How Carbon Trading Undermines Positive Approaches to the Climate Crisis

Carbon trading proponents often assert that trading is merely a way of finding the most cost-effective means of reaching an emissions goal, a source of funding that leaves everything else exactly as it is. The reality is more complex. Carbon trading undermines a number of existing and proposed positive measures for tackling climate change, including the survival and spread of existing low-carbon technologies, movements against expanded fossil fuel use, and well-tested green policy measures. It also undermines public awareness and political participation as well as creates ignorance.

Related articles of interest:

• Upsetting the Offset The Political Economy of Offset Markets
• Carbon Trading How It Works and Why It Fails
• Neoliberalism and the Calculable World The Rise of Carbon Trading
• Climate Crisis: Social Science Crisis
• Cooling It! No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming
• Carbon Trading: Solution or Obstacle?
• Toward a Different Debate in Environmental Accounting The Cases of Carbon and Cost-Benefit
• Carbon Trading A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power
• The Limits of Free Market Logic
• Who are the Climate Leaders? An Article for Red Pepper
• The Carbon Neutral Myth Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins
• Carry on polluting Comment and analysis in New Scientist
• Making and Marketing Carbon Dumps Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change Mitigation