More Space for Chicanery

COP29’s perverse achievement may be to expand opportunities to offset emissions while not making progress on actually reducing emissions.

We wondered if the Subsidiary Body would get away with it.

And what the COP Presidency would do about it.

Back in October, the carbon-market booster club working on 6.4 guidelines announced that henceforth their word would be law. Actual negotiations amongst Parties had broken down repeatedly over the last 36 months. CLARA members watched with some disbelief as the members of the 6.4 Subsidiary Body proposed breaking the stalemate by declaring that the standards they’d been working on could stand as rules.

Which meant -- Parties needn’t bother themselves by coming back and sorting out any of the longstanding concerns about such basic matters as –

•  what types of activities would qualify under 6.4 -- tree planting, geoengineering, storage in products (!), and everything else under the sun or buried undergrouind;

•  what procedures are in place for actually determining that emissions were reduced or sequestration took place – what data and verification might be needed;

•  what happens if a Party fails in its attempt to increase carbon storage, and how any sanctions might be applied;

•  whether there’d be a centralized registry for credits, and whether the mechanism would hold credits, and how in general Parties were expected to manage the almost-impossible task of preventing double-counting, now that a green light is to be given to carbon marketeers.

The word that came to mind regarding this Subsidiary Body stunt was ‘chicanery’. CLARA’s media pro Don Lehr observed the October meetings and that was his conclusion. Chicanery. But we didn’t know the half of it.

I went back and looked at the Dictionary definition of ‘chicanery’, to make sure what we’d just witnessed actually met the definition of the word. Dictionary says: “chicanery is the use of trickery to achieve a political, financial, or legal purpose.”

Yes, the trifecta. Legal: as Erika Lennon from CIEL commented: this procedural stunt “bypasses States’ ability to even discuss, much less revise the standards before they go into effect.” Parties and the COP Presidency created a weakening precedent by allowing the Subsidiary Body to do this.

Financial: This decision shows that the clamor by market interests for new offset mechanisms and expanded categories of ‘removals’ – the pressure of finance and the momentum of this set of false solutions -- won out over the concerns regarding market integrity and actual mitigation ambition that numerous Parties brought forward.

CLARA has amply documented the financial chicanery associated with these carbon-offset markets over many years. And the common rejoinder about Article 6 has been, that’s why we need global rules, to put a stop to the ‘wild west’ / carbon cowboy phase of market development.

The reverse is now true. A vague text, with few accountability mechanisms, limited transparency, and bail-in mechanisms for demonstrably unfit legacy credits, doesn’t advance the stated market purpose at all. Meanwhile the tug-of-war between States and private actors in the voluntary carbon markets around the certification (and release)of credits is about to get much tighter, as countries developing new NDCs look to their AFOLU (land-use) sectors to do a lot of the heavy lifting in order to get onto so-called ‘net zero’ pathways.

One other big concern on the financial side, in this case with reference to COP29. So – if the COP goes ahead and approves the 6.4 guidance as rules binding on Parties, thereby bringing private actors into this funding and crediting mechanism – what happens to negotiations regarding the ‘New Collective Quantified Goal’ on finance, which is actually the big item at COP29 that needs to get finalized?

Negotiations get derailed – or at least diverted. Developed countries will argue that, look -- markets have already been agreed to. So the NCQG has to include private funding.

A key negotiating hurdle on finance is cleared away if 6.4 rules are approved, and rich countries can hide behind the happy talk of central bankers and offset buyers while escaping the need to make serious commitments, with grant finance, in support of non-market mechanisms.

What was that last dimension of ‘chicanery’? Oh yes. Political. And the other shoe drops. The COP Presidency and Parties’ rubber-stamping of the 6.4 rules, on the opening day, at the Opening Plenary, allows Azerbaijan to point to an outcome, a ‘win’ – no matter what else happens for the remainder of the COP.

Meanwhile, developed countries got something they wanted, which was the ability to throw enough sand in the air with the proposed market mechanisms that the overall goal of mobilizing finance in line with the core principles of the Convention gets obscured.

But it’s even more of a win for Azerbaijan. Because Azerbaijan is one of too many countries that is still charging ahead with fossil fuel development plans, still assuming that ‘net zero’ can be met through the purchase of offsets. That’s the real political deal here.

Paris Agreement Article 6, which is supposed to be about international cooperation for mitigation ambition, instead becomes an opportunity for rich countries, petrostates, plus the oil & gas and aviation industries to supposedly ‘abate’ their continued growth, through the purchase of offsets, the rules for which were never actually agreed – simply foisted on countries through a procedural trick at a COP hosted by a country with a very strong interest in these carbon-credit markets.

The term ‘greenwashing’ isn’t actually big enough to describe the dimensions of what’s going on here. Maybe by the end of this COP – maybe by the end of today, with new text coming out -- countries will pull the rules back and impose some further conditions as part of operationalizing 6.4. Then at least we’d be able to evaluate whether in fact greenwashing was happening.

But with the set of rules as currently agreed it’s not even possible to do that!

Pure chicanery.