If you offered to help someone bury their garbage in their yard, and they said they'd just rather you didn't, would you just let the matter drop? Not if you're Japan, Norway, Saudi Arabia, or Australia, and are getting something out of it. All these countries pushed their positions today in a contact group on the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) in geological formations under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). They want to be able to offset their own emissions by using CCS projects (capturing the CO2 emissions from major CO2 sources, like coal power plants, transporting it, and then injecting it into geological formations deep underground where it would be stored) in developing countries. Canada is, not surprisingly, also on board.

There are many objections to the use of the CDM to begin with, such as "additionality" of projects - whether they actually result in behaviours that wouldn't have happened without extra funding, or the use of the CDM to allow developed countries to continue to pollute. There are objections to CCS as well, such as its role in "carbon lock-in", where societies are forced to maintain their dependence upon fossil fuels, continuing to aggravate global warming, the fact that it is used primarily in enhanced oil recovery - that is, to get more oil out of the ground, or fears of the leakage of CO2 from the geological reservoirs into which it would be pumped, causing environmental degradation and making the sequestration not truly permanent. Check out the IPCC 2005 CCS report for more details.

However, it wasn't CCS or the CDM alone that were being debated, but, rather, the combination of the two. Although many countries still believe that CCS may play a major role in global mitigation efforts, there a few major reasons it should not qualify for CDM projects.

Carbon Capture and Storage projects run counter to the principles of the Clean Development Mechanism. Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol states that Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects shall assist Parties in achieving sustainable development. Sustainable development, as defined in the Brundtland Report, is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Coal-based energy production runs counter to these principles. By using coal, or any carbon-based fuel for energy production, we are setting future generations on a path of carbon lock-in. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) legitimizes and encourages coal-based energy and inhibits the urgently-needed transition to clean energy.

As the Alliance of Small Island States (a negotiating bloc, known as AOSIS) pointed out very little of the research on CCS has taken place in developing countries and the conditions under which it has been developed have been primarily for enhanced oil recovery, not long-term CO2 storage, which are fundamentally different.

Furthermore, the CDM does not currently have the capacity to adequately monitor and regulate CCS projects. Technologies for monitoring over the necessary time scale have not been sufficiently developed and liability for potentially disastrous leakage events remains unclear. Many developing countries, such as Brazil, fear that projects would be initiated, earn credits for a few years, and then be abandoned, transferring the liability for the stored CO2 (and its potential disastrous release) to the host country for the rest of the time it must be stored - that is, forever. The use of developing countries as testing grounds for this potentially risky technology within a mechanism that is supposed to promote sustainable development is unjust, and has no place in the CDM.

We created a 1-page position paper under the Canadian, US, Japanese, UK, Danish, and Indian youth delegations, outlining these points and distributed it to parties and other delegates before the meeting. When I handed it to one negotiator (from the UK or Australia, I think) and explained that all these youth delegations are against CCS in the CDM, he replied, "Oh, that's too bad." Our ideas were more in line with some of the parties, though - it was really cool to hear AOSIS and Brazil bring up all our points in their statements. Acknowledging all these concerns, the EU proposed that there be a "pilot phase" to try to work out these issues, but this suggestion would 1) be unlikely to work - the major issues of long-term liability and carbon lock-in are not going to be resolved by a trial period of a few years, and 2) strain an already overworked CDM board.

The craziest thing about it all for me is that on top of these reasons to not include CCS projects in the CDM, all these developing countries are saying, "Please, no, we don't want you to do CCS projects in our countries," and the developed countries are still trying to push it on them. It just seems wrong.