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Carbon Trading: A Market Approach to the Environmental Crisis Carbon Trading: A Market Approach to the Environmental Crisis
A press release from EarthNet, published by the Earth Council, July, 1997
"Carbon Trading Initiative Gets Underway"The Earth Council has entered into an agreement with the Costa Rican National Parks Foundation and the Ministry of Environment and Energy to finance the construction of the "Earth Centre" with a portion of the proceeds from future sales of "Carbon Certifiable Tradeable Offsets" (CTOs). The Earth Council has also begun working with the Chicago-based Centre Financial Products Ltd. and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to develop a Global Environmental Trading System (GETS) for the CTOs.
The Earth Centre will serve as the future headquarters of the Earth Council as well as a "gateway" to Costa Rica's national parks. In addition to financing the Earth Centre project, proceeds from CTO sales will support Costa Rica's further efforts to preserve and regenerate its tropical forests, with the specific intent of offsetting carbon emissions from cars, industry and the burning of forests.
In a speech delivered during his visit to Costa Rica last May, U.S. President Bill Clinton hailed the CTO program as an innovative mechanism for financing the reduction of greenhouse gases and investing in sustainable development. "The carbon certificates created by the Costa Rican government and United States companies provide a new way to finance these investments," Clinton said.
In June, the Earth Council co-hosted the inaugural meeting of the "Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Policy Forum" in Chicago. The event gathered 50 senior policy makers and officials from federal government, the private sector, UN organizations and NGOs, and discussed opportunities for establishing a "pilot phase" global trading market for CTOs by the year 2000.
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