Reuters AlertNet - UN Kyoto chief judges climate change options

By Gerard Wynn
LONDON, May 30 (Reuters) - Huge green investment into developing countries, planned under a Kyoto Protocol scheme, should tick quality of life, clean energy and climate change boxes, the UN-appointed overseer of such projects told Reuters.
The United Nations and World Bank have high hopes for the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which is seen levering some $100 billion investment into developing countries by 2012.
The idea is that rich nations which are lagging their greenhouse gas emissions targets can meet part of these goals by investing in clean energy projects in developing countries.
But projects should span a range of goals, delivering jobs and long-term clean energy as well as cuts in greenhouse gases, said Jose Miguez, appointed this year chairman of the UN body which decides which types of CDM project are eligible.
"The environmental benefits must be clear for future generations," he said.
"(Renewable energy) creates a stable structure for recycling CO2, or in the case of hydro, not emitting at all. We have to create incentives for these types of projects, not for ones we have doubts about."
Miguez is also head of the Brazilian body which approves Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects at the national level.
On "doubts", he listed several types of industrial-scale type project to exclude from CDM, on fears they would swamp smaller ventures.
He opposed funding the destruction of a super-greenhouse gas and byproduct of air conditioning, HFC 23, which has nearly 12,000 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO2).
His comments could worry the emerging carbon market, however, which saw 58 percent of $2.5 billion CDM investment last year directed into HFC projects, which investors like because of the high multiple pollution cuts they yield compared to CO2.
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Under mooted project types under consideration for CDM, Miguez opposed so-called carbon capture and storage -- which siphons off heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) from power plants to bury it underground -- saying the risk of leaks could sink such projects in legal wrangles.
And he saw no hope for developing countries such as Brazil arguing that they count their forests -- which absorb greenhouse gases -- as emission cuts.
"If you put this under CDM, you would destroy CDM," he said, adding the Brazilian Amazon had the capacity to absorb more than 300 times the total carbon cuts needed by rich countries to meet their Kyoto goals.
But for the right kinds of projects Miguez saw CDM delivering a massive win-win, fanning up to $100 billion investment into poor countries by 2012, and at the same time making a huge impact on climate change.
"We started in Rio in 1992 and now we have 1 billion tonnes (planned) CO2 reductions (under CDM) and other cuts in developed countries. We have achieved a lot in my opinion."
He saw the Kyoto scheme as only the beginning of a global shift in attitudes on global warming, pointing to the success Brazil has had weaning itself off fossil fuel gasoline onto ethanol, a renewable fuel derived from its huge sugar cane crop.
"Brazilian ethanol has nothing to do with the Kyoto Protocol or the market mechanisms... Now we are looking at ethanol-fuelled planes."