Real conservation is sidelined by carbon trading’s bad math.
“Recently a woman was buried alive. She died on the site [picking rubbish, killed by a dump truck offloading]. I could have saved her life.” —Sajida Khan
Sajida Khan spent her life advocating for the closure of the notorious Bisasar dump in South Africa. Opened during the apartheid era in the Indian residential area where she lived, the dump emitted toxins that devastated the community with malignant cancers, one of which tragically claimed Khan’s life in 2007.
The government agreed on numerous occasions to close the dump, but reneged on all its promises. Instead, it planned to set up a project to capture methane emitted from the dump and convert it to electricity—and to get foreign capital from the World Bank for the government’s coffers, to the tune of $15 million, by billing this as a “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM) that would reduce emissions of gases that cause climate change.
This billing is questionable. The whole rationale for CDM projects, also called “carbon offsets,” is to fund something additional to what would otherwise happen—but, for environmental and health reasons, the municipality should really capture the harmful methane effluent anyway. And the carbon offset calculations are suspicious because other harmful gases will be flared into the atmosphere during the capturing and conversion process.
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