"Greenhouse gas emissions were down by 0.7 percent across the industrialized world in 2011, according to a new data analysis by Reuters. The Guardian reports on the leading causes of the drop:
“For the United States, it’s mainly a shift from coal to gas in power plants,” said Steffen Kallbekken, research director at the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo, said of the 2011 numbers.But the data shows that even though EU economic weakness and US natural gas are responsible for significant drops in emissions in the developed world, developing countries, led by China, continue to drive the global total higher.
“For Europe it’s primarily weak economic activity,” he said. Industrialised nations are trying to cut emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, to curb a rise in temperatures and avert heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels.
This underscores the disconnect between green policies and green results.
The US hasn’t checked off many items on the green wish list for domestic legislation; Europe has. But it turns out that the introduction of the euro and the subsequent economic disaster had more to do with European emissions drops than Kyoto or the shambolic carbon-trading program.
The usual suspects are headed to Bonn next week for another forlorn attempt to carve out a meaningful global climate treaty. Meanwhile in the real world, the challenge is to find a way for developing countries to continue rapid growth without driving greenhouse gasses and other pollutants to potentially dangerous levels.
But the diverging trends in greenhouse gas emissions won’t help the bureaucrats and cookie pushers in Bonn. The problem is simple. No meaningful climate treaty can get through the US Senate that doesn’t put strict limits on China and the developing world, and China will never voluntarily consent to international restrictions on the speed of its growth (nor will a large group of other developing countries). And Europe no longer has either the money to pay for grand global climate treaties or a way to pressure countries like China.
Under these conditions, some sort of grand bargain is unlikely. In the meantime, fracking continues to make the US greener every day." via Instapundit
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At Cancun 'climate summit,' Communist China threatened to spew extra poisonous hfc 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). 60 cents of every dollar spent in the global carbon market goes to China:
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.
European companies have been overpaying Chinese companies more than 70 times the cost to eliminate a potent greenhouse gas — triflouromethane, or hfc 23, a byproduct of manufacturing a refrigerant that has been banned in developed countries and is being phased out in developing ones.
In order to offset their own greenhouse gases, companies and utilities in Europe that are subject to the emission limits of the Kyoto Protocol have been paying vastly inflated prices to Chinese companies to destroy hfc 23, and in the process have been providing the Chinese government with hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue to compete against Europe’s own “green” industries.
European concern about this practice was a major source of contention during last week’s climate negotiations in Cancun, as the UN attempted to defend the integrity of the multi-billion dollar global carbon offset market. And in an odd twist, the incentives offered through the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) also appear to be stimulating production of an ozone-depleting refrigerant gas that has been landing in the U.S. black market.
That black market completes a global circuit unique to the era of climate change: From China’s industrial zones, the credits for the greenhouse gases — bought and sold as commodities on the global carbon markets — flow to European companies that need them to continue polluting at home, while the underlying ozone-depleting gas responsible for creating those credits flows to American companies seeking discounted refrigerants.
“It’s perverse,” says Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, a Dutch member of the European Parliament. “You have companies which make a lot of money by making more of this gas, and then getting paid to destroy it.”
Two European nonprofits, the Germany-based CDM Watch and the London-based Environmental Investigations Agency, kicked off the controversy when they asserted last summer that European companies were paying dramatically inflated prices for the emissions credits. Companies purchase the credits for about
- $15 a ton,
- 20 cents a ton.
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
The greenhouse gas is a byproduct of the manufacture of the refrigerant gas. And the offset credits paid to Chinese and Indian companies to eliminate the former, according to CDM Watch, have actually stimulated increased production of the latter — the ozone-depleting refrigerant hcfc 22, which is itself a potent greenhouse gas. CDM Watch has compiled records showing that companies in China and India have significantly increased production of hcfc 22 in order to receive funds to incinerate the byproduct gas, hfc 23. Some basic math suggests why: According to the Environmental Investigations Agency, the price for a ton of hcfc 22 fluctuates from $1,000 to $2,000, while that same ton can generate about $5,000 to $6,000 in hfc 23 Clean Development Mechanism credits.
