Call for no limit on CO2 offsets 'taken out of context'

August 22, 2007 (Emissions Daily) --

In an interview broadcast on August 22, UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer said he believed industrialized countries should be able to offset up to 100% of their emissions by purchasing credits from developing nations.

But a UNFCCC spokesman said de Boer's comments had been recorded three months earlier and were "taken out of context."

In the interview, de Boer said he believed there should be no maximum limit to the use of offset credits such as Certified Emission Reductions from Clean Development Mechanism projects.

At present, Annex 1 (industrialized) countries do not face a limit on the number of offsets they can use, he explained. "There has been some talk in the international legal language about putting a limit on [buying offsets]. The Kyoto Protocol says that domestic action should be the main means of achieving a target, but negotiators have never managed to define more precisely what main means is; is it 50:50, or 51% [at home] and the rest abroad?"

"I personally wouldn't have a theoretical maximum," de Boer said. "I would let the market make that choice. We're facing a huge challenge, and the more economically viable we make it, the better it is."

The UNFCCC spokesman said that de Boer was not recommending that industrialized countries should carry out 100% of their emission reductions by purchasing offsets, but that he was acknowledging that technically, a large percentage of reductions could be met this way.

Asked in the interview whether it was right that developed countries should "buy their way" out, de Boer said "I think [offsets are] a sensible part of the solution. Ultimately the climate doesn't care where the emission is reduced as long as they are reduced; but for economic reasons you want to find the cheapest options in the market."

De Boer pointed out that industrialized countries have been making efforts to reduce energy consumption for some time already. "We've been reducing emissions and making energy use more efficient in industrialized countries for a long time -- since the oil crisis."

"It's quite expensive in industrialized countries to reduce emissions more," he added. "In developing countries less has been done to reduce emissions and less has been done to address energy efficiency. So it actually becomes economically quite attractive for a company, for example, in the UK that's got a target, to achieve that target by reducing emissions in China, for example."

"And that's where the resource transfer happens. Technology is transferred from north to south, emissions are reduced and the investor gets the carbon credits back," de Boer said.

The UNFCCC spokesman dismissed the interview as having little value. "The remarks were made on May 4 this year, after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its third report," the source said.

"[De Boer] was not saying that industrialized countries should be let off the hook and should not be obliged to make any reductions at home. Under the Kyoto Protocol developed nations are called on first and foremost to make reductions at home."