The Turth About Kyoto...

Now you don't have to believe me: believe, all of sources, the Guardian, not exactly the most conservative of UK newspapers.

CDM, the Clean Development Mechanism, is a scam. The alternative, run by the EU, handed a windfall to big, bad oil companies:

While the CDM is run under the umbrella of the UN, the second market is overseen by the European commission. Before launching, it churned through a mass of figures and produced a maximum number of tonnes of carbon dioxide which could be produced by each nation in the scheme; each nation then handed its big corporations and organisations a set number of permits - EU allocations - defining the number of tonnes of carbon dioxide they could produce between January 2005 and December 2007. But they got their sums wrong.

The carbon market's leading analysts, Point Carbon, recently calculated that this scheme handed out 170m too many EUAs. In the early days, nobody realised quite how badly the commission had miscalculated, and so the price of the EUAs was quite high, at up to €30 a tonne. But individual companies, particularly energy companies, rapidly saw they had millions of tonnes of EUAs that they didn't need, and so they sold their surplus, making huge profits. A 2005 report by IPA Energy Consulting found that the six UK electricity generators stood to earn some £800m in each of the three years of the scheme.

They "got their sums wrong" is actually incorrect: the reality is that there are no "right" sums in this scam, but only wrong ones.

And this really underscores how shifty the whole set up is:

...there is evidence that a significant percentage of current and future CDM reductions, possibly as many as 20%, may have been wrongly checked. This effects not just the 50m tonnes of CERs which have been issued already, but a massive quantity which is sitting in the pipeline as a result of hedge funds pouring an estimated €4,000m into high-profit carbon projects.

In other words, the chaps in charge have bungled this beyond belief. But it gets even better!

Until July 2006, the CDM executive board did not reject a single project. It was short of staff, short of experts and short of funds. So it relied on the specialist companies to get it right. Since those specialist companies are hired by the projects who stand to earn big profits if they are accepted, that is an inherently weak structure. As one carbon analyst put it: "The verifiers are being paid by the people they are verifying. If it turns out the verified is a bad guy, he is paying the policeman to sign him off as a good guy."

Mind-boggling.

The whole point of these carbon credit schemes is to make it even remotely possible to reduce emissions without throttling the economy into slow death.

Instead, the lunatics are running the asylum.