Styky's sticky on Carbon Trading

[Faramir]

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news ... a72b2431db

In regards to this article, I need someone to explain the fine points of carbon trading to me. So, if a company in BC found that it exceeded its set limits (are these target pre-established by the BC government?) it goes to the carbon market to buy credits. I presume their will be credits to sell from a company that exceeded its targets, say in Arizona?

My question is how do we measure and how do we know there are no cheaters? Say the Arizona company is a fertilizer manufacturer. I have no clue how production of fertilizer would produce CO2 but anyways:

1) How do we measure how much CO2 is emitted by the company? Specifically, do we go to a smoke stack and put some measuring device in front of it? How is CO2 measured? Do they just guess?

2) Say we find fertilizer company emitts 1 tonne of CO2 a year, but we want it down to .6 of a tonne. Who measures to see that 0.6 was complied to? Does a government agent go out every week to take a CO2 emission measurement?

[fourhorses]

Don't be embarrassed by asking those questions. Everyone else in the Kyoto scam has conveniently skipped over them.

First of all, you are into organic chemistry (anything with carbon is organic chemistry) - so we must lean to those with background in that field of science.

There is more CO2 than just the smokestack, but in most examples given to the public, it is condensed to smokestack concepts. To be accurate one would have to use a calibrated test instrument. (CO2 tester - many out there)

Keeping to the stack example, a stack will vary according to its output, so some measurement - ongoing will be needed to develop a baseline - say year no1 or baseline year. If the goal is to reduce by some given percentage, say 10%, equipment retrofits, fuel conditioners (if oil used) and of course reduced consumption. The retrofits may be more efficient burners of compete boiler changes for example.

Now you raise the issue of how accurate the measurements were and how honest they were recorded for the baseline year. You also raise the question of who did the measurements, to which standards were adhered, and to what trust and accountability exists in that individual.

Now you want to buy some credits. There are brokerage services for that. They purchase credits from vendors and sell them to you. You can use an accounting firm - chartered accountants - to ensure that the transaction is kosher. BUT the accountants can only rely upon the information given to them - calculating carbon emissions is outside their professional jurisdiction, and no professional accountant will touch that one.

In some regions, people like chemists, chemical engineers, etc are governed by professional bodies and their license is on the line, so the overwhelming majority will do an honest job of calculating and verifying its accuracy.

However if one of these types of professionals are not employed to do the work, just who is doing the carbon calculations ? Are factories going to employ full or part time chemists or engineers / consultants to measure and check/ verify automatic monitoring equipment ? Possibly - if it is a large scale operation.

Suppose there are multiple sources of CO2 - from various processes ? Example: suppose there are heat treat operations and massive lubrication needs at high temp. How much oil/grease was burned off ? How much dripped or spilled ? How much of the metal coating on the raw material was burned off in the heat treat process ? How much CO was emitted?
How many company trucks were used and how much did each one emit each year.

These may all be enumerated and calculated - but at what cost, at what accuracy, at what honesty ?

Now move along to the international carbon trades. Carbons coming from - where did you say ? China, India, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea. - all places or virtue and honesty ?

Who is doing the CO2 evaluation and counting over there ? You are buying the credits. Are you going to get a document written in Korean, signed by a government appointed "chemist" in return for your hard earned buck? Perhaps a party member engineer will sign off ?

Going back to just Canada, think of the tens of thousands of businesses. Where are all these specialized consultants going to come from. They will pop out of the woodwork for sure, but who are they. What financial incentives will be available ?

It goes on and on and on as so much in life is based on carbon - the basic building block of life.

Wanna know what will happen - there'll be a lot of cheating, corner cutting, estimations, omissions, errors etc.

Money will flow like sh*t through a goose, from business to the brokers, with a cut going to the consultants, and a cut going to the national /international traders.

If anyone thinks that gov\t will send out inspectors to check - ha, ha , ha !
The gov't will develop multiple layers of bureaucracy to impliment this game. Hundreds of pencil pushers with gobs and goobs of their own specialized consultants

Kaching, Kaching, Kaching !

Industry will be inundated with regulatory paperwork, threats, fines,
Somewhere along the line the CO2 Police will show up - think I'm joking ? Not at all. Just like the Ontario Ministry Environment Swat Police - little baby gestapo - boots and all - with a badge - and a clipboard, reading the riot act - extra points and promotions for the number of prosecutions and/or fines levied.

|Some legislation will come out allowing |[i] any Canadian citizen to lodge a complaint against violators [/b] which will have to be investigated to the fullest extent of the law - an enviro weenie's wet dream.


