Examination of Witnesses (Question 39)
MR CHARLIE
KRONICK AND
MS ROBIN
WEBSTER
9 DECEMBER 2008
Q39 Chairman: Good morning and welcome.
Just so you can judge the pace of what we are going to do, we
hope to finish at about 12 o'clock because some colleagues have
got other commitments they have to go to. With regard to the last
session, is there anything you would like to say about any of
the evidence we received from Mr Eliasch and his colleagues?
Mr Kronick: What is amazing to
me about the Eliasch Review and the work that Greenpeace, and
Friends of the Earth I am sure, has done is that a lot of the
basic assumptions are the same, which is that deforestation and
forest protection is an essential part of responding to climate
change; that there are some absolute fundamental issues around
the role of offsets around what the carbon price can and cannot
deliver. I think where it starts to diverge is then how you interpret
those basic assumptions. If I was just going to make one point,
I think the points that Mr Eliasch particularly made more strongly
were that carbon is just another commodity, and if you can replace
soya beans, palm oil and timber and the revenues that accrue from
the exploitation of that commodity with a well-regulated market
in carbon and address the issue of opportunity costs the problem
will be solved, and I do not think that is true. I think it is
a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of forest protection
in climate protection. It is not a question of either/or; it is
not a question if we can just find some ways to make the delivery
of climate change If he is talking about up to 2030 I
would consider that the medium-term to long-term to make them
more economically efficient. To Greenpeace it is a completely
inadequate response to the problem.
Ms Webster: What I would add to
that is, I think you heard quite a lot over the last hour about
the robustness of frameworks, and the capacity-building periods
and "We must put these in place before we get the markets".
Yesterday I was talking to one of my colleagues who is following
the negotiations in Poznan at the moment and there is a very long
distance between the kind of economic theory you are hearing and
actually what is happening in Poznan at the moment. The distance
between politics and economic theory is absolutely huge. I think
this is where a lot of our concerns come from. You may say, "If
we had a robust carbon market; if we had these in place; if we
had decent capacity-building this could work"; but when you
are in a situation where you do notand where what you are
doing is putting in place a system where you are essentially looking
at vast amounts of money and enormous incentives to governments
to proceed very, very rapidly with thisthis is where a
lot of these dangers are going to come from. In monitoring Eliasch's
findings I think that is what we have got to think aboutthe
difference between the theories they are developing and the practice
we are going to see in politics.
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