Tipping Point (3/5): License to pollute - Carbon markets and the new economy of nature

We start to count as little kids. First our fingers, then our toys,
and finally more grown-up things – calories, money, trophies. As a
society, we now count our wealth and the CO2 that we emit. If you
can quantify something by counting it, you can turn it into a
market – right? That’s what countries around the world have tried
by setting up emission trading systems. These new markets aim to
put a price on carbon, to save emissions where it is cheapest and
benefit the global climate. But the approach has failed so far. In
the EU, the price for carbon has dropped to a low, so producers can
easily continue polluting. And they are actually making huge
profits from the permits they receive. Carbon credits are another
way for polluters to buy themself out of responsibility. These
offsets are often produced in poorer countries, in forests for
example. By turning nature into a commodity, indigenous people are
often forced to leave or change their traditional ways of life. In
this episode, we discuss the side-effects of our new carbon economy
with biologist Jutta Kill from Germany and Ivonne Yanez from Acción
Ecológica in Ecuador. Photo: CC-0, pixabay.com