One of the many reasons the Kyoto Protocol failed has failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as promised is because the rules were poorly designed (you could argue they were set up to be gamed). The Wall Street Journal reports that a French companies will make about $1 billion dollars in greenhouse gas credits all because it made a $15 million dollar investment. Here’s the WSJ:
The company, Rhodia SA, manufactures hundreds of tons a day of adipic acid, an ingredient in nylon, at its factory here. But the real money is in what it doesn’t make. The payday, which could amount to more than $1 billion over seven years, comes from destroying nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, an unwanted byproduct and potent greenhouse gas. It’s Rhodia’s single most profitable business world-wide. Last year, destroying nitrous oxide here and at a similar plant in Brazil generated €189 million ($300.5 million) in sales of pollution “credits.” […] The Rhodia factory in [South Korea] alone is slated to bring in more money, under the U.N.-administered program, than all the clean-air projects currently registered on the continent of Africa.
This doesn’t make any rational sense, but that’s not the point, is it?
