Air passengers would have often seen the fine print on a ticket indicating the tonnes of climate change causing carbon dioxide that would be emitted during the course of the flight, coaxing them to pay a small fee to ease their conscience.
The COP-26 Summit at Glasgow in November last finally agreed on a “rule-book” for two new carbon market mechanisms that were created in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Several thousands of projects were approved, and billions of tonnes of negative carbon sold to corporates in developed countries, enabling the latter to avoid mitigating emissions at home.
These countries had expected to sell patented technologies for carbon mitigation at high license fees to developing countries for CDM projects which would more than offset what they would pay for the carbon credits.
The EU abruptly announced that in future it would no longer buy carbon credits from CDM projects other than from Africa and “small island developing states” .
The Valli Moosa “Dialogue” commissioned a number of studies, including one to carefully examine specific allegations made by Western NGOs against 12 CDM projects that they claimed infringed sustainable development norms. The study, entrusted to The Energy and Resources Institute , found that in 11 cases the allegations were baseless.
The second mechanism is for large-scale country, region, or sector-wide programmes or policies, implemented cooperatively by the host and another country termed the Article 6.2 to ensure that there is no double counting of carbon credits.
Immense paperwork is involved in both mechanisms, which will add to their operating costs.