Welcome (for how long?) to the Circus of Carbon Trading!

The BBC World Service’s Mark Gregory has reportedly uncovered

“[…] serious flaws in the multi-billion dollar global market for carbon credits […] in some cases, carbon credits are paid to projects that would have been realised without external funding.

The BBC World Service investigation found examples of projects in India where this appeared to be the case. Arguably, this defeats the whole point of the CDM scheme, set up under the Kyoto climate change protocol, as these projects are getting money for nothing.

The findings reinforce doubts that the CDM is leading to real emission cuts, which is not good news for the effort to combat climate change […]”

Notably, the Economist has talked about these issues less than a month ago. And with the Kyoto Treaty soon expiring plus an ever-increasing control bureaucracy for the CDM:

a banker with an interest in the future of the clean development mechanism (CDM) […] foresees either buoyant growth or terminal decline for the arrangement designed to encourage financial transfers from long

I wonder if people will ask for their money back, if the whole CDM business will be shown ineffective (or if global climate turns colder…)