Morgan and co -- who will retain up to 9 million in commissions -- will be used to buy Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) credits under the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Easily the largest beneficiaries of this curious system are firms in China and India which receive the credits for showing that they have at least nominally cut back on their own greenhouse gas emissions. They can then sell their CERs through intermediaries, to allow organisations in the West, such as the British Government, to continue pumping out greenhouse gases such as CO2. Related Articles The largest and easily the most lucrative component of the CDM market, administered under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is a peculiar racket centred on the manufacture of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), classified under Kyoto as greenhouse gases infinitely more potent than CO2. The way the racket works is that Chinese and Indian firms are permitted to carry on producing the refrigerant gas known as HCFC-22 until 2030. But a by-product of this process is HCFC-23, 11,700 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. The firms can then destroy the HCFC-23, claiming allocations of carbon credits worth billions for doing so (while much of the useful HCFC-22 is then sold on to the international black market). According to the UN Environment Programme -- a body set up in 1972 by a Canadian businessman, Maurice Strong, who was its first chairman and also father of the