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Countries Gaming Carbon Offsets May Have Dramatically Increased Emissions
schwit1 writes: Abuse of the carbon offset system may have caused emissions to increase by as much as 600 million tons. That's the finding of a new report from the Stockholm Environment Institute, which investigated carbon credits used to offset greenhouse gas emissions under a UN scheme. As one of the co-authors of the report put it, issuing these credits "was like printing money." From the article: "In some projects, chemicals known to warm the climate were created and then destroyed to claim cash. As a result of political horse trading at UN negotiations on climate change, countries like Russia and the Ukraine were allowed to create carbon credits from activities like curbing coal waste fires, or restricting gas emissions from petroleum production. Under the UN scheme, called Joint Implementation, they then were able to sell those credits to the European Union's carbon market. Companies bought the offsets rather than making their own more expensive, emissions cuts. But [the studey] says the vast majority of Russian and Ukrainian credits were in fact, "hot air" — no actual emissions were reduced.
Companies make money creating a product that no one checks to make sure it's not bogus. Imagine that, you've actually got to enforce regulations to get them to work or people will defraud others (or in this case others will willingly, and probably knowingly, buy the fraudulent credits to make more money themselves). I'm just shocked, shocked I tell you, that greed overcame the greater good.
It's a market. Which means you are guaranteed that people will game the market for their own ends.
Like all markets, as soon as it exists, someone comes along and says "how can I exploit this for my own profit", and then proceeds to do just that.
And then you'll get cartels forming to do even more of it. Because humans are greedy and dishonest as group. And have figured out that ion groups they can be even more greedy and dishonest.
If anybody didn't see this coming with this kind of thing, they're hopelessly naive. When they brought this in people were saying this is exactly what would happen.
Here's a little rule: All systems which assume humans won't be greedy selfish bastards who will cheat and manipulate the system for their own gain, are systems which are doomed to fail because they stupidly ignore human nature.
That covers all ism's ... economic, political, religious ... if your ism says "at their core humans are nice and friendly and play by the rules" ... your ism is full of crap.
This was doomed to have this outcome from the very beginning.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That's an incredib... I think I'm gonna have a heart attack and die from that surprise!
Russia and Ukraine, engaging in financial and environmental fraud? That's unpossible.
People are making money. The system is working exactly as designed. Corruption and deceit is rewarded, as always.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Wealth was redistributed from wealthy to poor countries, and that's really the point of all this right?
Anybody with two brain cells to rub together should have recognized this whole game as a giant scam. Just another way for folks to game the system to make scads of money (Cue the Dire Straits earwig). And I seem to remember that the Inventor of the Internet was involved in setting all this up.
I am shocked to hear that China and Russia would be gaming the carbon credit system.
then inevitably that something will be counterfeited.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Right, and nobody on Wall Street wouldn't do this at the drop of a hat.
Would you like to see my inventory of fine bridges I have available for sale?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Yes, I'm sure the European governments involved are all blameless in this.
Who came up with this system again?
#DeleteChrome
Enron for one in case anyone is dumb enough to defend the concept. Don't be that guy. Let it die.
Also our increasingly chubby ex vice president. Happily from what I understand the 2008 credit crash killed most of his machinations.
If any of you are wondering why the wind went out of the sails of this issue... The "Bell" tolled for it and it went into the compost bin of history.
I am a big fan of environmental reform... I just want it to be REAL and EFFECTIVE... not a fucking scam to enrich assholes or get politicians elected.
If you care about your petty political parties more than the environment than you don't care about the environment in the first place.
Real change is going to involve china and india and all the other developing countries that are going to come right after them. One after the other. That is going to require a technological change. Not carbon credits. Just cold hard barrel of a loaded gun with the hammer cocked pressed against a temple... truth. This isn't something you solve by passing a law.
The problem was created by a technological change. Without coal and fossil fuel energy sources there would be no problem. The industrial revolution created a problem.
Technology can solve problems technology creates.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Congratulations to eastern Europe for selling Hot Air to western Europe!
I came here expecting a discussion about carbon emissions resulting from NVIDIA cards.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
You better throw the new Bay Bridge into the discount bin. It's hardly worth a wooden nickle.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The only way to reduce pollution for a world population raising its standard of living is to change energy sources; carbon credits and cap & trade are nonsense that only promote fraud, even within europe their have been billions of euros of known fraud before this news item
Absolutely. It couldn't possibly be that they just want to use dirtier systems due to their lower costs. No... it's poor minorities.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
-- W.C. Fields
I'm shocked and amazed. I'm also sarcastic.
It’s like the whole thing is just one big scam.
A free market system with no regulation was gamed by the participants?
I'm SHOCKED, SHOCKED I tell you!
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
And neither does Al Gore.
