Still more cackhanded greenery

The greens have got it wrong again!

Kevin Vranes, writing on the Nature Climate Feedback blog recounts the sad tale of some more perverse results of the Kyoto Protocol. It's like this. Rich countries that can't meet their Kyoto obligations pay poor countries to reduce their emissions instead. While this might be doneby means of something obvious like building biomass incinerators or windfarms, one outlet that has proved very lucrative for the third world has been the burning of a chemical called HFC-23.

Now, HFC-23 is the by-product of the manufacture of a refrigerant with the equally romantic moniker of HCFC-22. Both of these substances are chlorofluorocarbons and therefore can damage the ozone layer. Despite this their manufacture is still allowed, under a developing country exemption from the Montreal Protocol.  When Kyoto was put in place however, the developing countries discovered that as well as depleting the ozone layer, both chemicals were also greenhouse gases. In particular HFC-23, the by-product, turned out to have a very long lifetime in the atmosphere. Because of this Kyoto was going to reward them, and reward them big-time, for burning it rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. As Vranes puts it:

[P]roducers of HCFC-22 now make more money burning HFC-23 than they do selling HCFC-22. Imagine what being paid handsomely to burn your waste does to your incentive to reduce your waste. If your waste stream costs you to dispose of it, you might try to improve your production to reduce waste and thus save money. And even if you did get paid to burn your waste, it might make financial sense to reduce waste anyway if your efficiency improvements paid more in reduced operating expenses than burning waste generated in income. But neither is the case for HCFC-22 factories. For them a double financial incentive now exists: keep making HCFC-22 in copious amounts at a profit, which will produce HFC-23 as a now-valuable waste product. And since HCFC-22 producers need not even lift a finger to burn their HFC-23 (those funding the CDM project fund the capture and burn device), any incentive for switching away from the ozone-depleting HCFC-22 as a refrigerant is also destroyed.

 The great law of unintended consequences strikes again. Now just explain to me again why Mr Bush was so wicked for not signing Kyoto?