Interview with Com Ciencia magazine

Pollution trading, a gimmick originally invented to save large US corporations money in making small cuts in emissions of easily-measurable substances over the short term, is inappropriate and unworkable when applied to the severe, scientifically and politically complex global problem of climate change. Subsidising the worst polluters in both North and South, carbon trading is merely delaying the actions required.

Carbon trading is also riven by an insoluble scientific dilemma. On the one hand, carbon traders aim at creating a flow of cheap, standardized credits. Yet the harder they try to bring about this flow, the less believable their carbon credits become, and the less credible the market.

Addressing the climate crisis is not a matter of trying to find low-cost technical fixes for big business. Rather, it requires attention to issues of power imbalances, rights, land, capital and social change. It's a problem for everybody, not just scientists, economists and government officials.

(A Portuguese version of this interview is appended to the English one.)

Related articles of interest:

• Toward a Different Debate in Environmental Accounting The Cases of Carbon and Cost-Benefit
• Privatization of the Air Turns Lethal Pay-to-Pollute Principle Kills South African Activist Sajida Khan
• Uncertainty Markets and Carbon Markets Variations on Polanyian Themes
• Carbon Trading How It Works and Why It Fails
• Carbon Trading A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power
• Making and Marketing Carbon Dumps Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change Mitigation
• Missing the Point of Development Talk Reflections for Activists
• Whose Voice Is Speaking? How Opinion Polls and Cost-Benefit Analysis Synthesize New “Publics”