Zombie Carbon and Sectoral Market Mechanisms

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Acknowledgments

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Isvara Foundation, which made possible the writing of this article. Thanks to Joanna Cabello, Tamra Gilbertson, and Larry Lohmann for comments and discussion.

Notes

¹For more details on these proposals, including a critique of their environmental failings, see More is Less: A Case Against Sectoral Carbon Markets (Reyes 2011b).

²The Kyoto Protocol assigned responsibility for reducing international aviation and shipping emissions to the ICAO and IMO. A number of countries and blocs have expressed frustration at the inability of these institutions to reach agreements on climate change. The E.U. has legislated for the inclusion of aviation in its ETS starting from January 2012 and is also considering including shipping that docks in the E.U. in the scheme.

³The figures quoted for Chile are a like-for-like comparison with the capacity building estimates given by the PMR—both assume sectoral crediting and exclude implementation costs.

⁴DG Climate Action Director-General Jos Delbeke; Head of Policy Coordination Peter Zapfel; and Commissioner Hedegaard's Chef de Cabinet Peter Vis were key figures in the “policy network” that promoted the creation of the E.U. ETS. For more details, see Braun 2009.

⁵For extended critiques of this position, see Gilbertson and Reyes (2009) and Lohmann (2009).

⁶The World Bank is publishing PMR background documents at: http://wbcarbonfinance.org/Router.cfm?Page=PMR&FID=61218&ItemID=61218&ft=DocLib&dl=1&ht=63206.