Image from: made-in-china.com click for details
Posted on 08/25/2010 10:41:38 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
A UN board could rein in $2.7 billion carbon market to prevent the double dipping of CFC manufacturing incentives and carbon credit sales, as discovered to be happening in China.
Guest post by Ric Werme
Image from: made-in-china.com click for details
Excerpts from: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100821/ap_on_bi_ge/un_un_carbon_cutting_scheme# reports
UNITED NATIONS – An obscure U.N. board that oversees a $2.7 billion market intended to cut heat-trapping gases has agreed to take steps that could lead to it eventually reining in what European and U.S. environmentalists are calling a huge scam.
At a meeting this week that ended Friday, the executive board of the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism said that five chemical plants in China would no longer qualify for funding as so-called carbon offset credits until the environmentalists’ claims can be further investigated.
This is coupled with the production of the “ozone friendly” refrigerant HCFC-22 (chlorodifluoromethane). A byproduct of production is another gas, HFC-23 (trifluoromethane) which has been determined to be 11,700 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Not only are the manufacturers able to sell carbon credits for producing HCFC-22, they can also sell “certified emission reductions” (CERs) for destroying HFC-23, to the tune of about $100,000 per ton!
Not surprisingly:
“The evidence is overwhelming that manufacturers are creating excess HFC-23 simply to destroy it and earn carbon credits,” said Mark Roberts of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a research and advocacy group. “This is the biggest environmental scandal in history and makes an absolute mockery of international efforts to combat climate change.
This is not a new problem. While looking for a decent image, I came across the 2007 article http://www.carbon-financeonline.com/index.cfm?section=features&action=view&id=10420 which notes:
The creation of carbon credits from the destruction of the potent greenhouse gas (GHG) trifluoromethane (HFC23) has been one of the most controversial issues during the early life of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
A by-product of the manufacture of the refrigerant HCFC22, many viewed HFC23 destruction projects as a cheap money-maker for a small number of industrial sites in a handful of developing countries that provided little discernible sustainable development benefit to those countries.
With CERs currently selling for €11 ($14)/t, the profit margins from HFC23 destruction projects are obvious. For example, Indian chemicals firm SRF, which operates one of the 10 registered HFC23 destruction projects, said in a recently released earnings report that it has, so far, sold 3.65 million CERs in the 2006-07 financial year for Rs4,050 million ($96 million). The sale of CERs has become a significant revenue stream for the company, second only to its technical textiles business and ahead of its chemicals and packaging units.
Current state-of-the-art production facilities, such as DuPont’s Louisville Works in the US, have HFC23 generation rates as low as 1.37%, so there may be some scope for the volume of CERs from new production, if allowed, to be considerably less than from existing plants.
DuPont is not involved in HFC23 destruction in the CDM market. But it has destroyed HFC23 as part of a set of 1991 internal goals to reduce GHG emissions. “We were doing this way before the carbon market,” says Mack McFarland, an environmental fellow with DuPont Fluoroproducts in Wilmington, Delaware.
That article has a graphic…
…that shows HFCs as half the CDM market in the first 3 quarters of 2006.
In 2008, http://blueskieschina.com/mambo/content/view/257/90/ noted
While China has long been ahead of India in terms of potential carbon credits generated by registered projects, India has dominated actual CER issue since January 2006.
But a bumper start to 2008 for China saw over 10 million CERs issued in January, accounting for over 90% of all CERs issued that month (chart 2). These credits, stemming from just four chemical plant HFC23 destruction projects, pushed China into first place in the issued carbon credit leaderboard for the first time since the CDM programme began.
There’s a lot more background at http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Clean_Development_Mechanism_and_HFC-23_destruction
I guess it’s too late to invest in new HCFC-22 chemical plants.
fyi
takes a scamster to know one..I guess...
“Carbon credits”
####
...snicker...
Are there actual intelligent human beings honestly buying into that fraud?
Environmentalists are well qualified on the subject of scams.
Non-stop scammin’! And this scheme is probably just the tip of the iceberg!
IOWs it has no affect on the temperature of the planet at all.
No Smoking Hot Spot (The Australian)
That article takes Greenhouse Theory at face value and by the criterion set up in the theory itself finds no evidence of warming on the basis of greenhouse effect.
The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
Harvard astrophysicist dismisses AGW theory, challenges peers to 'take back climate science'
It Is Impossible For A 100 ppm Increase In Atmospheric CO2 Concentration To Cause Global Warming
Those four articles each show that Greenhouse Theory has no basis in reality due to a direct conflict with the known laws of physics. No wonder the smoking gun "hotspot" can't be found.
Claim That Sea Level Is Rising Is a Total Fraud
That article pretty much puts the kibosh on any serious trend of planetary warming from any cause. Think about it. If there is absolutely no sign at all of rising sea levels how could the planet be warming? Beyond the centuries long slow warming of the earth and rising of the seas of course. But that is only a few millimeters per century due to the inter-glacial period we are in.
Thanks Ernest.
Idiot Liberals can’t realize that when you create an artificial market you create plenty of opportunity for scams within that market.
Thanks for the ping!
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