Only announced tocause outrage and to hide How Americans have been cheating also.
are you evil, or do you support this program?
look directly at the camera while you answer, citizen 0xfeb928428a
-LT (my -1 Karma is better than yours)
"Cash for Clunkers". It made the absolute most out the broken window fallacy. As long as pollution is profitable, there will always be plenty to spread around.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
this reminds me of cobra-killing incentives in India.
you've actually got to enforce regulations to get them to work or people will defraud others
Pay attention. Over and over again we see government programs that shouldn't exist at all gamed by fraudsters, from welfare to education vouchers. Now you are shocked that this stupid corporate welfare is being gamed and abused? It was obvious that that was going to happen from the very start, and it should be obvious to you that the government never has a history of properly enforcing regulations to stop fraud. The policy is only to expend a tiny amount of effort to catch one or two offenders and "make an example" of them, but the others ignore this and continue collecting taxpayer money. You don't solve this problem by enforcing regulations, you solve this problem by not creating it in the first place, or admitting that it failed and shutting it down.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This is known as the cobra effect, named after the results of British occupation of India. The British did not like how many cobras were in India. They offered to pay Indians a bounty per dead cobra. Indians bred cobras and killed them. Sometimes they escaped. Eventually they were all let free once the program ended. The net result was the British paid for cobras all the while the population of them increased.
In France they paid for rats. Same effect.
This was hundreds of years ago. Why has nobody yet learned that government intervention with the free market results in disaster?
My take on things, just about everywhere it happens, the "War on _________" creates more of the __________
War on Poverty creates more poor people.
War on Drugs creates more drugs
War on Islamists wackos creates more Islamic Wackos
So, why does it surprise people that we create the very thing we wish to avoid?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
If anybody didn't see this coming with this kind of thing, they're hopelessly naive. When they brought this in people were saying this is exactly what would happen.
Doubly so since this was a United Nations scheme.
Here's an idea, let these same people, the United Nations, come up with an unpublished scheme for nuclear weapons inspections. Oh wait, we're already doing that.
Much lying about what the books really say.
Verify, then trust.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It only "failed" because everyone is not doing it. The corruption and system gaming will magically go away when everyone is forced into this wonderful scheme. After all, without everyone being forced into the game, there'll still be cash out there that is not available for hoovering up into the right pockets.
... if a system that was broken in the first place gets exploited.
We're trying to reduce emissions, not some vaguely defined savings potential,
so sell that commodity.
If you want to allow 1 Gt of CO2 emissions, then sell certificates allowing
polluters to release exactly that into the atmosphere
and not some 'reduction potential'. Then let the free market play.
And reduce the 1 Gt by a constant factor 1 each year if you want to reduce
emissions (do we?).
Very simple, but apparently politically not yet feasible... Well, it will be in the future.
People told them this would happen when they came up with the system. Government gets gamed every time is makes winners and losers, fishing quota's, water quota's etc when you use a ratio from previous use and allow them to be sold somebody will game it.
Want less emissions, make cheap energy. Want to make lots of cheap energy it's call fission the tech was commercialized 50 years ago. Build some plants the use tech that is not 40+ years old and stop trying to regulate it into the ground (anything less radioactive than the average human is not radioactive waste). Use systems like gas based primary where a leak would not be radioactive by the time it gets past the containment vessel. Use cogen where the "waste" heat is put to use like desalination and hydrogen manufacturing. Use prefab standardized SMR's with iterative designs, so your replacing/upgrading the SMR's on a regular basis not trying to keep some 40+ year old plant online.
No sir I dont like it.
Carbon trading scheme reminded me of soviet style "non cash currency" back in the day. But it is easier to accept deciet then to accept hard reality. Introduction of force into a deal will always benefit the cunning.
Have to agree.
Carbon sinks and carbon reductions are generally the wrong choice, in that you can run the plant clean while the inspectors are there and run it dirty the rest of the time.
What works is moving off of fossil fuels entirely, by putting more cash into actual built alternative energy like cheaper wind and solar that are verified and measured.
Crush the subsidies and exemptions for fossil fuels, and work on the capital need for new energy systems like wind and solar (10 year low cost loans at 1 percent for example).
I bought four solar units through our Seattle City Light program called Community Solar. Only cost me $300 per unit, instead of $7000 to get it installed on my home, since they built it as part of a new building and got economies of scale. Now I own part of the Aquarium, the Zoo, and a Low Income Apartment Complex solar panels. Capital cost is cheaper for me, and people using the Aquarium or Zoo know it's green while people living in a low income apartment know they're using green power they couldn't otherwise afford (due to the capital cost).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I have been posting about the fact that China is gaming this pretty badly, and the far left just ignores this.
That is why the west desperately needs to put in a tax on ALL GOODS (local and imported) based on where the item and parts come from.
