A problem with Kyoto offsets

From Environmental Capital:

So this is the Kyoto Protocol in action: A marginally-economical chemical factory in an industrial superpower finally installs 1970s-era technology to clean up its act, and as a result makes 30 times more money by selling “carbon credits” to fight global warming than it makes by selling chemicals.

...

South Korea is considered a “developing economy,” so it wins points—and factories there earn millions—by doing things that other industrialized countries do out of habit nowadays. That seems to flunk Kyoto’s own acid test that lucrative carbon credits have to come from projects that wouldn’t otherwise make sense.

Comments

[Catherine Shelley Norman]

Mike Wara noted this in a 2006 (?) article; my coauthors and I noted (in the most recent Global Environmental Change) that many of these destruction credits actually encourage the production of stratospheric ozone depletors (still allowed in developing countries under the Montreal Protocol) so their byproducts can be destroyed for carbon credits. So the global environment loses twice, and the European carbon market pays for it. Loophole excitement!

[Patrick (G)]

I'm not sure I understand what he is saying needs a rethink...
- cleaning up nitrous oxide emissions?
- encouraging Industry in developing countries ?
- having polluters buy green credits from factories that do clean up their emissions ?

Or is it that South Korea shouldn't be considered a developing country anymore ?

[Catherine Shelley Norman]

I think it's not that any of those three are bad goals, they're just not the goals of the program that's paying for them, and that's frustrating to a lot of people. Generally these chemical byproduct cleanups could be done much more cheaply in a framework designed to address them.

The goal of the CDM program, which wasn't in the end written into the rules but was very evident in the negotiations around it, was to build cheap energy infrastructure in developing countries that were going to put in more capacity anyhow, most likely using cheap and dirty technology. The hope was that rich countries paying for it would a) be cheaper than refitting their own and b) provide something of a transfer to get more support from developing countries.

[joshua corning]

So this is the Kyoto Protocol in action: A marginally-economical chemical factory in an industrial superpower finally installs 1970s-era technology to clean up its act, and as a result makes 30 times more money by selling “carbon credits” to fight global warming than it makes by selling chemicals.

Lucky global warming from AGW has been disproved other wise i really think more success stories like this would have caused environmentalists to spontaneously combust with self righteous indignation.

Seriously how is this worse then what the EPA did when it exempted old factories from EPA rules but made new ones comply? At least the Kyoto carbon trading encouraged the old Korean plant to pollute less which is very unlike the EPA which encouraged old factories to pollute more.