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.

Comments

Re:No shit ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had people telling me I was crazy for saying exactly what you said. I was called a 'republican shill'. But basically if you create imbalances in the market like this people *will* exploit it. There is money involved. I have seen people cheat to get a 30 cent toy. What makes people think they would not game it for millions?

either carbon credits or carbon tax

[h00manist]

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.