Here’s the full text of this fascinating and timely story from the Financial Times. — C.K.

Industry Caught in Carbon ‘Smokescreen’ (Financial Times)

By Fiona Harvey and Stephen Fidler in London

Published: April 25 2007 22:07

Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on ‘carbon credit’ projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a ‘green gold rush’, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go ‘carbon neutral’, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.

The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.

The FT investigation found:

? Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.

? Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.

? Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.

? A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

? Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

Francis Sullivan, environment adviser at HSBC, the UK’s biggest bank that went carbon-neutral in 2005, said he found ‘serious credibility concerns’ in the offsetting market after evaluating it for several months.

‘The police, the fraud squad and trading standards need to be looking into this. Otherwise people will lose faith in it,’ he said.

These concerns led the bank to ignore the market and fund its own carbon reduction projects directly.

Some companies are benefiting by asking ‘green’ consumers to pay them for cleaning up their own pollution. For instance, DuPont, the chemicals company, invites consumers to pay $4 to eliminate a tonne of carbon dioxide from its plant in Kentucky that produces a potent greenhouse gas called HFC-23. But the equipment required to reduce such gases is relatively cheap. DuPont refused to comment and declined to specify its earnings from the project, saying it was at too early a stage to discuss.

The FT has also found examples of companies setting up as carbon offsetters without appearing to have a clear idea of how the markets operate. In response to FT inquiries about its sourcing of carbon credits, one company, carbonvoucher.com, said it had not taken payments for offsets.

Blue Source, a US offsetting company, invites consumers to offset carbon emissions by investing in enhanced oil recovery, which pumps carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells to bring up the remaining oil. However, Blue Source said that because of the high price of oil, this process was often profitable in itself, meaning operators were making extra revenues from selling ‘carbon credits’ for burying the carbon.

There is nothing illegal in these practices. However, some companies that are offsetting their emissions have avoided such projects because customers may find them controversial.

BP said it would not buy credits resulting from
improvements in industrial efficiency or from most renewable energy projects in developed countries.

Additional reporting by Rebecca Bream

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Michael Riordan invited us to publish the following Opinion Piece, which was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 23, 2007. Michael is the co-author of The Solar Home Book. He teaches the history of science and technology at Stanford University and University of California, Santa Cruz. Thanks, Michael!

Time for a Carbon Tax?

By Michael Riordan

It balms my bleeding liberal heart to witness a conservative president from Texas and a Republican governor of California promoting renewable energy. Also known as alternative energy, it was widely advocated by environmentalists after the 1970s energy crisis and heartily embraced by President Jimmy Carter and Gov. Jerry Brown. But President Bush’s oil-patch friends ridiculed renewable energy as impractical, and it faded from the national agenda during the Reagan years — to be resurrected only recently. Perhaps the time has finally come to revive yet another radical idea: a carbon tax, which charges anyone who burns fossil fuels for the problems that ensue.

Of course, the word "tax" sends shudders across the political spectrum, but it shouldn’t, especially when the only good alternative is another hot-button word, "subsidy."

During the late 1970s, tax credits and other subsidies encouraged ill-considered technologies, such as solar-heating panels on roofs, that didn’t make much economic sense. Some renewable-energy advocates argued that governments should not subsidize any sources of energy — whether fossil fuel, solar, wind, biofuels or nuclear. Just get out of the economic way and let market forces determine the outcome — and penalize detrimental energy sources by taxing them accordingly.

Today, a different dynamic is operating. Global warming, then regarded as a distant possibility, is widely accepted in scientific — and, increasingly, business — circles as a looming threat that we must confront. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a majority of the U.S. population regards global warming as fact, caused by human introduction of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. All of us are contributing by burning fossil fuels, and we are just beginning to witness the terrible consequences.

Thus, a rational course of action is to penalize those who burn fossil fuels — all of us — and use the revenues to implement solutions. This tactic would discourage actions detrimental to the environment and encourage energy alternatives, which could range from energy-efficiency measures to carbon-removal methods to renewable-energy sources.

A carbon tax on our gasoline purchases, for example, would automatically penalize owners of gas-guzzlers while promoting hybrid and flex-fuel automobiles. The average miles-per-gallon of U.S. cars would steadily rise in response to such a measure, as individuals take this added cost into account when making purchases.