The United Nations Environment Programme reports that from 2004 to 2009, production of the ozone-depleting hcfc 22 refrigerant gas grew from 15 million to 28 million tons, paralleling the evolution of the offset program intended to eliminate its byproduct, hfc 23. But Hcfc 22 itself is actually the replacement gas for the ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons that have largely been eliminated under the 1989 Montreal Protocol, a treaty signed by 196 countries to reduce depletion of atmospheric ozone. Hcfc 22 is already illegal in Europe, and is sold in the U.S. only in small quantities strictly licensed by the EPA. Developing countries have until 2030 to phase out hcfc 22 completely.
Some of the rapidly increasing production of hcfc 22 is being used in developing countries, where a growing middle class can afford for the first time to purchase products using refrigerants, such as air conditioners. But the illegal refrigerant is increasingly showing up in the U.S. black market. Over the past year, in an effort dubbed Operation Catch-22, federal investigations have led to several convictions of people smuggling hcfc 22 into the U.S. In one instance, Alex Garrido, president of an import-export firm called Kroy Corporation, was arrested after an Operation Catch-22 team caught him on surveillance tape receiving, storing, and preparing to sell illegal shipments of hcfc 22 from China. Garrido pled guilty and was sentenced in February to two-and-a-half years in prison. In another instance, the St. Louis-based Marcone Company, a wholesale supplier for hardware stores and large construction projects, was accused of violating the Clean Air Act for attempting to sell more than 220,000 pounds of the illegal refrigerant.
Thomas Land, who works in the EPA’s Office of International Negotiations — and who is involved in coordinating diplomatic and enforcement efforts for the Montreal Protocol — says that the UN-administered subsidies to eliminate hfc 23 have led to an oversupply of hcfc 22. And the increasing supply has led to a decreasing price. “Because production is subsidized, the prices are artificially low,” Land says.
This has made the illicit gas far more financially attractive to large-scale users of refrigerants in the United States than the more expensive, non-ozone-depleting refrigerants. In this way, the European offset payments are setting the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols — the two seminal environmental treaties of our time — on a collision course.
- China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is at the center of the brewing controversy.
- Overall, 60 cents of every dollar spent on the global carbon markets goes to China;
On Nov. 25, the European Commission proposed that the European Trading System (ETS) no longer accept hfc credits starting in 2013.
That proposal awaits approval by the European Parliament and the EU’s Council of Ministers. If approved, it would put the UN in another quandary: How to assess the real value of the bulk of certified emission reductions already on the market, and how to move forward when the ETS —the world’s biggest market by far for emission credits — will be refusing to accept them in three years? UN officials declared that they would study the matter, while also issuing another 20 million tons worth of credits for an hfc project, to be used by a consortium of European utilities.
The controversy over hfc’s came to a head at the climate negotiations in Cancun last week. Last Tuesday, Chen Huan, deputy director of China’s CDM Fund, the recipient of the hfc tax revenues, denounced the attempts to reduce the use of hfc credits as “irresponsible,” and attacked the calculations on which they are based as “implausible” and lacking in documentation. He threatened that Chinese industries
- would vent hfc gases without government controls if the
The Environmental Investigations Agency and CDM Watch responded by
- accusing the Chinese of holding the climate “hostage” and saying
Meanwhile, money continues to pour into the Chinese CDM Fund, and Operation Catch-22 enforcement agents continue to lay traps for the new generation of ozone gas smugglers."
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More on this topic from Probe, Int.:
- Carbon credit fraud makes its way to Liberia
- Scamming the carbon markets in ten easy steps
- It’s official: global warming solutions will destroy the environment
- Carbon Credit fraud discovered in Ukraine ($280 million to a pension fund)
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