

Issues and Organisations

AB 32 Boiler rooms Bonn California Can REDD save ... ? Carbon accounting Carbon Credits Carbon Offsets CDM Conservation-Watch Conservation International COP21 Paris Deforestation FCPF FERN Financing REDD Forest definition Fossil fuels FPP Friends of the Earth FSC Greenpeace Guest post ICAO Illegal logging Indigenous Peoples Natural Climate Solutions NGO statements Plantations Poznan R-M interview REDD and rights REDD in the news Risk RSPO-Watch Safeguards Sengwer Sustainable Forest Management The Nature Conservancy Ulu Masen UN-REDD UNFCCC World Bank WRM WWF

Countries

Australia Bolivia Brazil Cambodia Cameroon Canada China Colombia Congo Basin region DR Congo Ecuador El Salvador European Union France Germany Guatemala Guyana Honduras India Indonesia Kenya Laos Luxembourg Madagascar Malaysia Mexico Nicaragua Nigeria Norway Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Republic of Congo Sweden Tanzania Thailand Uganda UK Uncategorized United Arab Emirates USA Vietnam West Papua
©2021 REDD-Monitor | Powered by WordPress and Superb Themes!