'Carbon trading' spawns conflicts of interest
23 October 2006US - As the world grows warmer, poorer nations are helping the rich by reining in heat-trapping gases, in a multibillion-dollar "carbon trade" that is outrunning its U.N. overseers and founding principles and spawning conflicts of interest and possible abuse.
Even pig manure has gone from a hot commodity to a controversial one in the two-year-old "CDM" market, in which industrial countries obliged by treaty to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions can get credit for reductions in the developing world. Less is being achieved than claimed, critics say.
Under the Clean Development Mechanism, a Japanese utility benefits from a hydroelectric dam in Vietnam, a British broker collects credits from a "green" cement plant in China, and Canada buys emissions reductions from Brazilian farms where methane from pig waste is now burned instead of left to rise into the atmosphere.
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Source: Free New Mexican
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