News

April 30, 2008

The Carbon Credit Market Seems To Be Losing Its Way In Amongst Bureaucratic Delays and Uncertainties

By Charles Wyatt

Lord Lawson, the man who was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Energy Minister under Margaret Thatcher, seems to have lost none of his marbles. In his new book “An Appeal To Reason: A Cool Look At Global Warming”, he describes carbon trading as “doing nothing to reduce emissions, merely awarding subsidies to selected emitters”. Carbon offsetting, he says, is “a scam … it resembles nothing so much as the sale of indulgences by the medieval church”. For those not well up on medieval history, the Roman Church used to collect money in return for absolving the purchaser of his sins.

An indulgence, in Roman Catholic theology, is the full or partial remission of temporal punishment due for sins which have already been forgiven. The indulgence is granted by the church after the sinner has confessed and received absolution. And the dead weren’t beyond the reach of the church either: many were approached to pay for dead relatives and friends who were claimed to be in dire torment from which they could be released by payment of an agreed sum. “As soon as the coin in the coffer...