Carbon Markets: Trading with our Future offers a rare and damning glimpse into the collapsing markets from the vantage of some of the leading architects and designers of climate finance.
In the film Tim Yeo, Chair of the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Select Committee acknowledges that the carbon markets have never capped carbon emissions: “In the first four years of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme the cap didn’t really reduce emissions at all. Even phase two the cap hasn’t had much impact.”
Other market mechanisms such as Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) are leading to serious human rights violations and land grabs. In response to killings in Honduras linked to a CDM project there, Martin Hession, Chairman of the CDM Executive Board and former Head of Global Carbon Markets at UK’s Defra says: “I don’t think the CDM can take on the job of being a human rights commission [or] resolving every social problem in every country.”