Would you be further shocked that the Huffington Post exposes the abuse?
If the World Bank and an Indian power utility have their way, the Rampur hydropower project in Northern India will increase global CO2 emissions by 15 million tons, at a cost of $164 million to unsuspecting energy consumers in Sweden. The project is a textbook example of how hydropower companies and other investors, with support from the World Bank, are gaming the system of climate finance.
Rampur is a 412-megawatts hydropower project on the Satluj River in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam Limited (SJVN), an Indian hydropower company originally created by the World Bank, signed an agreement with the local government to implement the project back in 2004. The Indian Prime Minister laid the foundation stone in 2005. The World Bank approved a loan of $400 million for Rampur in 2007. Throughout this process, the hydropower company SJVN assured the public and its lenders that the scheme was a “least cost” project and would remain financially viable even under adverse hydrological conditions. At no time did it indicate that the project depended on carbon credits to go forward.
Several years into project construction, the board of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is now considering an application to award 15 million carbon credits for the Rampur project for the 2012-2022 period. If approved, these credits would currently have a value of $164 million. The Swedish Energy Agency has offered to buy the credits in a deal that was arranged by the World Bank. Carbon credits from the CDM allow Northern polluters who are obliged to reduce their emissions under the Kyoto Protocol to keep polluting if they fund emission reductions in the global South. A key condition of the CDM is that carbon credits are only awarded if a project would not go forward without them, so that continued pollution in the North is balanced by reduced emissions in the South.
This simply highlights that the whole carbon credits issue is a scam. Oh, and that so-called “green” projects are anything but. It seems that most, if not all, of the green energy projects are actually just as bad for the notion of anthropogenic global warming as oil and coal. So many of the forms of ethanol are worse. Solar creates toxic pollution. Wind turbines need toxic lubricants and massive concrete bases (which puts out CO2). Now we have hydro-electric being shown to be huge producers of CO2. Plus, you end up with environmental destruction in the short term.
This is certainly not the first time there has been fraud and abuse in the carbon credits markets. We see it all the time. And here we see dupes in Sweden paying to offset an Indian project. Of course, those Swedes will, like most Warmists, never change their behavior in the first place and reduce their carbon footprints, meaning we are just shifting money around (and someone is surely getting a cut) and pretending to Do Something about reducing CO2.
And many of the Warmists are simply giving up, such as Simon Kuper at the Financial Times. Not that they ever actually did anything, they simply thought about doing something. Which is why Al Gore’s 24 Hours of Climate Reality was an abject failure: the science is ginned up, it’s based more on computer models (garbage in, garbage out) than real world data, and relies more on non-scientific consensus than on the scientific method. It’s pure politics, and few of the Believers practice what they preach (I’ve run out of ways to say that.)
PS: I have no problem with hydroelectric dams. I think they are a great way to create energy, and create a nice lake for fishing and recreation.
Nope.