the World Bank explains emissions trading to journalists
The World Bank's Charles Cormier then gave a short presentation. Cormier accepted that carbon trade �is a very strange concept. It's a trade in emissions that won't be emitted in the future.� He added that �In itself it' s a little bit of an experiment at the global level.�
The fastest growing contributor of greenhouse gases, the airline industry, �was a little bit left out of Kyoto�, according to Cormier.
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Later on, I met Cormier at the World Bank's Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF) stall in the Carbon Expo. I asked him for an interview about Plantar, an industrial tree plantation project in Brazil funded by the PCF. Plantar is by far the largest PCF project in terms of the amount of carbon emissions the project is supposed to save. �I don't know anything about Plantar�, he replied.
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Among the protesters were two Brazilians from Minas Gerais where Plantar's plantations are. Juarez Teixera Santana of the Rural Workers Trade Union in Minas Gerais said, �We have been fighting against the destruction caused by industrial tree plantations in our country for years. Yet now we are being told that these destructive projects are �clean development� projects that protect the climate. They are neither.�
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World Bank Carbon Finance in Brazil: New funding source for industrial tree plantations
The World Bank Prototype Carbon Fund�s (PCF) Plantar project has been heavily criticized by NGOs and civil society movements ever since it first emerged as the first industrial eucalyptus tree plantation to claim carbon sink credits from the Kyoto Protocol�s Clean Development Mechanism. The Plantar project involves 23,100 hectares of monoculture eucalyptus plantations for the production of charcoal, which will be used in pig iron production. The project is one of the largest in the PCF, claiming 12.8 million credits over 21 years, more than the total amount being claimed by all 13 renewable energy projects currently listed on the PCF website. Plantar argues that without additional income from carbon credits charcoal production would be uneconomical and the company would have to switch to using imported coal. In addition to this �avoided fuel-switch� component, the project also claims credits for the carbon that will be taken up by the new plantations. According to the project documents, the revenue from these carbon sink credits are essential to securing the necessary bank loans to finance replanting.
