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Thematic Section
Carbon Trading, Climate Justice and the
Production of Ignorance: Ten examples
LARRY LOHMANN ABSTRACT Larry Lohmann briefly sketches ten processes of
ignorance-creation facilitated by the new carbon markets, focusing
particularly on the Kyoto Protocol and the European Union Emissions
Trading Scheme. He queries what the quest for climate justice
becomes once it is incorporated into a development or carbon
market framework.
KEYWORDS Western development; emissions; sustainable systems;
knowledge systems; climate politics
Introduction: development and ignorance
Of all the effect s and products of development, ignorance is one of the most pervasive
(Dove, 1983; Ferguson, 1990; Hobart, 1993; Fairhead and Leach, 1995; Lohmann,
1998a, b). Not only do the familiar accoutrements of development ^ ex port of machines
and expertise, market construction, debt finance, structural adjustment, titling, survey-
ing and mapping, dam-building, extension, rural income programmes and so forth ^
necessarily o ften ignore, displace, supplant or even eradicate knowle dge possessed by
t heir ‘target p opulations’. The practices accompanying such projects, in positing back-
ward mass es pressed in by nature, also help keep developers themselves ignorant of
others’ knowle dge. Villagers become those who ‘do not understand’ (Pigg, 1992: 507),
t hose whom it would be unfai r to dep rive of the benefits of Western development, but
above all those whose existing knowledge is i rretri evably ‘loca l’ in some sense that the
experts’ is not. That reinforces a further kind of ignorance among developers: that of
t he background conditions for their own (local) knowledge.When a development insti-
t ution invests in the dissemination of narratives, technology or experti se, that are
problematic outside its local experience, it acquires an incentive to slight the salience
not only of other contexts but also of it s own. Ignorance spreads s till further as various
institutions ^ m inistries, schools, statistical and mapping bureaus, e cono mics and
forestry departments ^ coll ectively enact a dua lism acco rding to which social ac tion is
t he implementation of disembodied theories. The denial that powe r and k nowledge
are situated and that reality might not be an object for centralized, hierarchical
management comes to form a part not only of develop ment professionals’ defense of
t heir class pos ition, but also of middle-class self-de scription ge nerally. As agency
becomes identified with planners, the disaste rs and resistances that development meets
are accordi ngly dealt with as if they were the result of either faulty theory or incorrect
Development, 2008, 51, (359–365)
r 2008 Society for International Development 1011-6370/08
www.sidint.org/development
Development (2008) 51, 359–365. doi:10.1057/dev.2008.27
implementation. The further mishaps that follow
on a re confronted in the same way, engendering
an unending cascade of failed technical and other
fixes that expand the range of both the expertis e
and the ignorance that development generates
and both the powe rs a nd the impotences that it
makes pos sible.
Critiques of development play a key part in this
drama when they are translated into quests either
for better implementation or for alternative
models, theories or frameworks.‘Damage control’,
‘su stainable development’ and ‘reform of develop-
ment institutions’ become watchwords of one
school; ‘development as if people mattered’, ‘an
alter native development’, ‘replacing the capitalist
model’ slogans of anothe r. The one pictures devel-
opment’s failu res and falsehoods as someday
c oming to an end through negative feedback
loops: development institutions are seen as
lumbering supertankers on the wrong course
but which will nonetheless respond in a linear
fashion, if slowly, to warn ing signs from instru-
ments and app roaching landmarks s o that they
can gradually swing around to the right heading.
The ot her school of critique also desires to see
development institutions as steerable vessels on a
jour ney to somewhere, but pictures the current
ones as unseaworthy and ripe for replacement.
B oth continue to obscure the localness and em-
bodie dness of planners a nd theorists, mis reading
t he untrut hs, fa ilures and unanticipated conse-
quences generated by development as theoretical
e rrors or technica l mistakes rather than str uctur-
al features of development at all levels. Effor ts to
purify development of ignorance by correcting its
‘errors’ inevitably lead to the further manufacture
of ignorance, as each falsehood that development
generates, when exp osed, can be used as raw ma-
terial for further cor rective actions reflecting el ite
claims to apply power and knowledge at a d is-
tance. Far from being a problem for development,
t his endlessly spiralling process constitutes its
normal functioning (Loh mann,1998b).
The relevance to climate politics
These conclusions bear crucially on current
climate politics. Not only have development
institutions such as the World Bank taken a promi-
nent role in climate mitigation (Redma n, 2008).
