So Gareth’s in high dudgeon again. But this is not worth his ire: what he describes is nothing on the cheating Chinese.
Companies there have been caught out making mind-boggling bags of money. In a bold-as-brass scam under the Clean Development Mechanism, the UN has been paying them to destroy a refrigerant gas that has a very strong greenhouse effect.
What’s wrong with that, you might ask? Simply that they didn’t need the gas—they’ve been making it only to destroy it.
Individual Chinese companies have been raking in up to $40 million a year each by making refrigerant gas they don’t need then destroying it. The UN gives them the cash for being good green companies, but the money comes directly from we long-suffering taxpayers in well-organised, hard-working western countries, since we’re the ones who pay hefty UN fees—poor countries pay a pittance.
Our minor, entirely legal and predictable use of carbon credits isn’t at all in the same league as the Chinese (and Argentinian, Indian, Mexican, South Korean and Russian) cheating, and it will rather peeve many Kiwis to hear Morgan categorise our decisions as faulty. Without the CDM incentives the Chinese wouldn’t have manufactured the gas in the first place. That represents military-grade fraud.
The system of carbon credits is created by international treaties agreed by 195 countries with pure hearts and a clean conscience. Why should Gareth Morgan denounce us for using a mechanism created by the international community and made available to everyone? The majority of the dodgy Russian and Ukrainian offsets (and not all were dodgy) were sold to the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (the EU ETS). Morgan seems to want to let them off the hook.
Anyway, we can relax about the fraudulent gas credits now, because the Chinese are being paid $380 million under the Montreal Protocol (that’s the one saving the ozone layer) to close down their miscreant companies by 2030. It’s taking a long time, costing another heap of cash, and it’s more like a reward than a punishment—but that’s the United Nations.
The United Nations needs a searching inquiry. Say, who do we know with a bit of clout at the UN?
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Ah, the inscrutable Chinese.
Not only the scam you highlight RT, here’s another: the Chinese contracted a few years ago to buy a large portion of our considerable production of milk powder (along with Australia’s). Fair enough. We then get all excited, assuming that we need to increase production for other emerging markets and dairy conversions proceed apace. Trouble is China has been stockpiling milk powder not consuming it as Kiwi farming pundits assumed. Now they don’t buy any milk powder ’cause they got heaps. Fonterra milk-solids payout is half what it was a few years ago, farmers are going to the wall in droves and who buys their farm? Inscrutable Chinese.
http://theglobaldairy.com/noticias/bought-out-chinas-attack-on-agriculture-46516/
I had no idea it was like that.
The linked article also mentions an earlier Australia-Chinese mining scam, “Beijing pulled the same tactics on Australia’s mining industry in 2013. China created an artificially high demand, built up stockpiles, then pulled out of the market.”
At the risk of sounding “racist”, my observation is that cheating is part of Chinese culture. I spent a month teaching at a tertiary institute there a few years ago and cheating in exams was commonplace and even encouraged by the staff.
They told me this themselves
The Brits are similar – a few years ago I began teaching in a Comprehensive school for boys a few miles from Windsor and on my first day learned that staff members went to great lengths to hide their personal supplies of coffee, as other staff members would steal it they found it. The thieves didn’t even regard their thefts as dishonest but as a sort of peculiarly British ‘joke’ which I found totally unfunny.
Parents of the pupils there didn’t see any kind of moral or ethical problem with doing their sons’ homework for them, either!
Anyone who takes Gareth Morgan seriously is a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
Needless to say, if you create a scheme where you are literally trading thin air, there are those that will exploit it for their own gain.
The UN’s Clean Development Mechanism will take some unwinding (with scope for plenty of cheating), as will the Green Climate Fund, when both are found to be redundant i.e. the greenhouse effect is not what climate science thinks it is.
I repeat my challenge to warmies like Gareth Morgan as made at warmy Gareth Renowden’s Hot Topic (to date unanswered):
The Kelvin-Planck statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the excess heat from a cyclic heat engine is expelled to a heat sink, in this case space. A prediction in accordance with this law is that atmospheric temperature will return to ENSO neutral as is underway right now i.e. El Nino heat will not be retained in the atmosphere, it will dissipate to space. The IPCC’s climate models also violate this law.
Non heat specialist climate scientists like Schmidt, Rahmstorf, Sherwood, Foster, Mann, and the UKMO organization employees (think UKMO 5-yr forecasts) – all wrong.
Climate science, a large body of heat-illiterate (not applied heat qualified) groupthinkers, would have it that the earth’s atmosphere violates a law of thermodynamics – and no-one, except “climate deniers”, questions this. Where are all the heat specialists on this?
If the physical science is bogus, policies resulting are equally bogus – so who is really cheating here?