Shortly after Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s declaration of the Yasuní proposal, some of its official backers – such as the Clinton Global Initiative, the Wallace Global Fund and the World Resources Institute – started making noises about possibly generating carbon revenue by selling offsets and through controversial ‘debt-for-nature’ swaps.1 Former US under-secretary and lead climate negotiator Stuart Eizenstat (currently a director for greenhouse gas trading proponents Chicago Climate Exchange) began singing Yasuní’s praises.2 If the funds don’t materialize from other sources, the Correa Government may well find the lure of carbon financing too shiny to ignore. But the record of the carbon market to date has been less than sparkling.
In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, the principal city of Ankh-Morpork developed an innovative approach for dealing with crime and other antisocial phenomena. The city’s budding thieves and assassins were issued licenses and tasked with the dutiful management of theft and murder, replete with annual budgets, forward planning, quotas and quarterly targets. They were permitted to carry on looting and garrotting the citizenry, provided they could produce the necessary paperwork upon request.
