Beijing warns against changing Kyoto carbon dioxide offset rule
A Chinese government fund has told a United Nations panel that it supports project developers which earn carbon offsets under a lucrative Kyoto Protocol scheme, and which rejects the idea that they are over-compensated.
Chinese project developers rejected key grounds for a review of Kyoto's clean development mechanism (CDM), and the China CDM Fund supported them, confidential papers showed a week before a UN panel decides whether to launch a formal review of the scheme.
The projects are the most lucrative under the CDM, which allow rich countries to buy offsets from carbon-cutting projects in the developing world as a way to ease the cost of reducing emissions.
The projects are rewarded if they destroy the potent greenhouse gas HFC 23, which they produce as a waste product in the process of manufacturing refrigerants.
An environmental group, CDM Watch, said earlier this year that the projects were producing more of the waste gas than necessary to destroy it and claim the resulting offsets....MORE
