A work of art is being sold as CO₂ to denounce climate greenwashing.

BarcelonaA work of art that will never be realized, intended to denounce the perversions of global CO₂ emissions trading markets. This is the premise that led artist Josep Piñol to sign before a notary this Saturday the formal renunciation of ever building his sculptural work, which was designed to be installed in Belém, the region of the Brazilian Amazon where the UN COP30 climate summit is being held this November. Had it been built, this work would have emitted 57,765 tons of CO₂, which have now been converted into carbon credits worth €1.6 million.

The artist waived the money and gave the buyer (a private collector who wishes to remain anonymous) a single symbolic ton of CO₂, because his only objective, he said, was to denounce this "avoided emissions" mechanism used in voluntary carbon markets - to account for them in his CO₂ reduction plan.₂ (mandatory in Europe for companies of a certain size). A mechanism that the artist defines as a "greenwashing ".

The performance artistic, with the signature before a notary at the Museu Tàpies in Barcelona, ​​​​has been carried out during the closing of the Museu Habitat cycle promoted by the Department of Culture of the Generalitat and led by Manuel Borja-Villel to reflect on the future of museums, which has focused specifically on the debate about the decline of the cultural sector. "It's a project that questions how capitalism and colonialism have imposed this vision that separates humans from nonhumans, from the landscape, a violent system that has been refined since the 16th century and that leads to extractivism," Borja-Villel explains to this newspaper.

The work Josep Piñol had designed was an installation crowned by one hundred bronze figures in business suits, standing on coffins that were actually CO₂ capture modules, because the sculpture was also conceived as a carbon capture machine, a technology that is still very rapid. This was "first of all out of irony and sarcasm," but also to be able to obtain financing for it, a point that was key to being able to prove that the work had gone ahead because a planned investment had been made and that, therefore, it was "avoided," as Josep Piñol explains to ARA. The fact that it was a carbon capture plant managed to attract the necessary investment, and two companies, one Canadian and one British, had committed to paying 18.5 million euros to build the facility in the Amazon.

What are 'avoided emissions'?

But instead of building it, Piñol has turned the work into "avoided emissions" by committing not to do so. That's why he had to formally register a technical standard for calculating emissions from art, which didn't exist, calculate the emissions from his work, and submit this calculation to an official independent audit, although this auditor doesn't want to be mentioned publicly. "I'm not too worried about the process being entirely scientific, because it's a poetic action. In art, we work with perceptions, and what interested us was questioning imposed narratives and, in this case, denouncing this type of greenwashing", explains Borja-Villel.

In fact, as Piñol points out, there is a whole network of certification companies that calculate the impact of a project and give it a value in tons of CO₂, so that if the project is never implemented, companies can pay for this CO₂ savings and present it as a contribution to the fight against climate change.

The CO₂ reductions sold in voluntary markets come mainly from tree-planting projects in countries in the Global South, funded by countries or companies in rich countries. But another formula is this one that calculates the emissions of a project that was supposed to be carried out but won't and converts them into carbon credits, which can be purchased to certify a CO₂ reduction in a company's climate balance sheet. "The 'avoided emissions' thing is accepted in some voluntary markets, such as if someone says they will install a photovoltaic system in Mozambique that will avoid the construction of a thermal power plant," explains carbon footprint expert Jordi Oliver, from the consultancy Inèdit, but he admits that it is a "fairly controlled" procedure.

A study by the The Guardian It revealed, for example, that 90% of the credits certified by Verra, one of the world's leading certifiers—which large companies like Disney, Shell, and Gucci use to purchase credits to help them meet their emissions reduction targets—were "ghost credits" that don't represent real carbon reductions.

In fact, this concept of avoided emissions is still a legacy of the old Kyoto Protocol, but the new Paris Agreement doesn't prohibit them, and they continue to be used. Regulated carbon markets like the European one don't allow them, but global voluntary markets do. However, they are usually projects that were supposed to be built because they were necessary and are replaced by another project with a lower ecological impact, which is funded with the money from these credits, according to expert sources. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which regulates these voluntary markets, is the most difficult to agree on in its subsequent regulations, because it also sought to avoid double counting: that these emission reductions would be counted both in the balance sheet of the country where they are carried out and in that of the country that buys them.