Global warming ‘tradeoff’

SANTIAGO, Chile – Pig manure in Chile will keep neon lights glowing on Tokyo’s Ginza in the future.

It’s a tradeoff to slow global warming: “You reduce your greenhouse gas emissions so I don’t have to.”

In this case, a Chilean pork producer is eliminating methane fumes from animal waste and selling the resulting “credits” to Japanese and Canadian utilities, requiring that much less of them as they reduce carbon dioxide emissions at their coal- and oil-burning power plants.

Last month in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the annual international climate conference approved an expansion of this Clean Development Mechanism, or CDM, as the exchange is called, and a strengthening of the U.N. office overseeing it.

Carbon dioxide, methane and a few other gases trap heat that would escape from the atmosphere. A scientific consensus, endorsed by a U.N.-sponsored network of climate experts, blames much of the Earth’s temperature rise on these emissions.

The 1997 Kyoto pact, effective Feb. 16, sets mandatory targets for industrial nations to reduce emissions by 2012. Although the U.S government rejects Kyoto, other nations are setting quotas for industries that spew out the gases, particularly carbon dioxide.

A credit currently sells on the new European carbon market for about $10. But terms of the AgroSuper deal, still awaiting final U.N. approval, were not disclosed.

Environmentalists worry that a flood of questionable projects may win U.N. certification as Kyoto comes into force in 2005. They cite CDM proposals for hydropower dams, for example, saying they’re often “business-as-usual” projects that aren’t replacing carbon-heavy alternatives, but would have been built without the Kyoto trading mechanism.