I found a stack of older WSJ's today at a a friend's office. On the cover of the August 11 issue was this article. Being an avid opponent of frivolous treaties such as the Kyoto Protocols, I my attention was snagged, and, reading the article, I was amazed at what I read:
NOVA IGUACU, Brazil -- In a big dirt pit here, workers wearing protective masks piled rocks around cement columns jutting up from rotting trash. Some 6,000 miles away, Dutch officials awaited word of their progress. Only a business page could capture the stupidity of an environmental treaty in action.
The Brazilian workers and the Dutch government have been brought together in an unusual partnership by the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty under which most industrialized countries, other than the U.S., have pledged to reduce their global-warming emissions by 2012. Parnership. Most industrialized countries. Even the Journal can't shake collectivist brainwashing. Let's see how well this partnership runs...
The workers are building a modern landfill, a rarity in the developing world. The columns are part of a system to capture methane from the city's decomposing rubbish before it wafts up into the atmosphere. Methane is a particularly potent global-warming gas; by burning it, and thus converting it into a less-potent gas, carbon dioxide, the landfill will significantly reduce its output of global-warming pollution. European garbage deserves a better home than does third world garbage. Also, isn't carbon dioxide the cause of global warming? Isn't that why the internal combustion engine is so bad? Since when did methane become the big bad guy?
That makes this garbage pile a gold mine in a new international market: the buying and selling of greenhouse-gas emission "credits." Each credit that a buyer in the industrialized world purchases from a seller in a developing country reduces the buyer's obligation to clean up its act back home. In theory, the system will reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases by sending money from industrialized nations to developing ones to tackle projects that otherwise wouldn't have gotten off the ground. In capitalism, one pays cash for services rendered or goods transferred. In globalism/socialism/communism, one must poke through the layer of corruption to do anything useful, paying more for permission to do a thing, than to actually do it.
"Just by flaring methane," explains Pedro Moura Costa, a 41-year-old Brazilian-born scientist who founded EcoSecurities Ltd., the company behind the gas-recovery operation, "you're creating a lot of credits." The silliness of modern money, having gone from being pegged to gold, to the fiat, and now, at last, to trash. The global financial system will be fueled by the contents of your garbage pale. The more trash you make, the more money some other country gets. Trash-powered international welfare.
The Netherlands agreed under Kyoto to cut its greenhouse-gas emissions 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Cutting a ton of emissions in the Netherlands is expensive: about $25 to $50, Dutch officials estimate. So for half their planned cuts, the Dutch shopped around mostly in developing countries for cheaper deals. Here in Nova Iguacu, they've agreed to buy as much methane as this landfill is expected to snag -- for $4.15 per ton. Vicarious eco-consciousness...now 90% off! Is vicarious emission control even honest? Doesn't that invalidate the whole meaning of the treaty? If someone can keep polluting as long as they pay another country kickbacks for not polluting, has the problem really been solved, or is it an international transfer of wealth?
"We never can reach this target by doing things at home" exclusively, says Maurits Blanson Henkemans, the Dutch economic ministry's senior official on climate issues.
The Kyoto treaty's architects envisioned this international trade in invisible gases as the perfect combination of Earth Day and Adam Smith: Think globally and act locally, and do it in a way that cuts costs. But the experience here shows that harnessing the free market to fight global warming is proving more complicated than the theorists hoped. Only because it isn't the free market at all, but an artificial structure created by communists and socialists, hence the failure. Creating an international welfare system based on credits that have no real value on a truly free market.
The landfill is capturing much less methane than expected; exactly why is a matter of dispute between Mr. Moura Costa's firm and the Brazilian company that's operating the facility. Meanwhile, the attempt in Nova Iguacu to help the atmosphere is raising a thorny social issue on the ground: what to do with impoverished scavengers whose only source of income is taken away when a tightly controlled modern landfill replaces an old-style dump that was open to all. I'm sure a bold environmentalist will sieze on the virtues of correcting overpopulation while simutaneously "reducing" emissions. Let them eat tofu...
The landfill also points up a question about the Kyoto emission-credit market itself: Whether it will jump-start a global shift away from CO2-producing fossil fuels and toward renewable-energy sources such as the sun and wind. But, more importantly, is it even intended to do so, or was this an international giveaway scheme packaged as a save the world treaty.
By offering credits for emissions-reduction projects, the treaty's backers hoped to promote renewable-energy projects like solar panels and windmills -- and thus reductions in carbon dioxide. After all, CO2 is the most prevalent of the gases building up an atmospheric layer that's trapping reflected heat from the Earth's surface just as a greenhouse locks in heat. And we're back to CO2 being the big bad guy. Wasn't methane worse, way back in paragraph 3?
So far, the results aren't encouraging. Renewable-energy projects recently have been producing only about a third of the credits sold on the international market, according to a report from the World Bank, one of the market's biggest boosters. So, this treaty, which will supposedly save the world, is doing exactly the opposite of what the published aim was. It's turned into a pollution-based welfare scam, not encouraging any sort of alternative fuel research.
The problem is that CO2-reducing projects are proving less desirable to credit buyers than projects that go after more-potent, but less prevalent gases. A project that avoids the emission of a ton of CO2 produces just one credit. But, because scientists say a ton of emitted methane does as much damage to the planet as 21 tons of CO2, a project that cuts a ton of methane generates 21 Kyoto credits. Pollution laundering, Kyoto style.
So, aiming to get more bang for their bucks, many buyers of Kyoto credits are flocking to projects that have nothing to do with CO2: adding incinerators at chemical plants to get rid of a particularly strong hydrofluorocarbon gas, for instance, and capturing methane from landfills. Tilting at windmills, chasing snarks, and other environmental activities are also getting popular.
The lesson: Even with what amounts to a global-warming tax inducing much of the West to invest in the developing world, renewable energy isn't proving economic on a broad scale. "Perhaps we'll have to do some more incentives for renewable energy," says Charles Cormier, a World Bank official who works in the global-warming-credit market. "It's not there yet at the scale that was intended." BINGO!!! Tinkering doesn't work, so the tinkering will expand until it does work. Don't let obvious reality get in the way of a good bureaucracy.
Despite these hurdles, the emission-credit market is growing. And governments aren't the only buyers. The countries that have ratified Kyoto are divvying up responsibility for meeting their targets among the companies that operate in their countries. So businesses too are lining up to buy cheap emission credits in the developing world. I suppose the supporters of the Kyoto foolishness will point to this corporate involvement as a source of legitimacy. "Look, it's almost a free market. Just ignore all the money and credit laundering, the artificial value of the credits, and the fact that it's backfiring."
Go read the rest...
A world stupid enough to sign Kyoto deserves what it gets.
