A UN-endorsed carbon offset scheme designed to reduce emissions has actually increased them massively, a study by a green think tank has found.
As well as pumping much as 600 million tonnes more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the carbon credits scheme has been abused by countries like Russia and the Ukraine which have used them as a money making scam.
Vladyslav Zhezherin, one of the co-authors of the study by the Stockholm Environment Institute says:
“This was like printing money.”
Another co-author Anja Kollmuss has told BBC News.
“We were surprised ourselves by the extent [of the fraud], we didn’t expect such a large number.”
“What went on was that these countries could approve these projects by themselves there was no international oversight, in particular Russia and the Ukraine didn’t have any incentive to guarantee the quality of these credits.”
To which the two obvious questions are:
Have any of these people actually been to Russia or the Ukraine?
and:
This stuff that these greenies have been smoking sounds totally amazing. How do we go about getting some?
The corruption they describe is by no means a recent thing. It dates back to Enron whose entire business model was based on dodgy carbon credits, which it used not to save the planet but to close down its rivals in the coal industry.
In the early 1990s Enron had helped establish the market for, and became the major trader in, EPA’s $20 billion-per-year sulphur dioxide cap-and-trade program, the forerunner of today’s proposed carbon credit trade. This commodity exchange of emission allowances caused Enron’s stock to rapidly rise.
Then, as now, this crony capitalist scam was only made possible by the enthusiastic endorsement of greenie-lefty politicians:
Al Gore took office in 1993 and almost immediately became infatuated with the idea of an international environmental regulatory regime. He led a U.S. initiative to review new projects around the world and issue ‘credits’ of so many tons of annual CO2 emission reduction. Under law a tradeable system was required, which was exactly what Enron also wanted because they were already trading pollutant credits. Thence Enron vigorously lobbied Clinton and Congress, seeking EPA regulatory authority over CO2.
And also the support of other key figures in the Green Blob, such as the all-powerful environmental NGOs.
From 1994 to 1996, the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million dollars ‚Äì $990,000 ‚Äì to the Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project promotes global warming theories. Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on environmental groups that support international energy controls to “reduce” global warming. Executives at Enron worked closely with the Clinton administration to help create a scaremongering climate science environment because the company believed the treaty could provide it with a monstrous financial windfall.
Everyone involved in the green circle jerk stood – and stands – to benefit from the scam.
These include: privileged countries like India and China
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…
Eco-Blofelds, like the shady one-world-government freak and Communist sympathiser who devised the Rio Earth Summit:
Thus we pay billions of dollars to the Asian countries for the right to continue emitting CO2 and other greenhouse gases here in the West, including the ¬£60 million contributed by British taxpayers to keep our civil servants warm. As a result we enrich a small number of people in China and India, including Maurice Strong, who now lives in exile in Beijing, having been caught out in 2005 for illicitly receiving $1 million from Saddam Hussein in the “Oil for Food” scandal. He played a key part in setting up China’s carbon exchange, to buy and sell the CDM credits administered by the UNFCCC ‚Äì of which Strong himself was the chief architect.
Green gangster NGOs, like the WWF, which stood to make millions from the carbon protection racket:
If it then emerged, however, that a hidden agenda of the scheme to preserve this chunk of the forest was to allow the WWF and its partners to share the selling of carbon credits worth $60 billion, to enable firms in the industrial world to carry on emitting CO2 just as before, more than a few eyebrows might be raised. The idea is that credits representing the CO2 locked into this particular area of jungle – so remote that it is not under any threat – should be sold on the international market, allowing thousands of companies in the developed world to buy their way out of having to restrict their carbon emissions. The net effect would simply be to make the WWF and its partners much richer while making no contribution to lowering overall CO2 emissions.
And what a racket this is. In 2011, the global carbon trading market was worth $176 billion ‚Äì which, as Jo Nova noted, was the same value as total global wheat production. One industry supplies about 20 per cent of the total calories consumed by the seven billion people on the planet. The other pays for Al Gore’s waterside homes, private jet travel and intimate massages.