In addition, governments and activists alike
frequently claim that there is a need to address
climate and international development concerns
together, whether to head off global soc ial unres t
or to address the issue of social justice. Interna-
tional climate negotiations themselves largely
consist of a series of deals about capital flows,
trad e and other economic issues that have come
to define the development concept.Yet the histori-
cal rea lity of development is seldom considered in
this discussion (a fact which is itself part of the de-
velopment dynamic), least of all its role in the crea-
tion of wi despread ignorance ^ an increasing ly
important concept in an age of global warming.
Since the advent of the global warmi ng crisis,
institutions and practices associated with devel-
opment have played a large part in the co-produc-
tion of knowledge and ignorance about a range of
climate issues. One example is the way that both
climate change denialists and many climatolo-
gists rightly concerned about global warming
have fitted much of their scientific reasoning
about atmospheric processes to the norms of
international investment, ris k assessment and
rational choice theory (Lohmann, forthcoming).
More sig nificant for the politics of knowle dge,
however, is the way high-level international and
national policy responses to climate change have
been dominated for the last deca de by carbon trad-
ing ^ the construction of markets that us e the
earth’s carbon-cycling capacity as a commodity
(Lohmann, 2006). Just as the ex-mining executive
Hernand o de Soto pioneered, in the 1990s, the
idea that poverty could be addressed by relatively
simple legal and financial reforms turni ng the
‘dead’ assets the po or al ready possess in the
form of their houses into ‘live’ capital by t reati ng
them as collateral, or bring ing them ‘inside the
capitalist economy’ (De Soto, 2000), so, during
the same period, was born the idea that globa l
warming could be addressed by the benign and
relatively painless process of turning hitherto
‘unpriced’ greenhouse gas pollution into a trad-
able, ownable commodity. Both i deas are unten-
able, but i n a sense it is not their function
to be tenable. Rather, both ‘form part of the
Development 51(3): Thematic Section
360
e quipment for neoliberal projects’, providing a
‘mea ns of mobilizing certain facts of neoclassica l
e conomics in alliance with the planning of
development agencies, the resources of property
developers, and the political powers of local
regimes’ (Mit chell, 2007: 269) to facilitate the in-
t roduction of more extens ive powers of disposses-
sion and physical control as well as speculation,
rent-seeking and the redistribution of wealth
from poor to rich and from the future to the
present. A central as pect of this process has been
t he creation of new domains of ignorance.
How carbon trading creates ignorance:
ten examples
First, carbon market s are designed to make
government regulation of emissions cheaper by
abstracting from how the cuts are made. Corpora-
t ions that find it too e xpensive to meet their
e missions targets through their own efforts c an
buy the fu rther emissions cuts the y need from
firms that are able to overshoot their targets
cheaply and thus have a surplus of pollution cred-
its to sell. Carbon markets thus automatically
gloss over what kind of technology is used to make
t he cuts, what kind of industry is using it, and
whethe r the cut made in the place where it is
cheapest today will lead in fact t o a historical
t raje ctory of the least emissions in the future. Ye t
t hese are areas requiring the most serious
research and policy attention. How cuts are made
now, and who makes them, will have an influence
on how much can be cut in the future; the c ut
made by a factory in Tomsk may be the result of
an energy technology or way of organ izing social
life that will stimulate vastly multiplied future
c uts, whereas a quantitatively equal c ut made
by a firm in Toledo may be a routi ne efficiency
improvement that should have been made long
ago and l ea ds t o little else. Drawing attention away
from the type of i nnovation, long-term invest-
ments and broad res tructuring that are crucial to
speeding the transition away from fossil fuels,
carbon trading tends to prioritize scattered stop-
gap measures that are merely likely to delay the
struct ural change required. While emissions
t rading provides financial incentives for one class
of p olluters to innovate, it simultane ously pro-
vides financial incentives for the industries at
the very centre of the global war ming problem,
including electricity generators, chemica ls, iron
and steel, cement, oil and gas, aviation and so on,
to delay the sweeping changes they wil l have to
undertake. Because it is based on the false
assumption t hat all numerically identical emis-
sions cuts are the sa me in terms of cl imate history,
carbon trading is ill-designed to stimulate socio-
logical, political and historical inquiry into how
societies ach ieve radical change of the kind
required to handle the climate crisis. I ns tead it
reinforces t he current overemphasis among
policymakers on finding clever means of making
a fossil fuel-dependent system slightly more
efficient and of calculating timelines for achieving
numerical atmospheric concentration targets
that, without attention to social and political
processes, are purely aspirational.
