carbon craze

Back in Papua New Guinea, however, things had not gone exactly to plan. Since the first visits of white traders in the 19th century, and a fevered gold rush in the 1930s, the sheer difficulty of the country – its ravines, jungles, and history of cannibalism – has acted as a magnet to adventurers and unlikely schemes. It is as if the country’s somewhat virgin, somewhat violent quality is a guarantee that riches must lie there somewhere, and between 2008 and 2009 as many as 90 foreign “carbon developers” descended, determined to unlock the value waiting in its trees.

The international publicity courted by Somare and Conrad created a demand that Papua New Guinea could not meet. An Office of Climate Change & Carbon Trade was set uplining up along the coast to suck the air from the forests inland. Markets started selling plastic bags, to go and collect carbon. Villagers spoke of “sky money” and worried that Papua New Guinea might run out of oxygen. In early 2009, the director of the new climate change department, a schoolfriend of Conrad’s named Theo Yasause, was suspended for allegedly printing his own carbon credits. He was later imprisoned for shooting a man outside a nightclub. “The mood got out of control,” Conrad admitted.

Papua New Guinea was not the only place where early REDD experiments went wrong. In the Amazon, there were reports of “carbon cowboys” displacing communities from ancestral lands to make way for schemes being paid for by powerful corporations to offset their emissions. In