The real key to widespread acceptance of a carbon tax, is to put the money directly to use on solving our energy problems — not just pour it into the general fund, where it can be diverted. Carbon taxes could pay for loans or even grants for insulation and double-glazing of windows in older homes, especially in cases where owners cannot afford to make such improvements. They can fund much-needed research and development on ways to capture and remove carbon dioxide or subsidize power companies that begin to take such measures with their emissions. They can support tax credits to homeowners who install solar cells, as California is doing through its Million Solar Roofs program. They can fund much-needed research on converting agricultural waste, wood chips and switchgrass to biofuels, or to solve the knotty problems of fuel-cell automobile engines and compact hydrogen-storage systems.

As Americans consume about 9 million barrels of oil daily for transportation, a dime-per-gallon gas tax thus would yield nearly $14 billion annually for such purposes. This amount does not include taxing coal, oil and natural gas burned in electrical power plants or for heating our homes and office buildings, which would probably add twice that amount.

A small carbon tax applied across the board, wherever fossil fuels are burned, thus would yield more than $50 billion a year to help address global warming. We already do something like this with the gasoline taxes that go directly into highway construction and repair. It is not all that new of an idea.

Spending these funds wisely, of course, will require some kind of responsible governmental decision-making body. Given the politics and corruption that often swirl around large pools of money, this will not be easy. But with openness, vigilance and leadership, it can succeed.

Meanwhile, renewable energy sources would begin to flourish. It would finally become economical to tap the vast supplies of renewable energy that course through our communities daily. Just imagine solar-cell panels on millions of homes converting the sunlight shining on them into thousands of megawatts of electricity fed back into the power grid. And the local construction jobs thus created will be awfully difficult to export to China or India.

Achieving this worthwhile goal cannot happen without courageous political leadership, for few can stomach a new tax. That is why so many politicians, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., favor a "cap-and-trade" emissions-trading scheme, whereby companies are allowed to emit limited amounts of carbon dioxide, but can trade these allowances like stocks and bonds.

Fortunately, we are beginning to get the needed leadership in California, thanks to an inspired governor working across the aisle with Democrats on energy issues. What better legacy could President Bush leave when he departs from office in two years?

Here’s how Greenwire led its story on former Vice-President Al Gore’s appearance this morning before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce:

In a historic hearing appearance today before two House subcommittees, former Vice President Al Gore urged Congress to immediately freeze U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and reduce them 90 percent by mid-century.

Gore also called on lawmakers to tax the carbon content of fuels as a way to put the global warming issue before Americans.

"I fully understand that this is considered politically impossible, but part of our challenge is to expand the limits of what is possible,"
Gore said.

Gore also suggested that the United States push for the next global warming treaty to begin in 2010, two years before the expiration of the Kyoto Protocol.

By using 2010 as a start point for the next treaty, the next U.S. president could "use his political chits" to get the country in an "all-out sprint" to reduce its own emissions.

Congress should also set up a "carbon neutral" federal mortgage company to support "green" homes, ban sales of incandescent light bulbs and impose a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants built without the technology to capture and sequester carbon dioxide.

Gore’s appearance before the House Energy and Commerce and Science and Technology subcommittees drew standing-room-only crowds. It also filled several overflow rooms to
watch the testimony of the Tennessee Democrat.

In a 40-minute opening statement, Gore described what he said is a budding political movement for new climate change policies. He presented 516,000 online signatures he had gathered on his Web site and touted 100 new contacts per second in the last few days since soliciting comments in anticipation of his House testimony.

"This is building, and it’s building in both parties," Gore said.

Gristmill’s David Roberts has a handy summary of Gore’s 10-point legislative proposal here. Gore’s #2: Start a long-term tax shift to reduce payroll taxes and increase taxes on CO2 emissions. His #3: Put aside a portion of carbon tax revenues to help low-income people make the transition. (#1: An immediate "carbon freeze" that would cap U.S. CO2 emissions at current levels, followed by a program to generate 90% reductions by 2050.)

Small world dept: Not so many years ago, geophysicist grad student Kevin Vranes and I were part of an intrepid band of New Yorkers marking sites where pedestrians and cyclists were run over by car drivers, as part of a campaign against vehicular dominance of the streets. Now we’re both in the thick (?) of the climate debate. Kevin has published a terrific account of reactions to Gore’s testimony today before the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, in the Colorado University Science blog Prometheus. Note particularly his recitation of the keen interest in carbon pricing and taxing shown by Montana Democrat Max Baucus and New York Democrat Hillary Clinton.

My one correction to Kevin’s valuable report: Keivn, this may have been the first time you heard Gore urge a tax on carbon emissions, but the former V-P has been calling for a carbon tax (with a tax-shift out of payroll taxes) for some time. See details here.

Photo: flickr / Oscar H Mataquin