The Financial Times:
Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.
A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.
Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.
The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a “green gold rush”, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go “carbon neutral”, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.
The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.
Instead of producing real values, companies are now printing free eco-money and doing a roaring trade in pure delusion.
On the international stage, it is possibly even worse. Last week, Norway's state broadcaster NRK showed its bias by covering the government coalition leader Labour's national congress directly on Television (no other party received this free advertising). Labour used the stage effectively, even having Kofi Annan over to pat their backs.
The big announcement from Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg was that Norway would reduce its emissions by 30 percent by 2020 and make the country "carbon neutral" by 2050 (notwithstanding the Labour party may not be in power beyond 2009, and Stoltenberg will be 91 by mid-century anyway). The proposal was very high on rhetoric and short on concrete proposals, of course, as there were no promises whatsoever on how much Norway, a major oil producer, would actually reduce its own emissions. The "carbon neutral" standing would be achieved simply by buying carbon quotas from other countries.
The major sellers of these quotas are Russia and Ukraine. The Kyoto protocol sets the baseline year to 1990, at a time when these countries had a huge, polluting heavy industry. Since then, this industry has collapsed and disappeared. These countries could not fail to reach the Kyoto target no matter how hard they tried, and thus have a possibility of making a nice profit from selling carbon quotas to countries that can then reach their emission targets without reducing the emission of greenhouse gases at all.
The carbon trade is a pure money transfer from some countries to others without having any effect whatsoever on the composition of our atmosphere, except maybe all the hot air produced by pompous politicians and the eco-scare-lobby.
10:09:33 PM 
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