By “wonders” we actually mean “have the exact opposite effect”. And, yes, one wonders how such nonsense gets taken seriously, and peddled by supposedly serious people. Including this business of carbon credits where people in Western countries pay real money to people somewhere else that they can’t see supposedly not doing something they can’t check. Fools with money, step right up! And indeed according to new research at Yale University the global market for these invisible offsets, in which suckers elsewhere pay money to the UN which passes it on to companies in China in return for a promise that they will cut their emissions, the Chinese companies in question not only didn’t cut their emissions, they increased them. And the more offsets they sold the more they raised their own emissions. Oops.

The economists at Yale who authored the report studied data from the UN Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which they described as follows:

“The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was established under the Kyoto Protocol to allow firms in high-income countries to meet part of their emissions reduction targets by financing projects in low- and middle-income countries. In return, they received tradable carbon credits, known as Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs).”

Certified no less. The CDM has implemented over 3,000 projects certifying 2.2 billion tonnes of alleged emission reductions. The largest seller of CDM credits was China, of course. And wouldn’t you know it? We were being had by the Commies planning to dominate the world by 2049 partly by undermining our economies with our help and at our expense:

“In fact, [Chinese] firms that received CDM projects saw their emissions increase by 49% over four years. This is the opposite of what they had projected when applying to the programme, claiming emissions would fall by 20%.”

Perhaps “projected” is too kind a word for con men. But at least they were good at it. You see, the authors also compared Chinese firms whose proposals to the CDM were rejected against those whose projects were accepted. The firms whose proposals were rejected had lower emission increases than the firms whose proposals were accepted, the exact opposite of what the program was designed to achieve. Waak waak waak.

So what happened, other than the obvious answer that the whole thing is a scam? The authors found that the CDM money tended to go to higher growth firms who used the money to help them expand their operations. They got paid to improve their energy efficiency “but used those efficiency gains to expand production rather than cut back on emissions.”

The authors make the modest suggestion that from now on the CDM should only pay for projects that reduce emissions rather than subsidizing new equipment. But since it’s what the program was supposed to be doing all along, and Westerners were far too eager to believe it was doing, we won’t hold our breath.

After all, neither the sellers nor the buyers have any interest in shutting the scam down. Sellers make easy money and buyers get cheap PR bragging rights about having certified emission reduction credits, which cost them a fraction of what they would pay actually to reduce their own emissions.

The fact that emissions weren’t reduced, and instead went up, and that the UN grandees overseeing the whole thing aren’t going to change it, let alone be fired or docked pay for it, just shows once again that those pushing the climate emergency are the least likely to act as if they thought it was a real emergency. Or, in many cases, as if they thought much at all.