However, we need to make sure of what the actual CO2 is. Since so many nations, esp. the worst one being China, are gaming this, we need hourly sat photos over the planet to check how much is generated and absorbed in all areas. OCO2 is just one sat. OCO3 will be added to ISS early next year. With a couple of more sats, we can see everything and make sure that nobody is cheating.
In addition, we need to normalize this properly. CO2 is tied to GDP, not ppl. In general, ppl do not make the choices where large emissions come from. It is businesses and gov. that make those choices. In addition, when population rise massively, CO2 increases very little. However, when GDP increases, CO2 increases with it, and typically at a faster pace. So, we need to set this up for emissions / $GDP (real). In addition, to keep nations from cheating, it needs to be $GDP (real), not $GDP( ppp ).
Without such a mechanism in place, all nations will have a strong incentive to cheat. WIth this in place, there is ZERO incentive, since all can see the REAL data.
Sadly, the far left will fight it because it harms China, while the far right will say that it increases tax on all goods, which is not true.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Where you pay someone else to diet for you and then wonder why you don't lose weight.
Fuck you carbon haters
This article singles out Russia and Ukraine, but a larger issue is CFC-23, a nasty greenhouse gas. It's a chemical byproduct which Chinese and Indian companies are deliberately producing in order to destroy, because the cause the credits for destroying the byproduct are worth five times the value of stuff they're nominally trying to make.
The article mentions this, but doesn't mention that CFC-23 fraud supplies HALF of all the carbon emissions credits sold on the European market.
The cheating problem is a big part of why I favor a straight up carbon tax rather than trying to get fancy with incentives and credits. Place a flat tax per ton CO2e on companies which generate or import fossil fuels or CFCs. They will pass this cost on to customers, making goods that require lots of fossil fuels cost more, so the market will determine which emissions reductions strategies are most cost-effective. You can return the tax money to the people via lower income or payroll taxes, use it to reduce the deficit, or use it to pay for green infrastructure, I don't care. One more element is needed to make this work: you need import tariffs on manufactured goods coming in from countries that don't have a comparable carbon tax. Otherwise countries that "offshore" their emissions will have an advantage.
In addition to being simpler and harder to cheat, this system is preferable from a "big gubmint is evil" perspective. Conservatives don't want a massive government bureaucracy inspecting every element of the supply chain, making sure the incentives are properly spent and the credits fairly earned, and neither do I. I just want to use their worst enemy, taxes, to make their best friend, capitalism, work to help the planet. Put a green thumb on Adam Smith's invisible hand.
I'm a free-market environmentalist. I say we need to stop hoping that greed will go away, or worse pretending it doesn't exist, and start using it as a tool.
Well the systems intent was actually sound.
CO2 IS a pollutant.
Now if I can to YOUR property and ump my rubbish on it you would be pissed, demand I clean it up, and if I don't I am sure you would sue me for damages.
We CO2 is a tad harder to pick up. So, the "fine" polluters. Trees are one way of requesting CO2, however there are often more economic uses of that land, so to encourage others to "pick up" the pollutant, they can get money from the polluter (carbon credits).
The USA already suffers from Pollution from China, so it is happening.
However, unfortunately where there is money there are criminals. The system needs better management and a system of punishment for those who game the system. But people will cheat.
The Olympics, people cheat, Tour de France, people cheat, baseball, people cheat, football , people cheat.
And in business too they cheat (Bernie Madolf anyone).
if a financial link is made to pollution, i cant think of too many ways to implement it.
guess it has to be either a payment for polluting, or a credit for not polluting.
one is called 'carbon credit', the other is called 'carbon tax'. i think the carbon tax would have been much simpler and easier to enforce, even if it were very small. but seems like it was a political hot potato, that few dared touch.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
An artificial market gives rise to bogus trading to game the system and milk it for competitive advantage. A cautionary tale for all believers in social Lysenkoism.
Testing 1 2 3 4
News at 11. Seriously, who DIDN'T see this coming?
Oh, you mean 'catastrophic man-made global warming' is going to destroy the planet?
The daily 'climate change' bullshit from 'Climatedot'.
www.wattsupwiththat.com
www.climatedepot.com
It was either a foolish and naive idea to have such a system, or a deliberate plan by groups that saw it as an opportunity to increase their wealth. The only thing that can be trusted to reduce emissions of CO2 is the invention of better technologies that are more profitable to run and distorting markets to make new technologies more profitable is not the way to do it. The only solution is to invest in applied science and roll it out as fast as possible once it is proven viable. i.e. Fusion energy, because nothing else scales fast enough and works everywhere and all the time.
better idea then jamming increasingly bigger diodes up our assets in the hope of that making any difference at all.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
In your face, my environmental econ teacher from my second to last semester in college! Did my final project for the class on this subject, with the argument that we should just defund oil subsidies and fund renewable research directly with the goal of getting total renewable cost per KWH under that of carbon emitting power sources. Got a B- because "Carbon offsets allow the market to decide, and that's better!" Even though I argued that carbon offsets could and would be gamed just like the acid rain offsets were after the laws were put in place in the US during the 90's.
