Carbon Credits - An Outgrowth of the Hoax

    Amruthanand Nair's article entitled, "India Reaps Benefits of Carbon Program", in the June 18 Issue of Chemical and Engineering News, reviews the worldwide situation on carbon credits.
    Carbon credits are an outgrowth of the international attempt to control carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, as a method to control world climate change. I have yet to see any data justifying the theory that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has any significant effect on climate change.
    Be that as it may, in 1997 an international meeting in Japan developed what is known as the "Kyoto Protocol". The basis of the Protocol was that too much carbon dioxide was being emitted to the atmosphere through fossil fuel burning and this was having a disastrous effect on climate change. In the discussion, it was agreed that the world should be divided into two segments; industrialized and developing. Examples of industrialized nations were France, Germany, UK, and the US. An example of a developing nation was India.
    The protocol required that industrialized nations were required to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. Developing nations were not required to do so. However, if a company in a developing nation reduced its carbon dioxide emissions, it could receive a carbon credit known as a "Certified Emission Reduction" (CER). Each CER was equivalent to 1000 tons of carbon dioxide. CERs could also be obtained by reducing emissions of nitrous oxide and trifluoromethane.
    The CER's achieved monetary values, because they could be sold to companies in industrialized nations, which could then use them as an alternative to reducing their own carbon dioxide emissions. This was a particularly generous program for India, which with a few minor equipment changes could obtain CER's and sell them to companies in Western Europe. The initial trading value of a CER was $53. Price dropped to $12-$15 six months ago, and it is now less than $4. Some Indian companies reaped a gold mine, but it looks like the heyday is over.
    It is interesting to speculate on why there was such a significant drop in CER value. We know that the recession in European Union countries has decreased factory production and related carbon dioxide emissions, which automatically reduces the need to purchase CER's from developing countries. I also speculate that another reason for the price reduction is the general public awareness that there is no basic scientific data which would indicate that carbon dioxide emissions lead to harmful climate change. This decreases the legitimacy of the Kyoto protocol. In fact, efforts to update it and make the terms more legally binding have failed. Hooray for common sense!