The COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference 7-18 December 2009 is one of the most debated events of our time. The need for nations to reach an agreement on measures to prevent drastic climate change is urgent, and characterized as “the last chance” to commit to joint action. The first conference of its kind was the COP1 in Berlin, 1995. An important and often mentioned conference is also the COP3 in Kyoto, 1997, which resulted in the Kyoto protocol after intense negotiations. It was the first time a protocol introduced binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions in 37 industrialized countries from 2008 – 2012. The protocol came into force in 2005. Norway has increased its emissions every year since 2005, but the government has now decided to supersede the Kyoto target by 10 per cent. This goal can not be reached without buying CO2 permits which are regulated by the concepts of Emissions Trading System (ETS) and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
ETS (also known as Cap & Trade) is a market based system where permits for a given amount of pollution get distributed by government to industry to create a financial incentive to reduce pollution. These permits can be traded amongst different actors. CDM is aimed to enable global emission reduction in the overall most cost-effective way. Critics argue that ETS and CDM allows “Business as usual” to the largest polluters , and that the mechanisms prevent rather than promote effective measures against global warming. It is alleged that the systems are simply not cost-effective, and that the same measures could be implemented to a much lower cost through already established programs. ETS has in recent time also been criticized for being a distraction, creating a false sense of progress, leaving it to the market to fix the problem and being a tool for big industry to maintain business as usual. Critics are asking if ETS could be working against its purpose, and be stalling the energy revolution? Which are the forces who are pushing this solution onto the world and what is their agenda? Is there being put too much effort into an insufficient system rather than into developing the “real” technical solutions to the energy/emissions problem?
ETS is as a technology constructed by forces in society to closely fit into our existing systems. At the same time the choices and decisions being made and/or not being made, the actions taken and/or not taken as a result of the existence of an Emissions Trading System are shaping society and nature simultaneously. ETS is a technology co-produced with nature and society. The politically- and symbolically sustaining forces in the discourse of climate change seem to be of substantial power and are in effect stalling radical social change and a real energy revolution. The Emissions Trading System is a good example of how the existing arrangements of society limit the adaptability of society. Scientists are producing more and more frightening results predicting catastrophe if the world does not act now. Institutions are facilitating the production of the same results, distributing representations of it to the public and the policy makers to give it political effect. In spite of the existence of an array of renewable energy technologies either ready for implementation or close to it, the main “fix” on the table in Copenhagen was how to agree on a fair world Emissions Trading System, so that the existing market economy which sustains the wealth of the “northern elite”, does not collapse. This project becomes dangerous if it creates a system which serves as a distraction from developing the real solutions to facilitate the energy revolution to break us out of the oil age. We could be destroying our home in the pursuit of infinite growth and material prosperity.
The US environmental activist Annie Leonard concludes in “The Story of Cap & Trade” : “You can´t solve a problem with the thinking that created it”, and in this case I agree.