Second, in de-emphasizi ng how emissions cuts
are made, and in seeking new things that might
be considered cuts, carbon trading has also
encouraged intellectuals to posit equival ences
that are scie ntifically dubious. For e xample, in
order to be able to trade cuts in carbon dioxide
for cuts in other greenhouse gases, the climatic
hazards asso ciated with each gas must be c om-
mensurated with the others. Figures for ‘CO
2
equivalences’ emanating from the Intergovern-
mental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s scienti-
fic climate advisor y panel, however, are admitted
to be gross oversimplifications: the effects and life-
times of differe nt greenhouse gases in different
parts of the atmosphere are so complex and multi-
ple that any straightforward equation is impossi-
ble. The original carbon dioxid e equivalence
figure for HFC-23 of 11,700 orig inally put forward
by the IPCC in 1995^ 1996 was revi sed in 2007 to
14,800, and the error band of thi s estimate is sti ll
an enormous plus or minus 5,000 (MacKenzie,
forthcoming). The practical effects of this over-
simplification of reality are c onsiderable: HFC-23
destruction is the large st single credit earner
in the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development
Mechanism, accounting for 67 percent of the
credits generated in 2005 and 34 percent of those
generated in 2006 (World Bank, 2007: 27).
Lohmann: Carbon Trading and Climate Justice
361
Third, if carbon markets necessarily abstract
from how emissions cuts are made, they also ab-
stract from where they are made ^ again in the
cause of maximizing cost-effectiveness. But this
abstraction syste matically obscures the signifi-
cance of place. This gap is likely to be damag ing
to social equality, since the industries most firmly
locked into fossi l f uel exploitation or use, and most
likely to be carbon pollution right buyers, tend to
have a disproportionate adverse effect on poorer
and d isadvantaged communities. Carbon tradi ng
also requires downplaying the differe nt ecological
effects that pollution can have in different biomes.
Another way ca rbon trading encourages ignor-
ance has to do with the way it discounts t he e nor-
mous dis tances between, on the one hand,
carbon-credit figures appearing on computer
screens in the urban offices of carbon consultants,
UN officials, bankers, hedge fund managers and
m inistries and, on the other, the complex politics,
biology and physics of hydroelectric dam or wind
farm sites in less industrialized countries, to-
gether with the social and technological arenas
in which flows of c arbon dioxide and other green-
house molecules are imagine d and negotiated by
scientists and technicians. British buyers of offsets
from a company that has contracted with an elite
c onservationist organization in Rajasthan to pro-
vide biogas cooking stoves for rural villagers near
a remote tiger reserve 7,000 kilometres away are
u nlikely ever t o have the chance to verify what
effects the project is having on local wood-gathering
practices or class relations, much less its climatic
effects (Ghosh and Kill, forthcomi ng).Yet they are
e ncouraged to believe that they can understand
all facto rs relevant to the transaction.
Fourt h, in a classic instance of ignoring their
own background assumptions, carbon trading
prop onents have overgeneralized the lessons of
t he sulphur dioxid e trading system that has been
in place in the US since the 1990s ^ the only pollu-
t ion market to date that has not been an unambig-
uous failure, a nd the main model for the carbon
market set up by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. The
US SO
2
market was made possible by the relative
simplicity of the regulatory task (achiev ing mod-
e st numerical cuts in a single industr ial pollutant
e mitted by a comparatively small group of
sources), the possibility of establishing clear prop-
erty rights in pollution dump s (wh ich were
handed over free to polluting corporations) and
the recent invention of continuous emissions
monitoring equipment capable to transmitting
emissions data to Washington, DC in near real-
time. Carbon traders are compelled to make the
false assumption that similar property rights
arrangements, measurement systems and enforce-
ment will be available for global carbon trading.
