In the Guardian, Damian Carrington describes Chinese companies’ gaming of the EU Emission Trading Scheme, and European proposals to combat it:
The use of carbon permits from industrial gas projects in China could be banned because of their “total lack of environmental integrity”, the climate change commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, has told the Guardian.
Billions of euros’ worth of the controversial permits were used between 2008-09 in the European Union’s emission trading scheme (ETS), in which companies must exchange pollution permits for any emissions produced. The ETS allows some of those permits to be bought in from developing countries.
In June, the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency said many Chinese chemical companies were manufacturing HCFC-22 primarily to earn the money from destroying HFC-23, which can be five times the value of the refrigerant gas the plants are ostensibly set up to create.