Groups like the Sierra Club will start civil litigations just to collect fees - companies will settle out of court for lower costs -

Kaching, Kaching, Kaching


Companies will begin to pack up shop.

Kiss your ass goodbye.
BC is .....ked


It's much deeper than this thumbnail, but think you see the tip of the iceberg

[Faramir]

Thanks fourhorses for offering some of your technical knowledge.

It does appear to be a nightmare and frankly if I were a company exceeding my allotment I would be tempted to fudge my figures. Heck, even if I was meeting or exceeding, I would cut corners, because I'd have to staff an entire department to be in charge of carbon credit compliance. To hell with that.

Great post - and worth thinking about.

[Faramir]

Sad, just as government are trying to reduce red tape, we are about to destroy industry over carbon credit red tape. This is something out of Atlas shrugged.

[styky]

Can We Atone for Our Energy Sins?
Media fawn over celebrities' 'carbon offsets' and fail to examine cost of carbon-trading programs.
By Julia A. Seymour
Business & Media Institute
3/7/2007 11:59:52 AM

Typically, green represents the deadly sin of envy, but with the media’s help it now also stands for hypocrisy.

In this case, the hypocrisy is media promotion of buying carbon offsets – giving a donation to an energy-saving project as penance for guzzling gas or jetting off to an exotic location. With Al Gore, Hollywood and other celebrities leading the way, the media have joined the excitement, encouraging individuals and companies to offset carbon dioxide emissions.

“If more people do it over time, it’s a good thing,” said reporter Russ Mitchell during the “Early Show” on CBS February 22.

Mitchell even undermined criticism of offsets during that same broadcast: “There are critics of carbon offsetting who say it allows people to feel less guilty about the way their lifestyle affects the environment. Most people who know about it, though, see it as – as a step in the right direction.”

Gore and others call it becoming “carbon neutral” and it is all the rage these days – just look who’s doing it: the Oscars, Dave Matthews, George Clooney. In fact, “carbon neutral” was the Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year in 2006.

To be carbon neutral, it’s as easy as buying a “carbon offset” or so proponents say. Then you can help save the planet from global warming and still fly to Cancun for that vacation. Online booking sites like Travelocity and Expedia even partner with companies that sell carbon offsets to consumers.

The companies then use the money for “carbon-reducing projects, such as renewable energy like wind and solar,” said CarbonFund.org’s Eric Carlson. He was interviewed on CBS “Early Show” February 22.

The media have supported not only individuals’ offsetting, but companies’ as well. NBC “Nightly News” praised shoe company Timberland on the February 3 broadcast for “not waiting for the government to take action” to stop global warming by reducing and offsetting emissions.

“20 tons of carbon each year for each American. All of that carbon adds to a layer of greenhouse gases that is warming the planet,” said NBC’s Tom Costello. “And it may take each one of us acting locally, to truly make a global difference.”

The “Wall Street mantra of ‘greed is good’ has been replaced by ‘green is good’,” CBS “Evening News” anchor Katie Couric declared on February 26.

But carbon offsetting might as well be a joke to economists and environmentalists.<a href=http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=030607D “Subsidizing ‘good’ energy in order to justify ‘bad’ energy is like eating salad in order to justify eating dessert. It is an exercise in self-deception,”</a> wrote economist and author Arnold Kling on March 6.

Jolly Green Hypocrite

Just a day after Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award at the “green” Oscars, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research cried foul over the former vice president’s green sermons.

“In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average,” the free-market think tank reported, pointing out the hypocrisy of Gore’s conservation message.

An article in The Tennessean defended Gore from the charges, claiming “green power” is used in the Tennessee mansion, and quoted spokeswoman Kalee Krider who said, “They, of course, also do the carbon emissions offset.”

But it turns out Gore purchases offsets through Generation Investment Management, a company he founded and chairs.

While Gore argues that his offsets and energy choices allow him to continue gallivanting around the world to spread the message of conservation, a BBC News article from February 20 said emissions offsets may actually be harmful.

BBC quoted Jutta Kill of the Forests and the European Union Resource Network (FERN), who said carbon offsetting does not reduce emissions and the public is being seriously misled.

