An explosion of greenhouse gases from China is expected over the next decade, because an international program to fund their destruction is drying up.

The gas is HFC-23, which is 14,800 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide.  It’s a by-product in the manufacture of a chemical that is used in refrigeration and air conditioning. 

Investigators from the NGO Environmental Investigative Agency (EIA) have discovered that many Chinese and Indian facilities are releasing or threatening to emit the by-product unless they receive additional financing to dispose of the chemicals.  And this is despite those plants already possessing the means the destroy HFC-23.

And to make it worse, the plants were incentivised to produce more HFC-23 because of the world's largest carbon market, the European Emissions Trading Scheme:  it paid the factories to destroy the harmful gas, so it was in the best interest of the factories to make more to destroy.  The fear is that the plants will dump enough HFC-23 greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to equal a quarter of China's already nasty output.

The EIA is calling on China to ban such gases and end economic incentives for their production in multilateral talks.