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January 25, 2009
Carbon Credits: A Dam Swindle
Posted by Dave Blount at January 25, 2009 11:50 AM
Global warming hysteria isn't really doing anything for the polar bears, but at least it's of benefit to the tyrants running China:
The hydroelectric dam, a low wall of concrete slicing across an old farming valley, is supposed to help a power company in distant Germany contribute to saving the climate — while putting lucrative "carbon credits" into the pockets of Chinese developers.
But in the end the new Xiaoxi dam may do nothing to lower global-warming emissions as advertised. And many of the 7,500 people displaced by the project still seethe over losing their homes and farmland.
"Nobody asked if we wanted to move," said a 38-year-old man whose family lost a small brick house. "The government just posted a notice that said, 'Your home will be demolished.'" …
Similar stories are repeated across China and elsewhere around the world, as hundreds of hydro projects line up for carbon credits, at a potential cost of billions to Europeans, Japanese and soon perhaps Americans, in a trading system a new U.S. government review concludes has "uncertain effects" on greenhouse-gas emissions.
One American expert is more blunt.
"The CDM" — the 4-year-old, U.N.-managed Clean Development Mechanism — "is an excessive subsidy that represents a massive waste of developed world resources," says Stanford University's Michael Wara.
But massive waste is to be expected, when Big Government meets Big Environmoonbattery.
The idea is that countries can meet their Kyoto requirements by shoveling money at "developing nations," which fight the phantom menace of global warming on their behalf by building "clean energy" facilities.
Like everything else having to do with global warming, the entire project is a farce. Facilities like Xiaoxi would have been built anyway. But the point isn't to change the climate, as if that could be accomplished by constructing dams; it's to transfer taxpayer money to the Third World, and to give our liberal elitist rulers something else to feel smugly self-righteous about.
On a tip from Franco.
