Shamelessly lifted from this excellent blog: http://palosverdesblog.blogspot.com/

From a December NY Times front page article:

(I can't determine whether any of this is paraphrased, because I will not subscribe to the NYT website in order to search archives.)

QUZHOU, China — Foreign businesses have embraced an obscure United Nations-backed program as a favored approach to limiting global warming. But the early efforts have revealed some hidden problems.

Under the program, businesses in wealthier nations pay to reduce pollution in poorer ones as a way of staying within their government limits for emitting climate-changing gases like carbon dioxide.

Among their targets is a large rusting chemical factory here in China. Its emissions of just one waste gas contribute as much to global warming each year as the emissions from a million American cars, each driven 12,000 miles. Holy smokes!!

Cleaning up this factory will require an incinerator that costs $5 million, far less than the cost of cleaning up so many cars, or other sources of pollution in Europe and Japan.

Yet the foreign companies will pay roughly $500 million for the incinerator, 100 times what it cost. The high price is set in a European-based market in carbon dioxide emissions. Because the waste gas has a far more powerful effect on global warming than carbon dioxide emissions, the foreign businesses must pay a premium far beyond the cost of the actual cleanup.

The huge profits of $495 million will be divided by the chemical factory’s owners, a Chinese government energy fund, and the consultants and bankers who put together the deal from a mansion in London.

European and Japanese companies which are paying roughly $3 billion for credits this year, complain that it mostly enriches a few bankers, consultants and factory owners.

As word of deals like this has spread, everyone involved in the nascent business is searching for other such potential jackpots in developing countries.


There you have it. What more needs to be said?

--97T--