February 2010
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Conning the climate:
Inside the carbon-trading shell game
Mark Schapiro is the senior correspondent at the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, California, and the author of Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power. His last article for Harper’s Magazine, “Toxic Inaction,” appeared in the October 2007 issue.
No, it’s not abstract, up there in the clouds!” exclaimed Talita Beck. “I can see it. I can measure it.” We were talking about carbon emissions; Beck is an emissions assessor, a profession that did not exist a decade ago. Several times a month, she leaves her office in São Paulo, Brazil, in search of greenhouse gases—or, more precisely, to visit sites that have promised to emit less of them. Such commitments, whether made by malodorous pig farms, squalid city dumps, or rural sugarcane-processing mills, can be transformed into money by companies thousands of miles away, in Britain or Germany or Japan or any other country that has ratified the Kyoto Protocols.
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| September 2010 THE WAR ON UNHAPPINESS
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