Carbon Crooks

At the end of 2012, the Kyoto Protocol expired. All the countries that ratifed the protocol have guaranteed that they will cut down on their carbon emissions and curb the greenhouse gasses. The question is: How did they do that? One solution has been to buy carbon credits. If a rich country in the developed world has problems reaching their goals, they just buy Carbon Credits in the poor countries.

It all looks good in the official documents, but how does reality look? In Bangladesh, numerous countries have bought carbon credits from new brick factories that the UN call “smokeless”. But the workers are exposed to extremely hazardous fly-ash and are hardly able to breathe due the the heavy smoke. And in Kenya some 900,000 water purification filters were distributed for free. The idea was to reduce the use of firewood and thereby save carbon emissions. But what do you do when you want to make a profit and only a quarter of the population actually use firewood to boil their water? You bend the truth a bit.

And in addition to dodgy local initiatives, the international carbon trading industry has been exposed to massive theft and fraud in a much larger scale. According to Europol, fraud that exceeds more than 5 billion euro.