May 31st 2009
Kyoto Kills
T
he carbon credit trading schemes that are the primary outgrowth of the UN’s Kyoto climate treaty – a cooler climate certainly isn’t! – are a scandal in the making. And it’s not just a scam scandal like I’ve been writing about, in which people pay for credits that are never realized on the back-end; it’s a massive, global environmental and financial scandal in the making.
In a long and detailed expose in The (UK) Mail forwarded to me by Bookworm, the massive pollution created in the name of carbon credits is exposed and the scale of the problem is detailed:
‘The carbon-credits business operates rather like the financial-services industry did,’ says Kevin Smith of campaigning watchdog Carbon Trade Watch.
‘Insufficient scrutiny and transparency, dodgy projects getting money when they shouldn’t be. And we all know the consequences of what happened in financial services. But this is potentially much more serious, because unlike the Government, nature doesn’t do bailouts.’
Here’s an example of how Kyoto-spawned carbon credits really work:
On a busy trading floor in London, a polluting European company buys credits sold by a trader like European Climate Exchange (ECX), which handles about 98 percent of the carbon-emissions trading in Europe — 25 million tons of carbon traded daily. The market is expected to grow this year to about $200 billion from $160 billion, despite the recession.
Money from the credit purchase, less ECX’s commission, goes to the owners of a factory in India owned by Gujarat Fluorochemicals (GFL) that makes refrigerants like HFC23, a ton of which is equivalent to 11,700 tons of carbon, so it’s a bad boy in the anthropogenic global warming world. GFL uses the money to install new technology and clean up its act. But, says The Mail:
Our own extensive tests by an independent laboratory showed dangerous contaminants in the land and water around the factory – chemicals that match those pollutants produced by GFL. Interviews with the people living nearby reveal their livelihoods and health have been severely affected. We found that the auditors who were supposed to verify the carbon savings were paid for by GFL, a stipulation of the scheme, and they checked only for greenhouse gases, caring little about other pollution.
In a further ironic twist, we discovered that GFL used some of the money it gained from the UN to build a factory making Teflon and caustic soda –both processes are massively polluting.
Meanwhile in the UK, one of our biggest industrial companies is able to claim it has off-set its own pollution by supporting GFL, yet it remains oblivious to and unconcerned about the serious accusations being made against the Indian factory.
The money from the carbon credits were very profitable for GFL – its earnings tripled over the previous year, and it didn’t both to spend any of Europe’s largesse on other pollution control equipment. It’s hardly alone – factories throughout India, Latin America and China are also profiting from money received from carbon credits.
The Warmies’ insistence on only monitoring for reductions in greenhouse gases, ignoring the local pollution that harms locals’ health and the local environment, is Western environmental chauvinism at its worst. Convinced that global warming poses a threat to their quality of life, the West is sanctioning the trashing of everyone else’s piece of the planet so greenhouse gases can be reduced.
Human-made greenhouse gases, if they have any profound impact on the environment at all, are long-term, bit-part players in the pollutant scheme of things. Far more people suffer – as in live shorter lives, not get the sniffles – from pollutants in the ground and water, pollutants that are not only not addressed by carbon trading schemes but, as The Mail’s expose points out, are actually exacerbated.
Here’s a bit more from the article, detailing what was found in the water sample from a water well (right) near the GFL factory receiving income from carbon credit trading:
They revealed dangerously high levels of fluoride and chloride – fluoride in the water was more than twice the international acceptable limit. All the water fell well below any safe drinking standards and the soil had worryingly high levels of these chemicals.
We showed the results to environmental specialist Hiral Mehta.
‘High flouride levels cause skeletal fluorosis in which people complain about joint pain, backache and rigid bones,’ she says. ‘The crop deterioration is another impact. Your tests confirm previous investigations.’
I’m not a quick one to dole out new rights, but I do believe people should have a right to clean water. We have accomplished that in the US with the Clean Water Act (even though now it’s become a tool of expensive over-regulation), and if the carbon traders would start worrying about what they’re doing instead of just raking in dough, they could use the money generated by the trades to encourage the clean-up of all sorts of pollution, not just greenhouse gases.
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May 31st, 2009 at 10:48 am
I knew you’d do this story justice. I linked and I sent your story on to friends.