A question for the International Emissions Trading Association: “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
A question for the International Emissions Trading Association: “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
An interesting discussion is taking place in the REDD world between proponents of voluntary carbon markets and proponents of what they call “sovereign carbon credits”. In this particular part of the discussion, one corner is occupied by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) and the other corner by the Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN).
Interesting to read the UNFCCC secretariat's position on this...I attended a CfRN session at an event in Singapore earlier this month where the CfRN slide deck referred to the credits with a slide titled: 'the first UNFCCC-certified credits are available'.
Of key concern is the term “ITMO” (Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes).
Of course, to perform mitigation, a scenario must exist in which some operation (1) is able to mitigate some other operation (2). To complicate matters, “outcomes” is thrown into the mix, which implies that both mitigation 1 and mitigation 2 each have a measurable outcome. Then the third complication, which is that these two supposed mitigations can be exchanged across distance and perhaps time, for the International Transfer. A fallacy exists at every juncture here. It’s a shell game; you would have better luck at sports betting.
If you could peel back India, for example, and find another sub-continent under there yet undiscovered, you might reasonably sell offsets from that land. But, there being no undiscovered lands, the entire planet was already fully involved in the carbon cycle BEFORE fossil-fuel burning began, so that ARE NO possible sources of mitigation.
Interesting to read the UNFCCC secretariat's position on this...I attended a CfRN session at an event in Singapore earlier this month where the CfRN slide deck referred to the credits with a slide titled: 'the first UNFCCC-certified credits are available'.
Of key concern is the term “ITMO” (Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes).
Of course, to perform mitigation, a scenario must exist in which some operation (1) is able to mitigate some other operation (2). To complicate matters, “outcomes” is thrown into the mix, which implies that both mitigation 1 and mitigation 2 each have a measurable outcome. Then the third complication, which is that these two supposed mitigations can be exchanged across distance and perhaps time, for the International Transfer. A fallacy exists at every juncture here. It’s a shell game; you would have better luck at sports betting.
If you could peel back India, for example, and find another sub-continent under there yet undiscovered, you might reasonably sell offsets from that land. But, there being no undiscovered lands, the entire planet was already fully involved in the carbon cycle BEFORE fossil-fuel burning began, so that ARE NO possible sources of mitigation.