Some Environmental Policies Backfire
If you’re looking for yet another example of how greedy pigs have worked around a well-meaning attempt to protect the environment, you’re in luck.
I believe that government can, and in fact, must help in driving environmental reform, but it’s not an easy task – even in the absence of corruption. Without some level of decency on the part of the private sector, it may be impossible.
This disgraceful situation has been going on since the European Union introduced Carbon Trading and began accepting Certified Emission Reduction certificates in the market.
Most people will see the sense in encouraging the use of efficient biomass stoves in the developing world to reduce deforestation, help the poor, and improve local air quality, or of using efficient lighting in a developing country where it will both cut emissions and allow a limited electricity supply to reach more users.
This disgraceful loophole unfortunately encourages factories to unnecessarily make CFCs in order to make huge profits from destroying them.
Contrary to popular opinion in the West, many people in China and India are very aware of environmental issues and are very keen to see their countries move to cleaner ways of doing business.
Hopefully the public in India and China will begin to see the stupidity of this arrangement and encourage the companies involved to use cleaner processes which do not make CFCs in the first place!