On Tuesday, as the access to the Bella Center was severely restricted, I chose to spend some time at Klimaforum in the DGI Byen center in Copenhagen. After attending an event on deforestation in Brazil, I walked around and stumbled into an event on “False Solutions.”
The event had two keynote speakers, a woman from Brazil who had a very interesting outlook on REDD and the negative impacts it would have on her country and Nnimmo Bassey the Chair of Friends of the Earth International.
Nnimmo spoke of a great abuse of the “CDM (Clean Development Mechanism)” projects in his home country of Nigeria, and how CDM’s can provide a false solution to climate change if abused.
The abuse he spoke of was about “gas flaring” a process by which oil company’s burn the natural gas byproduct which is released when they pump oil out of the earth.
He explained that there are three potential ways to deal with the natural gas. Oil company’s can either pump the gas back down and keep only the oil, they can also capture the natural gas and sell it, or they can simply light it on fire. The latter of which is the cheapest.
Gas flaring is terrible for the environment and it’s a process which goes on 24-7-365. Nnimmo also said it’s a process that has been illegal since the 1980’s in Nigeria, however the gas company’s continue to do it in 2009.
This bring’s us to the CDM. Oil company’s in Nigeria have begun to take gas flares and use them to give power to villages. A process which the UN rewards by giving the corporations that do this carbon offsets they can sell as CDM’s. The UN overlooks the fact that the gas flares are still burning and also that gas flaring is a process which has been illegal for over 20 years in Nigeria.
Nnimmo gave an example of how he perceived this practice by saying, “if I am a bank robber and I rob 10 banks a week, if I call the UN and promise to only rob 5 a week from now on… can I have carbon credits?”
This discussion was a real eye opener because it showed the great abuses that can happen and how “solutions” to climate change can be manipulated to where they actually do no good at all.
