Is the carbon-trade business really 'green'?

[jpak]

http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/other/10/22/22carbontrade.html

As the world grows warmer, poorer nations are helping the rich by reining in heat-trapping gases in a multibillion-dollar "carbon trade" that is outrunning its founding principles and spawning conflicts of interest and possible abuse.

Even pig manure has gone from a hot commodity to a controversial one in the two-year-old "CDM" market, in which industrial countries obliged by treaty to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions can get credit for reductions in the developing world. Less is being achieved than claimed, critics say.

Under the Clean Development Mechanism, a Japanese utility benefits from a hydroelectric dam in Vietnam, a British broker collects credits from a "green" cement plant in China and Canada buys emission reductions from Brazilian farms where methane from pig waste is now burned instead of left to rise into the atmosphere.

From 40 approved projects last December, this gas exchange has grown to 299 projects today in 35 countries. The deals totaled $4 billion in the first half of 2006, even before the biggest yet was announced Aug. 29 — a European-Asian consortium's contract to buy $1 billion worth of emission credits from two Chinese chemical plants.

<more>

[Joanne98]

1. This is very interesting. Who's in charge of oversite?