This assumption is demonstrably false on numer-
ous grounds. First, the sulphur dioxide trad ing
system was not complicated by the presence of
offsets, or special pollut ion-saving projects de-
signed to inject additional pollution rights into
the market; most ca rbon markets are. This is
important si nce, second, measurement of offsets
is impossible even in p rinciple (Lohmann, 2001,
2005). Third, even without taking offsets into
consideration, the measurements necessa ry to
support a credible carbon market are not being
made, even in many technically advanced Eur-
opean countries. Fourth, the highly centralized
enforcement system s that carbon trading requires
are absent in most countries of the world. Fifth,
the question o f who owns the world’s carbon
dumps, and how they gain that ownership, is be-
coming increasingly contested in a way that own-
ership of sulphur dioxide dumps in the US was
not. For instance, European governments’ free
gift of carbon pollution rights to their biggest
industrial polluters under the European Union
Emissions Trading Scheme has become an
international scandal in view of the windfall
profits being made by fossil fuel-fired power
generators under the syst em.
Fifth, most existing and contemplated carbon
markets trade both in emissions allowances and
in carbon credits produ ced by offs et projects,
which then are exchanged for each other. It is
even written into the Kyoto Protoc ol that offsets
are emissions reductions. However, this is false.
Offset projects can involve planting trees, fert iliz-
ing ocean s to stimulate carbon-gobbling algae,
burning methane from landfills to generate elec-
tricity or se tting up wind farms ^ yet none of these
things can be verified to be climatically equivalent
to each othe r or to reduc ing one’s fos sil fuel
Development 51(3): Thematic Section
362
c onsumpt ion (Lohmann, 2006). The carbon mar-
kets’ UN-approved mandate to ‘make them the
same’ (MacKenzie, forthcoming) has led to the
c reation of an enormous technocracy producing
t housands of pages of forbid ding ly technical
documents every month dedicated to refining
arcane metrics that hide this reality (Lohmann,
forthcoming).
Sixth, in a patte rn reminiscent of much that
goes und er the name of development, carbon mar-
kets are actively undermining much of the knowl-
e dge base required for tackling global warming.
One example is the lo cal low-carbon irrigation
system of Sarona village along the fast-flowing
B hilangana river in mountainous Uttaranchal, In-
dia. The system uses po rous rock dams to divert
water ge ntly into small canals while letting silt
t hrough. The water then flows into still smaller
channels fe eding terraced rice and wheat fields
t hat then d ischarge any remaining water back
into the river. This well-established, sustainable
system, like many others in the region, is now un-
der threat from a 22.5 megawatt run-of-the-river
hydropower system being built by Swasti Power
Engineering with prospe ctive Kyoto Protocol car-
bon finance. Knock-on effects would include loss
of livelihoods, migration and loss of a type of
knowledge that, ironically, will be especially valu-
able in a greenhou se world. Sarona residents were
never consulted and first learned about the project
only in 2003 when construction machines
arrived. Conflict, police brutality and ar rests
followed. In the mountainous river valleys of
Uttarancha l, some 146 similar dam projects are
prop osed or underway, with hundreds more
hydroelectric schemes seeking carbon finance
across the world (Ghosh and Kill, forthcoming).
Nor is the threat only to long-established knowl-
e dge. In February 2008, for instance, two dozen
Calif ornia environmental just ice organizations
released a strongly worded statement condemn-
ing carbon trading as a ‘charade to continue busi-
ness as usual’ that would block investment i n
c reati ng new renewable energy know-how
needed to help stop the 21 new fossil fuel-fire d
power plants plan ned for the state under its car-
bon-trading advocate governor (Los Angeles Times,
20 February 2008).
Seventh, in a pattern that is not coi ncidental,
one after another carbon trading institution can
be heard naively repeating neocolonialist and
racist shibboleths of development discour se. In a
recent NewYorker magazine, for example, Richard
Sandor, C hicago commodities trader, inventor of
interest rate derivatives and one of the principal
architects of pollution markets, is approvingly
quoted endorsing schemes to commodify native
forests in the global South for use as sinks for in-
dustrial carbon dioxide: ‘They are slashing and
burning and cutting the forests of the world. It
may be a quarte r of global warming and we ca n
get the rate to two per c ent simply by inventing a
preservation credit and making that forest have
value in other ways.Who loses when we do that?’
(New Yorker, 25 February 2008, emphasis added.)
Ignorance of this stamp, which has long been pub-
licly exposed by the patient research of networks
such as the World Rainforest Movement, damages
the struggle for a liveable climate not least
because of the way it nourishes the general
process of knowledge destruction exemplified in
the Bhilangana river project mentioned above.
