Trading carbon credits misses the point

Ground Floor: The recent publication of the Stern report on climate change put the cost of our disposable consumer society into stark relief. Unchecked, the result of an increase in average temperatures will cause rising sea levels to displace around 200 million people and have an economic cost of at least 5 per cent of world GDP.

Shifting the world onto a low-carbon path could eventually show a benefit to its economy of $2.5 trillion (€1.96 trillion) a year and low-carbon technologies could be worth at least $500 billion by 2050. Once again, it's the economy, stupid!

I fretted about my own carbon-footprint yesterday as I was eating a fruit salad; one of the components was a kiwi which had travelled halfway around the world to be in my bowl. By eating it I was probably condemning future generations to live a seaboard life even though their birthplace is currently in the midlands.

I'm not flippant about the future of the planet although despairing of the fact that the non-sustainability of carbon-based fuels has been known for decades. When I was younger, my favourite reading material was sci-fi. At no time were any of the characters travelling in petrol-driven cars, pretty much everything was solar powered (or by some mysterious element which had yet to be discovered).

Clearly, though, companies that had invested a lot in carbon-based energy weren't too keen on the alternatives and later, when I switched to espionage and thrillers, a constant theme was the thwarting of solar or wind technologies by the oil industry.

While consumers often feel they are solely responsible for wiping out entire species because they accidentally threw an envelope into the rubbish instead of recycling it, politicians have come up with the concept of carbon credits. Carbon credits give countries the right to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases. If you're a big emitter you can, instead of reducing your emissions, trade them with a smaller country which doesn't emit as many.

Basically, we trade our noxious fumes for their lack of them. It's pretty much a shuffling of the deckchairs on the Titanic approach and, almost inevitably, has become a tradable market.

According to the IETA, the International Emissions Trading Association, "market transactions are driven by relative prices of emission reduction opportunities among market participants". Exactly.

At the end of last month Morgan Stanley announced that it was going to invest $3 billion into its global carbon-trading positions. Trading in the European carbon market is currently estimated to be €500 million - €1 billion.

Morgan Stanley is also setting up low-emission energy projects. According to Kate Hampton of Climate Change Capital (a specialist investment bank ), there is "scope for a long-term international market" to emerge in carbon trading.

Although there are only a few countries approved to trade emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, carbon trading volumes have increased from 10 million tons in 2004 to 600 million tons this year and are expected to be worth about $45 billion annually.

There is a part of me that is horrified by trading carbon emissions. If everyone on the planet was given a certain number of "pollution credits" the result is akin to me sitting on the M50 worrying about how many of my credits I'm using up, then phoning my mother to ask her if I can borrow some of hers. Between us we haven't actually reduced emissions, just changed their ownership.

And yet there's another part of me that recognises our ability to look at any problem and see a way of making money. The trading houses will be beefing up their carbon desks. The analysts will be producing reams of information about degrees of pollution. The traders will make big bonuses on identifying anomalies in the market. Commissions from trading carbon credits are projected to bring returns of around 7 per cent with the potential for substantially higher gains on non-standard carbon credit instruments.

Already there are more carbon trading conferences being held than anyone can reasonably manage to attend. And maybe there are companies looking at the sun and remembering it is our biggest and closest source of energy and that it has about another five billion years of output left so perhaps solar-power will yet be viable.

However, the sun could do us all in eventually too. Climate change has already happened without man's intervention. In five billion years, when it has used up its quota of hydrogen, the sun will collapse and take the Earth with it.

In the real long-term, no matter what we do, we're all toast.

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