Source: smh.com.au
Chinese firms blamed in huge greenhouse gas scam
Damian Carrington
October 28, 2010
BRUSSELS: The European Commission is planning to clamp down on a €2 billion ($2.8 billion) carbon trading scam involving the deliberate production of greenhouse gases which the fraudulent manufacturers are then paid to destroy.
The Climate Change Commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, says the use of these carbon permits, from industrial gas projects in China, could be banned because of their ''total lack of environmental integrity''.
Billions of euros worth of the controversial permits were used between 2008-09 in the European Union's emission trading scheme, in which companies must exchange pollution permits for emissions produced.
The scheme allows some of those permits to be bought in from developing countries.
The most popular of these so-called offsets come from projects that destroy the greenhouse gas HFC-23, a byproduct of the manufacture of the refrigerant gas HCFC-22.
The Environmental Investigation Agency said in June that many Chinese chemical companies were manufacturing HCFC-22 primarily to earn money from destroying HFC-23, which can be five times the value of the refrigerant gas the plants are ostensibly set up to create.
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