Global warming carbon credit scheme has actually made emissions worse

Using carbon credits as incentives to reduce industrial pollution has actually had the effect of increasing global emissions beyond what researchers had expected.

That’s thanks, in large part, to the potential for graft, cronyism and abuse inherent in the way the United Nations negotiates with various nations that participate in the Euro-centric scheme. From the BBC Wednesday:

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.

The report, issued this week by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), calculates that the so-called Joint Implementation (JI) plan, intended to help carry out pollution goals in the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, has actually increased air pollution by a staggering amount.

“The analysis indicates that about three-quarters of JI offsets are unlikely to represent additional emissions reductions,” SEI wrote. “This suggests that the use of JI offsets may have enabled global GHG emissions to be about 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent higher than they would have been if countries had met their emissions domestically.”

In the study summary, SEI also noted that “[o]verall, 80% of ERUs [Emission Reduction Units] issued came from project types with questionable or low environmental integrity.”

The UN’s implementation scheme actually creates compelling reasons for some participating nations to increase their pollution, if it qualifies them for the credits.

“[P]erhaps worst of all are the perverse incentives the SEI report alleges these credit swaps have created for actually increasing emissions,” The American Interest observed. “According to a study released in the journal Nature Climate Change, plants in Russia ‘increased waste gas generation to unprecedented levels once they could generate credits from producing more waste gas,’ resulting in an increase in emissions as large as 600 million tons of carbon dioxide — roughly half the amount the EU’s ETS intends to reduce from 2013 to 2030.”

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