The BBC and the Guardian have some articles that find holes in some potentially useful tools for reducing carbon emissions: Carbon trading and the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol.
Here are the BBC stories.
Carbon trade scheme 'is failing'
June 5 -- The EU's carbon trading scheme has increased electricity bills, given a windfall to power companies and failed to cut greenhouse gases, it is claimed.
An investigation by BBC Radio 4's File on 4 programme has found that after two and half years the scheme has yet to cut in carbon dioxide emissions.
The consumer body Energywatch said customers are getting a raw deal.
But a government minister has promised that the scheme's next phase will be a big improvement.
June 5 -- Europeans are paying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in China as part of the continent's efforts to tackle global warming.Power generators and other polluting firms are buying "carbon credits" from countries such as China to offset their own emissions.
But where the Chinese gain by cleaning up their factories and selling the resulting credits, European consumers lose as the costs are often passed on in the form of higher energy bills. ...
Critics say the system is not monitored properly and often does not lead to any actual emission reductions.
Yang Ailun, a spokeswoman for Greenpeace in China, said there have been cases in China where low-emission factories have been built solely to earn money from carbon credit sales.
"The firms involved were not originally planning to build these factories, they were just exploiting the system," she said.
The result is that the world gets more, not less greenhouse gas emissions.
But despite these problems, even the Greenpeace spokeswoman admitted that carbon trading is a valuable tool in reducing emissions.
"It's using a business model to solve an environmental problem," she said.
"But the fact that people make money from these projects does not undermine the validity of the system."
From the Guardian:
Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved
June 2 -- The CDM is one of two global markets which have been set up in the wake of the Kyoto climate summit in 1997. Both finally started work in January 2005. Although both were launched with the claim that they would reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, evidence collected by the Guardian suggests that thus far, both markets have earned fortunes for speculators and for some of the companies which produce most greenhouse gases and yet, through a combination of teething troubles and multiple forms of malpractice and possibly fraud, they have delivered little or no benefit for the environment. ...
Until July 2006, the CDM executive board did not reject a single project. It was short of staff, short of experts and short of funds. So it relied on the specialist companies to get it right. Since those specialist companies are hired by the projects who stand to earn big profits if they are accepted, that is an inherently weak structure. As one carbon analyst put it: "The verifiers are being paid by the people they are verifying. If it turns out the verified is a bad guy, he is paying the policeman to sign him off as a good guy."
More recently, the CDM board has found its feet and is using a new team of experts to check the work of the specialist companies. Now, they are spotting bogus projects which previously were slipping through. Since July last year, they have rejected 14 of them. Some of them were blatantly inappropriate, and yet specialist companies had validated them.
If a significant number of the 1,900m CDM credits waiting in the pipeline also prove to be bogus, the whole Kyoto project would start to backfire.
Defenders of the CDM argue that these are the early days of a complex mechanism which will run for a hundred years and leave these problems behind it. Jørund Buen, of Point Carbon, the pre-eminent expert on the carbon market, said: "Some projects shouldn't have received carbon credits, one of these specialist companies seems to have done a lousy job. However, most projects are highly credible, and most of these specialist companies do decent work."
The chairman of the CDM executive board, Hans Jurgen Stehr, likewise insists that the market is stable, growing and improving. Against them, environmental groups argue that there never was a justification for attempting to tackle climate change by creating a carbon market.