Carbon Credits: Paying For Indulgences?

For the record, I am, at the present time, neutral about going carbon neutral. Mainly because carbon-trading is currently a speculative economy and a lot of confusion and misinformation surrounds it. Carbon-trading is, in theory, quite a simple concept to grasp. However, the information about it has been poorly presented, and not without bias, that many - myself included - have wrested with the concept.

I hope to put it succinctly:

Carbon-trading is to start in 2008 under the second phase of the Kyoto protocol when businesses will be allocated a "carbon allowance".

By "carbon allowance" it is meant that a business is allowed to emit carbon-dioxide without penalty until its emissions reach a pre-determined threshold.

If the business exceeds the carbon emission threshold, it will be required to buy credits to compensate these excess emissions.

Likewise, if a business falls below its pre-determined threshold for carbon emissions then it acquires credits which it can sell to the businesses who are required to purchase carbon-credits to compensate their excess emissions.

In theory, the businesses that pollute less will generate more money than business that pollute more.

The theory is indeed sweet, as it predicts that carbon-inefficient businesses will, over the years, be required to divest its greenhouse-gas-spewing ways and modernise lest it ends up throwing millions of pounds into the wind(turbines).

The naysayers are rife. I have heard some silly opposition to carbon-trading: Carbon-trading implies possession of an unownable atmosphere. Though philosophically valid, the argument has little pragmatic value.

The most persuasive critique I have heard about carbon-trading is that it is, in essence, the same as the medieval Catholic practice of paying for indulgences (see photo, top right). Like the sinner, the excessive polluter would effectively be paying for their sins.

As such carbon-trading is not dealing with the excesses of environmental destruction, it is merely making the excess purchasable. Purchasing excess will, in turn, alleviate pressure (where in medieval Catholicism there was temporal guilt) as prescribed by the Kyoto protocol.

Carbon-trading is a compromise. It is an unwillingness to surrender the global capitalism framework and instead adapting environmental welfare to suit the framework. If this is so, the root-problem, the cause, of environmental-destruction is not solved rather it is negated.

Persisting with the Catholic indulgence analogy, carbon-neutralising may only by us temporal remittance and not a get-out-of-Hellish-eternity-free card.