Eighth, carbon offset compan ies offering the
spurious commod ity of ‘carbon neutrality’ to i ndi-
vidual consumers necessarily design their ma rket
in a way that hides the roots of climate change ^
that is, the historical overuse and skewed use of
the earth’s carbon cycling capacity by a global
minority ^ as well as other syst emic social and
technical proce sses. Offset advert ising teach es
that the climate change problem is due to, and
can be addressed by, individual consumer choices.
It encourages northern consumers to conside r
part of their emissions to be simply ‘unavoidable’
rather than as part of a pattern of energy use that
can only be tackled through political and social
organizing. It conc eptualizes global warm ing pri-
marily through complex calc ulation s of guilt over
individual ‘carbon footprints’ rather than, for
example, the s tudy of international oil politics or
the history of social movements that have
achieved structural change o f the magnitud e re-
quired to alleviate global warming (Smith, 2007).
Nin th, the cloud of jargon that is inevitable with
the highly centralized, quantification-heavy regu-
latory apparatus that constitutes carbon trading
Lohmann: Carbon Trading and Climate Justice
363
keeps even many journalists and environmental-
ists ignorant about how little governments and
t he UN system are actually doing about climate
change. Few members of the general public have
any inkling of how far the attempt to set up a giant
global carbon market has gone, much less of the
meaning of carbon market acronyms and techni-
cal t erms such as additionality, model rules, meth
panel s, supplementarity, l eakage, AAUs, CERs,
ERUs, DNAs, DOEs, NAPs, PDDs, AIEs, SBIs,
SBSTAs, COPs, MOPs, COP/MOPs and so on. This
indirect but highly effective suppression of
public discussion is precisely the opp osite of the
wide-ra nging g rassroots debate and political
mobilization that the climate crisis calls for.
Tenth, this same regulatory apparatus also
functions to recast heavy fossil fuel polluters as
protagoni sts of the climate battle whi le conceal-
ing the contributions o f ordinary communities
and progressive social movements. Under the
Kyoto Protocol and elsewhere, carb on c redits
necessarily go mainly to well-financed, high-
e mitting operations with official and UN connec-
t ions and the money t o hire professional carbon
c onsultants capable of documenting what
pollution ‘savings’are being made, but not to non-
professional actors in already low-emitting
c ontexts or soc ial movements actively working
to reduce us e of fossil fuels. As a result, heavy
polluters and local cor porate ‘bad citizens’, such
as India’s Tata Group, ITC, Birla, and Jindal, Korea’s
Hu-Chems Fine Chemical, Brazil’s Votorantim
and South Africa’s Mondi and Sasol, become stars
of heroic green narrat ives while the contributions
of villagers in places like the Bhilangana river
remain a static, unrecognized background.
Conclusion: carbon trading,
development and climate justice
Within the past few years, there has been increas-
ing talk about climate justice, not only among
grassroots activists but also among environmen-
tal organizations, policymakers, governments,
UN delegates and trade associations. However cli-
mate justice is defined, it is often assumed t hat it
is all about re-energizing or reforming develop-
ment and investment in the global South to steer
it in a low-carbon direc tion, harnessing the poten-
tial of carefully c onstructed green markets, or
making capital flow from North to South, instead
of from South to No rth, as part of a global warm-
ing mitigation package.W hat is less discussed are
the les sons gained f rom more than a half-
century’s popular and institutional experience of
what development ^ neo-libera l or otherwise,
reformed or otherw ise ^ act ually does.What does
the project of a just solution to the climate crisis
become once it is associated with or incorporated
into an economic development or carbon market
framework?
This article has sugges ted that carbon trading,
as part of the ‘climate d evelopment’ package that
has become entrenched at national and inter-
national levels over the past ten years, is organized
in ways that make it more difficult even to see
what the ce ntral issues of climate justice are,
much less to take action on them. By concealing
and undermining the knowledge and analysis
needed to respond to global warming, by
obscuring how neede d social and technological
changes will take place, by ge nerating new
and dangerous equivalences, by participating in
neo-colonia l mythologies and by befuddling
the c oncerne d middle-clas s public, carbon
markets are interfer ing with effective and demo-
cratic approaches t o global warming. Calls for
pursuing climate justice wit hin a carbon trading
framework, like other esse ntially glib calls
for combining ‘environment’ and ‘development’,
neither help clarify the problems nor provide
a use ful framework for addressing them. It
is time to bring this discussion back down to
earth.
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