Global Carbon Credits Program Not Exactly Working Out Well

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our or .

| Sourced From |

Years now the United Nations has been administering a carbon credit system that allows Kyoto signatories (and, unfortunately, the US to a more limited extent) that are supposed to be reducing their carbon emissions to instead by carbon credits that are in turn supposed to fund green projects in developing nations like China to help those countries reduce their emissions.

The result?  China is taking the billions it’s getting in carbon credits and using it to fund questionable green projects created at the expense of forced relocations of millions of citizens.

Forced relocations have become common in China as people in hundreds of communities are moved to clear land for factories and other projects, provoking anger and occasionally violent protests. But what happened here is unusual in highlighting not just the human costs, but also the awkward fit between China’s authoritarian system, in which complaints of official abuse abound, and Western environmental ideals.

Those ideals produced the Clean Development Mechanism as a market-based tool under the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement to combat climate change. The CDM allows industrial nations, required by Kyoto to reduce emissions of gases blamed for global warming, to comply by paying developing nations to cut their emissions instead.

Companies thousands of miles away, such as Germany’s coal-burning, carbon dioxide-spewing RWE electric utility, accomplish this by buying carbon credits the U.N. issues to clean-energy projects like Xiaoxi’s. The proceeds are meant to make such projects more financially feasible.

As critics point out, however, if those projects were going to be built anyway, the climate doesn’t gain, but loses.

Such projects “may allow covered entities” — such as RWE — “to increase their emissions without a corresponding reduction in a developing country,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its December review.

What amazes me is that they call this system “market based.”

What’s even more amazing is just how harm we’re inflicting upon ourselves in the name of this misguided jihad against “climate change.”  We’re forcing prosperous businesses to pay a penance for their prosperity to countries like China that in turn use that penance to line their own pockets and oppress their citizens.

Climate change is enough of a “crisis,” according to the environuts, to justify this sort of extreme policy.  Yet it’s not enough of a crisis to get Barack Obama and his followers to stop living in mansions or flying private jets.  Which begs the question: Is global warming really about a dangerous crisis?  Or is it just an excuse for more government power and wealth redistribution?