Clan Webb

Several years ago, Scott Adams wrote this Dilbert cartoon that mocked a misguided management practice that was supposed to minimize software defects. It made the point that paying someone to reduce a undesired behavior will lead to the obvious conclusion of first increasing that behavior so there’s more to reduce. Evidently, the framers of the Kyoto Protocol don’t read Dilbert.

Pardon me while I chuckle at the junk scientists tripping over themselves. Based on this Reuters article, it would appear that the Kyoto Protocol is actually making some things worse. It’s all because of an idiotic carbon trading scheme that was constructed as part of Kyoto.

You see, after lecturing the industrialized world on how awful carbon emissions are, Kyoto then gave them a way to buy their way out. Instead of forcing those countries to change their emissions, it offered them a way to pay another country to lower their emissions so as to balance out. Somehow this seems an awful lot like buying indulgences in the middle ages. The poor countries don’t have this option, but the rich countries can simply pay someone else to cut back for them and they can continue on producing just as much as before.

This is embarrassing to begin with, but it gets better. Now, those poorer countries have figured out how to work the system. They are artificially producing too much carbon just so they can be paid off to cut back. Despite the questionable ethics, the entrepreneurial sprit seems alive and well! Here’s the punchline:

The most popular type of project has been to destroy a potent greenhouse gas known as HFC 23, one of a family of so-called hydrofluorocarbons, in China and India.

The problem is that HFC 23 is a waste product in the manufacture of a refrigerant gas which damages the ozone layer, called HCFC 22, and chemical plants have used their CDM profits to ramp up production.

So, let’s get this straight: Kyoto allows rich countries to pay poor countries to cut back on carbon emissions. The poor countries begin increasing processes that generate easy-to-destroy chemicals so they can get bigger payoffs. And, to make matters worse, that very process is increasing chemicals that attack the ozone layer (the environmentalist boogeyman from the 70s and 80s).

This is becoming self-parody.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 18th, 2007 at 4:41 pm by Wyatt and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.