Man I wish I'd had that professors email to rub this in his face. Or rather, a reliable email for any presidential candidate likely to win and sane enough to listen to reason. That we just need to get renewables to be more cost effective than carbon emitting sources directly, and THEN the market will take care of it, global warming included. Ohwell, I'm sure here in the US they'll listen to whoever pays them, errr, contributes to their campaigns the most.
False premise is the the base of your post.
CO2 is life. C is life.
Calling it pollution is a political stance, ushered in by those that created this system, a system designed to be gamed from its inception.
The fact that y our ideology lets you gobble up these lies, is irrelevant to the truth, that it has nothing to do with the environement.
Everything good in this world is in the market - Bullshit !!!!!
We can't let greed control greed - it don't work !!!!!
Australia's carbon tax, which was repealed by the worlds worst leader, is the way to go.
If our dick head prime minister said it's bad, it must be really good !!!!!
Hurt the bastards bottom line - profit, it's the only thing companies and share holders understand.
Make their products - e.g. coal fired electricity production, uneconomic and more expensive than clean, green electricity.
Make shipping products half way around the world more expensive than local production.
Make the petrochemical industries uneconomic.
Put a real cost on digging big f___ing holes in the ground.
Recycle the materials we already have in the system.
Put a real price on international air travel to stop people wastefully flying across the globe for no good reason.
Tax road transport per kilometer.
Green companies get savings from their efficiency and give increased profits.
We get cheap or free solar electricity, after paying off your solar system it is ostensibly free.
Go well
Reminds me of http://codeoffsets.com/
It's not really a false premise at all. It's all about quantities. A certain level of CO2 is OK, desirable in fact, but above that level it starts to become a problem. Same thing with water, nitrogen etc.
I think you'll find you aren't even in the right ball park of when CO2 can become a problem.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.ph...
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.ph...
For the sake of argument... how would I communicate that point to you if you're wrong, don't know it, think you're right, and are too pigheaded to realize it?
To quote Bill Nye from a creationist debate: "Evidence". His opponent, the creationist, said "Nothing" given the same question. So I'll ask you: What would it take to convince you of the same?
In this case, you'd either need to provide credible sources that show that coal power plant pollution doesn't cause illness, but keep in mind that I've posted scientific studies (scholar.google.com and academic credentials are lovely for accessing studies).
Evidence has been generally lacking in your rebuttals, which at least against me, renders them mostly ineffective. Note how when I do them when it involves a matter of 'fact', I start linking sources. Note how, when you did link sources, I did go and read them.
1. I think you're not going to understand what "for the sake of argument" or "theoretically" are going to mean in this situation and are going to refuse to go along with the thought experiment.
Disproved? Like I've said before, you have a bad rate at predicting my understanding, actions, or thoughts. That's not necessarily a bad thing, you don't really know me and I'm very much non-standard. The best description of my politics I've been labeled with is "practical minarchist".
I'll give you the last word here, sport. You're another of these sad dopes that gets conned by sophistry from much smarter people than yourself...
You do realize that such people are few and far between, right?
Am I perfect? Nothing is... but at least my mistakes and my errors are my own. You're a fucking parrot mouthing talking points. You think you understand what you're saying but you don't. its all just sounds to you.
And we're back to personal insults. Again, that's an indication of you not being able to attack my arguments. Besides, parrets understand more than you think. Note my use of supporting evidence.
So I'm going to ask, who do you think is feeding me these talking points? Why?
Personally, I wonder the same about you, now that you've brought up the idea.
Evidence:
1. The mismatch between my points and your responses. I talk about pollution, you bring up global warming. I talk about nuclear plants, you talk about how wind and solar can't replace coal/nuclear. Carbon credits I'll give you, given that it was what the thread was originaly about, and I hadn't gotten around to decrying them yet(see: not writing a book).
2. The disregard for my arguments - instead you double down, still don't provide evidence(I'll admit that I'm often lazy and will just post, but if pressed I start pulling sources).
3. The constant strawmanning and falling back on personal insults. Note how the worst I've said is that 'you're bad at predicting me'.
So, going by the theory that you're working off of talking points provided by a coal power advocate:
1. The talking points are geared towards countering a 'greenie', Not a pseudo-libertarian nuclear power advocate. In short I break the 'script.
2. I break script, you have the choice of doubling down and saying the same thing in a different way hoping that it'll change or I'll start following the script, but I don't.
3. When that doesn't work you fall back on personal insults. Given that I view this as relaxation, it doesn't work very well.
I don't read AC A human right