8/9/12, "Green Fail: UN Carbon Trading Scheme Increases Pollution," Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia
"Behold a green failure so colossal even Via Meadia is surprised: a UN carbon-credit trading program intended to reduce global concentrations of greenhouse gases has instead led a handful of factories in the developing world to massively increase them.
The NYT explains:
- "Greenhouse gases were rated based on their power to warm the atmosphere. The more dangerous the gas, the more that manufacturers in developing nations would be compensated as they reduced their emissions.
- But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity.
- They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, but could earn more than 11,000 credits by simply destroying a ton of an obscure waste gas normally released in the manufacturing of a widely used coolant gas. That is because that byproduct has a huge global warming effect. The credits could be sold on international markets, earning tens of millions of dollars a year.
- That incentive has driven plants in the developing world not only to increase production of the coolant gas but also to keep it high — a huge problem because the coolant itself contributes to global warming and depletes the ozone layer."
The carbon credits represent such a lucrative business ($20–40 million per year per plant, by one estimate) that some of the plants participating the scheme, located mostly in China and India, made the bulk of their profits from carbon credits alone; other plants would hit their carbon-credit subsidy limits and then shut down for the rest of the year.
Like last week’s U.S. cooking-oil-for-fuel scam, this story is so unbelievable it almost makes one doubt the greens’ superior ability to regulate complex economic and political systems."
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Among comments to above article:
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Anyone who thinks carbon trading is about carbon should think of who invented the scheme in the first place:
They were never about anything but trading as a way to make $$$."
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At Cancun 'climate summit,' Communist China threatened to spew extra poisonous gas into the atmosphere if anyone messed with the hundreds of millions in profits it's making via UN CDM deals. (near end of post) "Major U.S. financial houses, such as
- Goldman Sachs,
- Citibank, and
- JP Morgan Chase
have significant holdings in the credits linked to the gas:"
12/13/10, "‘Perverse’ CO2 Payments Send Flood of Money to China," by Mark Schapiro, Yale Environment 360
"To offset their own carbon emissions, European companies have been wildly overpaying China to incinerate a powerful greenhouse gas known as hfc 23. And in a bizarre twist, those payments have spurred the manufacture of a harmful refrigerant that is being smuggled into the U.S. and used illegally. European legislators in Brussels have discovered that the strategy they devised to combat climate change is helping subsidize the economy of their, and America’s, major global competitor — China....
More than a billion dollars, the nonprofit groups concluded, have thus far been spent on the credits. Two members of the European Parliament have demanded an inquiry by the European Commission into the “gross misuse of European consumers’ money” in the UN-administered offset system.“European consumers are paying a billion euros to buy something worth less than 100 million euros,” says Theodoros Skylakakis, a Greek member of the European Parliament, who, along with Gerbrandy, demanded that the commission begin tightening the rules governing the hfc 23 offsets in the European Trading System. “Some people are getting extremely rich because of a loophole in our Clean Development Mechanism,” says Gerbrandy.
Hfc 23 is, per pound, 11,000 times more potent than CO2 as a contributor to global warming. The European Union has adopted a carbon emissions trading scheme, and more than half of the 474 million tons of emission credits now utilized to offset companies’ emissions are involved in paying firms in China and elsewhere to destroy hfc 23. Major utilities in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, and Japan rely heavily on these emissions offsets, as do a number of U.S. companies operating in Europe, including Chevron and Conoco Philips. Major U.S. financial houses, such as
- Goldman Sachs,
- Citibank, and
- JP Morgan Chase
have significant holdings in the credits linked to the gas."...
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"Nobody in that world is critical of the process because they are all making their living off it.”
10/12/10, "A carbon trading system draws environmental skeptics," New York Times, Patricia Brett
"C.D.M. projects represent billions of dollars. The World Bank started preparing for the program 10 years ago by setting up a prototype fund worth $160 million and today it runs a whole family of funds worth $2.5 billion, the bank said in a report this year.
Yet five years after its introduction, and despite several changes, the mechanism remains open to abuse, according to many involved in climate change issues.
“The problem is that the whole mechanism is conceptually fundamentally flawed,” said Patrick McCully, executive director of International Rivers, an environmental organization in Berkeley, California, and a consultant for the U.N. Environment Program....
Estimates of carbon credit misuse globally “range from 20 percent to 66 percent.”
Yet, radical change is unlikely to happen, Mr. McCully said, because there are “lots of revolving doors in the carbon trading industry where people go from different parts of the private sector, from auditors to developers, to brokers,
- to funds like the World Bank,
- to government, and
via Instapundit
