Documentary explores carbon trading business
Carbon Hunters (CBC-TV on Thursday) profiles new breed of entrepreneurs
Last Updated: Sunday, November 22, 2009 | 4:33 PM ET
The Canadian Press
A new breed of entrepreneurs is working to get rich — and save the planet.
They are called carbon hunters, which is also the title of a new documentary that airs on CBC-TV's Doc Zone on Thursday night.
It's about people who find, package and sell carbon credits, then take a cut from the sale.
Vancouver journalist and filmmaker Miro Cernetig, who wrote and directed Carbon Hunters, says the $100-billion business is big, even thought the commodity is largely invisible.
His documentary follows Shawn Burns, who earns a living putting a price on pollution. As chief executive of Vancouver-based Carbon Credit Corp., Burns finds people who are cutting back their greenhouse gas emissions, generating what is called carbon credits.
These credits come from farmers in Alberta who have stopped turning the soil before planting a new crop, and farmers in India who are using treadle pumps for irrigation to replace carbon-emitting diesel pumps.
Burns, and other carbon-hunting firms like his, package those credits and sell them to heavy industrial polluters.
"I think you can make money and save the planet at the same time. And I think you should," he said.
But not everyone sees the buying and selling of pollution as a worthy business practice.
Kevin Smith, of the environmental group Carbon Trade Watch, argues in the documentary that the so-called cap-and-trade system rewards large polluters and does little to stop global warming.
Smith said it also gives some businesses "environmental credibility they don't deserve."
Cernetig initially thought carbon trading was a fad.
"I was skeptical about it and I still am," he said in an interview.
But he said it's hard to ignore the global carbon market.
Europe has a full carbon market, currently the world's largest, while the U.S. is close to setting up its own system.
In Canada, some carbon credits are traded on the Montreal Climate Exchange.
Cernetig said the jury is still out on how viable the carbon market is over the long term.
"Nobody knows whether cap-and-trade will work," he said. "A lot of smart people think it will, a lot of smart people think it won't."
His film describes how Canadians helped create the carbon-trading model.
The idea came from Maurice Strong, former head of the then national oil company Petro-Canada and later Ontario Hydro, who suggested such a model when he was a United Nations official heading the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
Carbon Hunters is produced by Vancouver-based Force Four Entertainment.
