Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
arguing that too many permits were given out initially, there are too many excep-
tions, and their market value, which have collapsed to around ᾬ 5 per tonne of
carbon from ᾬ 15 in mid-2011 are too low to encourage effective change in many
companies. Indeed when emissions are cut by many polluting companies they sell
their excess ETS allowances to others who can the emit more carbon, so that emis-
sions are not necessarily reduced. In addition doubts have been cast on the effective-
ness of the monitoring of some opt-out projects, such as planting trees in tropical
areas as compensation for the carbon emissions, where some schemes have been
shown to be fraudulent. In any case in a world context it is worth noting that the EU
countries only account for 13 % of the greenhouse gases in the world, so globally
this will have a limited effect. This slow progress in dealing with greenhouse gases
at an international and national level has started to convince some cities that they
need to take action in reducing their emissions, recognizing that their urban envi-
ronments are some of the major sources of greenhouse gases. Such actions are being
actively considered in the C40 network of large metropolitan cities. For example,
in 2010 Tokyo became the first major urban areas to apply the cap and trade system
to 1300 of its major commercial buildings and 300 industrial facilities for its major
polluters, accounting for 40 % of the area's CO
2
emissions (UNCSD
2012
). New
York also hopes to reduce its carbon emissions from municipal buildings by 30 %
by 2017 (C40
2013
). The beginning of an even greater change started in early 2013
when the Chinese government began a cap and trade scheme for the major indus-
trial city of Shenzhen, covering the largest 630 plants with emissions (Qiu
2013
),
a scheme that is being extended to six other large centres and eventually the rest
of the country in a determined effort to reduce the life-threatening pollution levels.
The big question is whether these Chinese schemes will really have the appropriate
implementation strategies to be effective as there has been a long history of local
areas avoiding policies pronounced nationally.
58
Geo-Engineering
The costs and complexity of dealing with all these alternatives to reducing the build-
up of greenhouse gases and reducing sustainability has led to the development of
what is being described as geo-engineering, essentially ways of cooling the earth
down by engineering solutions on land and in the air (Hamilton
2013
). Some similar
engineering is already practiced in areas subject to serious hail damage, where storm
clouds that threaten to produce heavy hail are seeded with iodine particles which
reduce the chance of large hailstones developing, but this is only applied to small
areas. Among the many solutions being proposed, the simplest but very costly, is for
large machines to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or from major pollut-
ing sources and sequester it underground, a technology that has been shown to work
in pilot projects, but would require a huge investment in many plants to make a dif-
ference. Another popular suggestion is seeding clouds with sulphate particles which
would have the effect of increasing the sunlight reflected back to space. This would
