Tuesday, 13 February 2007

Its happening

The recent developments
IPCC report.
500th CDM project registered.
Carbon credit Exchange in china.
my observation - a huge jump in intensity of articles related to climate change and Kyoto.
The number of articles with some critical views on Kyoto and CDM have also risen in numbers. Last two days I saw two of them; Crib over HFC -23, CDM is useless in business standard. I tried to discuss the issue of HFC23 on orkut forum and my dear friend Manpreet Singh summarised it very clearly

"The fact of the matter however is that HFC is a major green house gas with an enormous Global Warming Potential....So need to curb those emissions anyway....if not through CDM then i guess by law....just like Montreal banned CFCs...Kyoto or another new protocol should ban release of HFCs without thermal oxidation in refrigerant industry.....CDM gave an incentive....a huge incentive for these guys to curb these emissions.....so it might have resulted in a flood of carbon credits but the fact is those emissions have been minimised....There could have been ways to actually cap the credits from such projects in order to give them only the incentive that they deserve and not become a free rider....."

The point is very clear, the CDM board is constituted by learned people from different spheres and every methodology undergoes various stages of check and revisions before becoming eligible for use by project proponents. Moreover all these methodologies are open to discussions and clarifications. So the people who crib about this should learn that global warming is reduced by lowering such emissions.

Although I do agree with portion of second article which says, the need is to redesign CDM so as to see where can it e used effectively for actual development. Although we need not take any emission targets in near future, developing countries have been emitting decades before we even started any considerable fossil firing. There definitely is need to structure a policy to enable justified usage of carbon generated funds.

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