Isra-Mart srl: China accused of 'climate blackmail' over HFC credits

www.isramart.com

China has threatened to release huge amounts of the potent greenhouse gas HFC-23 if the international community proceeds with plans to ban carbon credits generated by destroying the gas.

HFC-23 is a by-product of the refrigerant gas HCFC-22 which has a much greater warming effect than carbon dioxide and stays in the atmosphere for up to 200 years.

The EU moved to exclude HFC-generated credits from its emissions trading scheme from 2013 amid fears that developers were deliberately manufacturing and then destroying the gases to generate credits that can be sold for 70 times the actual cost of destroying HFC-23.

The UN has also considered taking action and will discuss banning HFC projects from qualifying for the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) offsetting scheme at a meeting of the CDM executive board a week before the Durban Summit later this month.

However, China has blocked similar moves to reform the CDM at previous meetings, and officials have indicated that they remain unwilling to give up on a practice thought to have generated revenues of $1.3bn for Chinese industrial firms in a move described by green campaigners today as "a shocking attempt to blackmail the international community".

According to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), Xie Fei, revenue management director at the China Clean Development Mechanism Fund, told the Carbon Forum Asia in Singapore last week that "if there is no trading of [HFC-23] credits, they will stop incinerating the gases" and instead vent them directly into the atmosphere.

Xie claimed that he spoke for "almost all the big Chinese producers of HFCs" which "cannot bear the cost" of destroying the gases and maintain that "they will lose competitiveness" if they are forced to do so without the compensation provided by the CDM scheme.

The EIA said that such claims are unjustified, and branded China's attempt to force countries to continue sponsoring the practice as "extortion". It also accused China of having no interest in emissions reduction beyond "profiting from a fatally flawed CDM system".

Clare Perry, senior campaigner at the EIA, said that the EU and UN have to stand firm and ban HFC credits from international emissions trading.

"HFC-23 CDM projects have cost European taxpayers untold millions, and allowed European industries to increase their emissions whilst subsidising chemical producers in China to produce yet more greenhouse gases," she said. "These dirty credits should be discontinued immediately."