Carbon trading

The UN's Rio+20 summit this week will be the target of unprecedented levels of industry activity, including lobbying and greenwash. At the same time, there is growing critique of the corporate capture of the UN - with UN agencies appearing to endorse greenwashing without any criticism.This article is also available in French.

Highways cutting through protected nature areas in Europe? Privatised forests and ugly houses in what was until now a common area of natural beauty? As long as the company building it pays to 'protect' other area in a remote place. This is what biodiversity offsets are about. Just one of the things the European Commission is proposing together with business under the name of green economy. Twenty years after the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, governments will once again converge on Rio for the third UN Summit on Sustainable Development from the 20-22 June.

The European Commission's Hugo-Maria Schally kicked off the debate arguing that the 'green economy' is about how societies use 'natural capital'. He considered this agenda to be win-win, with no-one losing out, neither rich or poor countries [watch all the speakers online here].

It is generally not a good idea to develop climate policy with the banks, whether its with a few of them or with them all. However, this was the essence of a debate which took place recently concerning a meeting scheduled between a high-level official from DG Clima and the carbon traders lobby, the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA). Peter Zapfel, a key man at the Commission responsible for the Emissions Trading System (ETS), the EU flagship climate policy, had scheduled a private briefing with IETA to discuss the Commission's planned measures to boost carbon prices. Zapfel

A new European Commission measure has opened the door to the granting of millions of euros worth of subsidies to help the continent’s largest corporate polluters with their electricity bills. This report shows how:

The goal of the summit is to assess progress made since the Earth Summit as well as address new challenges. On the agenda will be institutional reform of governance on global environment issues, which could lead to strengthening of UNEP (the French government’s proposal for a World Environment Organisation is not going to happen). The most intense discussion in the preparatory process is around the ‘Green Economy’ agenda promoted by UNEP, a concept that could replace ‘sustainable development’ as the dominant discourse.

Finance sector lobbyists are pushing the European Commission to block tighter regulation of the EU’s carbon market, a new report from Corporate Europe Observatory and Carbon Trade Watch, published today, reveals.

Plans to exclude some offsetting projects from the EU's Emissions Trading System, due to be formally approved this month, have been watered down following lobbying by big business. Corporate Europe Observatory has obtained documents which show that BusinessEurope, the International Emissions Trading Association (representing carbon traders), the chemical lobby group CEFIC and some big companies such as Enel, lobbied DG Enterprise to sabotage DG Clima's proposals. The business groups found an ally in DG Enterprise.

Emissions trading is the European Union’s flagship measure for tackling climate change, and it is failing badly. In theory it provides a cheap and efficient means to limit greenhouse gas reductions within an ever-tightening cap, but in practice it has rewarded major polluters with windfall profits, while undermining efforts to reduce pollution and achieve a more equitable and sustainable economy. The third phase of the scheme, beginning in 2013, is supposed to rectify the “teething problems” that have led to the failures to date.