“Dr Alison Doig, senior climate-change advisor at Christian Aid, says, ‘Live’s investigation highlights exactly what’s wrong with this flawed system, which is focused only on exchanging carbon credit globally, with no accounting for other environmental or social damage. All carbon credits are doing is making some companies rich, while doing nothing to prevent global pollution. It needs either abolition or total reform.’”

That’s a quote from a piece on how the much-touted carbon-credit trading scheme actually works on the ground in combating pollution. The idea of the scheme is to give industries a cap below which they have to operate. To exceed the cap, they have to purchase carbon credits from manufacturers in the developing world, who receive them in exchange for every cut in emissions they make.

The credits trade in private and international exchanges like any security, one ton of CO2 emission being equivalent to one Certified Emission Reduction (CER).

Carbon trading was one of the fastest growing sectors in 2006 and 2007, doubling in value, but like everything else, when the market took a hit, it took one too. With manufacturing output falling, emissions also fell, and with them carbon, making it more profitable for companies to pollute and buy the credits rather than cut back on emissions from fossil fuels.

And how does the scheme work on the ground? As Carbon Trade Watch documents in this revealing account by Nadene Ghouri, a company can actually be receiving tax-payer funded “green reward points” from the UN, and using the money for operations that are highly polluting – which is  what GFL (Gujarat Fluorochemicals) was doing.