Mainstream financial institutions including Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs are joining the booming carbon market, which continues even through the current economic jitters. According to the World Bank, global trades in this market in 2007 were valued at more than $64 billion, more than doubling since 2006. Full Story »
Posted by Dwight Rousu
Lohmann points out that to show that an offset project does what it claims—actually reduce emissions—“you have to argue that there will be lower emissions than would have been the case without the project. That type of measurement is just doomed from the start. And people are aware that it can’t be verified, which opens the way to making any claim you want to make. There have been a lot of complaints about so-called carbon cowboys making a lot of money on nonexistent carbon reductions,” Lohmann adds. “But since the question can’t be decided scientifically, there’s no sheriff.”
Wara discovered that offset sales from destruction of the gas were far more lucrative than the sale of the refrigerant responsible for creating the pollutant in the first place, giving factories a perverse incentive to produce as much waste as possible and then create projects that sell offsets to destroy it.
