Corzine’s Too-believable Excuse

THE Justice Department announced that Jon Corzine, the former New Jersey governor, won’t face federal charges for misplacing $1 billion of customers’ money at the commodities broker MF Global in 2011. His defense was that he was unfamiliar with the workings of the operation he headed and had no idea what became of the money in its treasury.

Anyone who lives in New Jersey could have seen that one coming.

This won’t be hard to believe: Another UN program has backfired. In 2005, the United Nations began giving credits to developingworld firms that reduced emissions of greenhouse gases or destroyed the chemicals themselves. The value of the credits, which could then be sold on climate exchanges like the EU’s, was determined by a chemical’s greenhousegas potency. Carbon dioxide was rated 1, methane 21, etc. One number caught the eye of some savvy Indian and Chinese manufacturers: 11,700, the value of destroying one ton of HFC23, a waste gas created in the production of HFC22, a common coolant. They decided to increase HFC22 production solely to churn out HFC23, one of the world’s worst greenhouse gases, and then destroy it, with the UN and environmentally conscious countries’ carbon markets paying the way.

Nineteen factories across the developing world got into the game; several would actually stop producing the coolant when they’d maxed out their HFC23 credits for the year.

Regulations can turn out to be green in more than one sense.