In the carbon trade you have the same situation with the third-party verifiers.
Making it even more fun, rather than a physical property as the basis for all the financial engineering, we buy, sell and package the absence of an invisible gas.
What a great time to be alive.
From Reuters:
One in five carbon credits issued by the United Nations are going to support clean energy projects that may in fact have helped to increase greenhouse gas emissions, environmental group WWF said on Thursday.
The United Nations runs a scheme under the Kyoto Protocol that allows rich nations to invest in clean energy projects in developing countries and in return receive certified emissions reduction credits (CERs) to offset their own emissions.
But WWF said in a report that the credits are being delivered to projects that would have gone ahead anyway, even without the extra incentive provided by U.N. approval under the scheme, called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
The report, prepared by Germany's Oeko Institute for Applied Ecology, said projects lacking this so-called 'additionality' help increase gases blamed for global warming by giving firms a spurious justification for continuing to pollute.
"One out of five emissions reductions credits sold under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) lack environmental integrity," WWF said in a statement....MORE
