Sweden has bought 48,000 new electric mopeds for use in Ghana in a bid to offset its own carbon emissions. The e-bikes, seen as an alternative to petrol- and diesel-engined transport, will be treated as reducing Sweden’s greenhouse gas outputs.
Ever since the earliest critiques of ‘carbon trading,’ it has been apparent that the approach owes more to creative accounting than preventing or reducing climate change—not to mention, this time, the CO2 discharged manufacturing these bikes.
By pouring SEK109 million (€98 million) into the scheme, Sweden hopes to cut 250,000 hypothetical metric tons of emissions from its total energy consumption by 2030, at a cost of about SEK400 per metric ton.
According to the annual report of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, the notoriously eco-friendly government of Sweden is far off track with its climate goals. Neither the goals set for 2045 nor the interim milestones in 2030 and 2040 will be reached as things stand today.
As a response to the news, but without going into specifics, Minister of Climate and Environment Romina Pourmokhtari wrote: “The government is working on several measures to improve Sweden’s conditions for achieving EU goals.”
Yet her own government investigator, economics professor John Hassler, is critical of this kind of ‘sustainable’ bean-counting and questions the capacity and willingness of developing countries such as Ghana to prioritize measuring CO2 outputs.
