Blogs: In Hot Water

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is meant to catalyze climate-friendly and sustainable projects in low-income countries. Instead, it's provided massive subsidies to hydropower developers while increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Through deception and abuse of the system, at least two-thirds of all CDM projects are likely not additional, and more are slipping in each year. 

In an attempt to cure its ills during the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, the CDM Executive Board has initiated a year-long policy dialogue. Having failed to reach any decisions about reform at Durban, the CDM policy panel members will examine unresolved issues ranging from stronger rules for public participation to an appeals procedure. Of particular concern to the global movement for rivers is ensuring that the CDM imposes greater limitations on large hydropower projects, which are more likely to create enormous environmental and social problems for local communities than smaller community-driven decentralized projects.

EU demonstration (knowledge.allianz.com)

Durban is over, the delegates have all either gone home or are enjoying the sunny South African weather, and serious actions to curb rising emissions have again been shunted down the road. (You can read more about the results at Durban on our colleague Payal Parekh's blog.) However, progress is being made on the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – albeit slowly – to address some of its most serious flaws, including how to deal with non-additional, "hot air" projects in the world's largest emissions trading scheme, the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS).

Increase of credits from large hydro expected by 2020

A new study released in time for the climate negotiations in Durban confirms that over 20% of all carbon credits under the UN's offsetting scheme, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), could come from business-as-usual large hydropower projects. This is not surprising considering that hydropower is heavily supported and subsidized in many countries, especially in China and India, who host a combined 78% of all the registered hydropower projects in the CDM. Large hydro projects are projected to generate 2 billion carbon credits by 2020, which could be a lot of hot air.

Nam Leuk Reservoir, an ADB-funded project (China International Water & Electricity Corp)

One of the first reservoir emissions studies ever to be conducted in Southeast Asia has just been published, and the results may be a wake-up call to dam builders trying to win carbon credits for hydropower projects in Southeast Asia.

The international team of researchers spent two years measuring the greenhouse gas emissions from two sub-tropical reservoirs in Laos, the Nam Ngum and the Nam Leuk reservoirs (the latter of which diverts water from the Nam Leuk River to the Nam Ngum Reservoir). What they found was that at Nam Leuk, "GHG emissions are still significant 10 years after impoundment" and that the emissions values were comparable to other tropical reservoirs. The annual carbon export (including both diffusion into the atmosphere from the reservoir and from downstream) amounted to about 2.2 ±1.0 gigagrams of carbon per year. While much less than a coal-fired power plant, this is still roughly equal to the emissions from the electricity use of over a thousand US homes, which is far from insignificant.

Gaming the environment (Friends of the Earth)

As Wall Street and the EU continue to reel under the crisis brought on by the financial deregulation of global markets, a recent report on the EU's carbon market shows just how far these (mal)practices have spread. 

"Letting the market play: corporate lobbying and the financial regulation of EU carbon trading," co-produced by Carbon Trade Watch and Corporate Europe Observatory, reveals how under-regulation in a market mechanism meant to reduce global carbon emissions led to fraud and over-speculation. The EU is currently changing its rules in response, but corporate lobbies continue to try to influence this process. Ultimately, the author Oscar Reyes concludes that such reforms are bound to fall short, since they attempt to "regulate the unregulatable."

"It's hot in here, it's hot in here, there's too much carbon in the atmosphere!" As I heard this chant led through a megaphone this past Saturday, I had to smile. For those of you who attended sporting events at a US high school or college, or, like me, were a cheerleader, this chant should bring back some memories - yet with an all-too-important twist. Fifteen years ago the threats of climate change hadn't yet entered mainstream consciousness. Today, it can't be avoided. Even people who don't believe in climate change(!) are talking about it. And hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people around the world are taking action to stop it.

The International Rivers crew holding a Healthy Rivers banner (By David Feng for 350.org)

This past weekend, my friends/colleagues and I - and thousands of other people - came together to create the Bay Area Mega Massive Mobilization. The local gathering was but one of over 2,000 events in 175 countries, collectively called Moving Planet. This international day of action was created by 350.org to call for the essential transition to sustainable energy sources, and a rethinking of how we literally move around our planet. Around the world, people rode bikes, walked and gathered together to celebrate their communities and the power they have to make collective change.

A recent WikiLeaks cable from the US Consulate in Mumbai provides irrefutable evidence that carbon credits generated by Indian projects and sold to European countries under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) are a lot of hot air. 

It reports on a seminar in 2008 with the US Consulate General Office, analysts from the Government Accountability Office (which later released a critical report on offsets), and the executives of top Indian companies. The cable notes that these companies "conceded that no Indian project could meet the 'additionality in investment criteria' to be eligible for carbon credits."

Status of projects for which International Rivers and partners have submitted Comments (as of July 1, 2011)

For many years, International Rivers and our partners have been submitting comments on the worst hydropower projects in the CDM pipeline, raising issues ranging from environmental problems to human rights abuses to additionality. Our general experience has usually been that rather than seriously assessing public comments, the validators, also known as DOEs, ignore any criticism of the project developers' claims. Recently, however, a number of these projects, for which we had raised serious concerns, have had their validation terminated by their DOEs. Could these DOEs finally be hearing what we've been saying for years? 

Photo: Saoud, Flickr

Mathematical errors in the classroom or on tests usually don't carry a whole lot of consequences besides a blot on your grade and maybe a deflated sense of self-esteem.

But what happens when the mathematical error occurs in a major government energy agency? The ramifications could be huge, especially when a country is dead set on reducing its carbon footprint through building more hydropower projects – and it's precisely the greenhouse gas emissions from these projects that are being miscalculated.

Pascua River, Chile

According to a new report which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published today, the sky is the limit for the expansion of renewable energy. With an investment of slightly less than 1% of global GDP, renewable energy could contribute up to 43% of the world’s energy supply by 2030, and 77% by 2050. Such an increase could stabilize the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere at 450 ppm and may be just enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. It would also boost energy access for the 1.4 billion people who currently live without access to electricity.