Billions of pounds are being wasted in paying industries in developing countries to reduce climate change emissions, according to two analyses of the UN’s carbon offsetting programme.

Leading academics and watchdog groups allege that the UN’s main offset fund is being routinely abused by chemical, wind, gas and hydro companies who are claiming emission reduction credits for projects that should not qualify. The result is that no genuine pollution cuts are being made, undermining assurances by the UK government and others that carbon markets are dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, the researchers say.

The researchers found that most of the projects claiming carbon credits would have been built anyway, something which directly contradicts the goals of the program, which are that the projects would not have happened without the credits.

“Traders are finding ways of gaining credits that they would never have had before. You will never know accurately, but rich countries are clearly overpaying by a massive amount,” said Victor.

Yet another apparently good idea destroyed by the “magic of the marketplace.” Sounds like the opportunities for corruption and kickbacks are massive here too.

Carbon credits will only work when they are legally enforceable and monitored by an international organization with the power to prosecute those violate or try to evade the rules. Period. Otherwise the system will continue to be gamed and will accomplish little if anything in the way of real carbon reduction.

The “marketplace” can not and will not self-regulate and do the ethical thing. This has been rather conclusively proven by the collapse of Enron and the current mortgage and credit debacles.

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Personal carbon offsets are gonna look kinda twee and silly once we have gigantic, collective programs to drain carbon out of the sky. It’s not about the personal emissions of the living — we gotta remove the emissions that have been hanging over our heads since World War One.

It’s gonna take people a while to realize that we’ve got to forget “footprints” and live in a less-than-zero carbon handprint. But we’ll get to that realization, because there’s no other choice. This kinda stuff pretends that removing pollution is a personal, moral choice. It isn’t. It isn’t any more a personal moral choice than some monster Greenhouse firestorm threatening to incinerate San Diego.

Planet-wide problems require planet-wide solutions. We should, of course, try to cut our carbon footprint, but such efforts can be illusory.

An example: We just moved from a 2100 sq ft house in Connecticut heated by heating oil and with air conditioning to a 750 sq ft apartment in the Bay Area with no air conditioning and mass transit across the street.  Our carbon footprint has dropped dramatically, but since someone bought the house from us, the net carbon footprint probably remains the same.

DJ at AsymptoticLife has documented how they’ve dramatically cut their carbon emissions, which is all to the good. But Sterling is correct, we need to remove the carbon that has been in the atmosphere for decades too. And that can’t be done on a personal basis.

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