Carbon Credits Gone Awry Raise Output of Harmful Gas

More often than not, I catch myself ‘substantiating’ MSM reports on ATS. In a Men in Black (the movie) sort of way, I’ve actually come to believe that if anything of real significance transpires, I’ll likely find it in some obscure post on ATS. I didn’t see this posted yet & I thought it worth mentioning…

The following article from today’s NYT illustrates how rewarding it is to produce toxins so their byproducts can be destroyed. I typically advocate positive reinforcement, but this article has me rethinking my naiveté:

"Greenhouse gases were rated based on their power to warm the atmosphere. The more dangerous the gas, the more that manufacturers in developing nations would be compensated as they reduced their emissions.

But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity.

They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, but could earn more than 11,000 credits by simply destroying a ton of an obscure waste gas normally released in the manufacturing of a widely used coolant gas. That is because that byproduct has a huge global warming effect. The credits could be sold on international markets, earning tens of millions of dollars a year.

That incentive has driven plants in the developing world not only to increase production of the coolant gas but also to keep it high — a huge problem because the coolant itself contributes to global warming and depletes the ozone layer. That coolant gas is being phased out under a global treaty, but the effort has been a struggle..."

www.nytimes.com/2012/08 /09/world/asia/incentive-to-slow-climate-change-drives-output-of-harmful-gases.html?_r=1&hp




From a conspiratorial perspective, one may conclude that the carbon credits fiasco is merely reverse psychology aimed at ensuring global-societal deterioration through a myriad of schemes—no less than actual atmospheric annihilation itself(?).

well when you allow high dollar corporations buy the credits to release the chemicals into the atmosphere and you also make it cheaper to buy these credits than the cost of the punishments (fines and regulations) then what do you thing the corporations are going to do. these policies just leave the little guys sitting around unable to do anything because they cant afford credits or the fees for breaking the law. the equipment to meet regulations is also quite expensive. its like they deliberately plan to hold the small businesses down. what ought to be done is outrageously high fines for not purchasing the lower cost equipment. regulate prices of equipment to keep them down and punish those companies that dont feel they need to keep it clean. oh but that would just drive them out of the country to somewhere that is more lenient on environmental protection laws. basically its a f***** system created by f***** individuals for their own profit and benefit.

It's the law of unintentional effects.

California environmental laws forced the use of MTBE in gasoline as an oxygenator, originally a waste byproduct of refinement. Turns out MTBE does not get completely burned and is highly carcinogenic. Since the molecules are smaller than water it ends up in underground water supplies and is expensive to filter out, making many rural properties useless as the wells were poisoned.

reply to post by OlafMiacov


To play devil's advocate here, why should Al Gore and his suited cronies be the only people getting assininely wealthy off the carbon credit ponzi scheme? The real conspiracy surrounding carbon credit, IMO, is the fact that the same people raking in the bg bucks off the specter of GLOBAL WARMING are the same individuals who initially began the fear mongering over it. This is an incredible display of ignorance by the masses, very much akin to the old snake oil salesman days in which a well dressed man would bring his caravan into town, invent an ailment which had symptoms conveneintly common (fatigue? muscle aches? the gravy leg?), and then sell a bottle of sugar water mixed with wood alcohol or some opiate to the people, riding quickly out of town before the folks realized they'd been made asses of. Before too long, commercial operations sprang up and the birth of big pharma was upon us... all thanks to the snake oil salesmen demonstrating what a bunch of gullible chuckleheads the people are.

Same thing in action here with global warming and carbon credits...

Thanks for the replies and S&Fs. I agree it is a f*****-up deal that further oppresses the individual capitalists, while encouraging innovative ways to continue poisoning our air & water. Indeed, it is exactly like a global snake oil routine & that’s why it seems so conspiratorial (but maybe we're just giving too much credit).

It’s also not lost on me that aside from the pseudo-huggers like Gore, the biggest benefactors of this scam are the Chinese. While their citizens live in collective corporate prisons churning-out our ‘cool stuff’, their economy grew faster than a corn-fed adolescent & everyone is essentially paying them to buy the US.