Kill and several other environmentalists explained in the story that offset payments often go to tree planting and other projects, but “they are not actually neutralising their impact on the global environment.” The system is harmful, they said, because people believe action is being taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when they buy offsets.

Planting trees to make up for carbon emissions was also criticized by columnist Lorrie Goldstein of the Toronto Sun. “[T]o absorb most of the carbon dioxide caused by one passenger taking one domestic round-trip flight across Canada in 2007, requires planting 15 trees today that won't complete the job until 2047-2057, assuming none is destroyed by fire, disease or insects. If they are, they'll release their carbon back into the atmosphere.”

In a May 2006 Wired magazine article, in which Gore said he atoned for 1 million miles in global air travel for 2005, he also admitted average Americans are unlikely to practice carbon offsetting, which is “essentially a voluntary taxation system.”

But what if now-voluntary offsetting becomes mandatory?

Cap’n Who?

Carbon offsets are a choice for individuals and business who want to spend the money, but a legislative proposal called “cap-and-trade” would forcibly limit emissions by industry or the entire economy and act as a tax, according to some experts.

Al Gore has called global emissions trading, also called cap-and-trade, a “responsible approach to solving the climate crisis,” according to Newsweek.

Cap-and-trade is a two-part system. The “cap” is a government-imposed limitation on carbon emissions, either for industry or the entire economy. The “trade” is a government-created market to buy and sell pollution or greenhouse gas credits. Companies that remain under the limit can then sell credits so someone else can emit more gases than the cap allows. Essentially, high-emissions companies try to “offset” their own emissions by paying the lower-emitting companies.

A regional cap-and-trade system is in the works for the Western United States now that the governors of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington signed an agreement in late February.

The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post covered that story favorably on February 27 without including any critics. The Times even called it a “plan to curb global warming” and labeled it a “market-based” approach. Between the two stories, 10 individuals or groups were cited that support this cap-and-trade agreement.

But according to an editorial in the March 3-4 weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, it is not a market approach: “There’s no market here unless the government creates one.”

Kling, an economist and author who frequently writes for TCSDaily.com, called cap-and-trade “an entitlement policy, in which corporations would be given licenses to pollute, which they would then trade in a market.”

He then declared such entitlements a “tax and subsidy scheme” because companies that go over the government limit will essentially be taxed by having to purchase credits from another company.

The Wall Street Journal editorial called the companies lobbying for them “rent-seekers” in the March 3-4 weekend edition of the paper.

In her January 26 Journal column, Kimberley A. Strassel explained why 10 major companies, which banded together in the Climate Action Partnership, have called for a national limit on carbon dioxide emissions. Several are utility companies with investments in wind, hydroelectric and nuclear power, while others have invested in biofuels, but the bottom line is that each stands to make a profit and “simultaneously sock it to their competitors,” Strassel wrote.

Duke Energy CEO James Rogers explained it earlier this year: “If you’re not at the table when these negotiations are going on, you’re going to be on the menu.”

Winners and Losers

Cap-and-trade systems are promoted with the idea that the planet wins because emissions will be reduced and global warming will be mitigated, but that may not be the case.

Echoing Couric’s remark that “green is good,” Newsweek reported on corporate “climate change.” “[A]ny deal that reeks of greenhouse gases” sets off alarms at Goldman Sachs, who is “leading the greening of Wall Street,” according to the March 12 issue.

One legislator who has proposed cap-and-trade legislation is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). When CNN’s Miles O’Brien asked McCain about his support for a cap-and-trade system, McCain called it “a free market-based proposal that’s working in Europe [to reduce greenhouse gas emissions],” during the January 24 “American Morning.”

O’Brien did not disagree or mention any criticism of cap-and-trade during the interview – nor did he counter McCain’s claim about how well cap-and-trade is working in Europe.

“In truth, Europe's CO2 emissions are rising twice as fast as those of the U.S. since Kyoto, three times as fast since 2000,” wrote Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in the February 2 Washington Times.

Horner, the author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism,” also wrote in his book that the only countries in Europe that have significantly reduced emissions, with one exception, “did it the old-fashioned way: economic collapse.”

“Current emissions-trading schemes have proved to be little more than a shell game, allowing polluters in the developed world to shift the burden of making cuts onto factories in the developing world,” reported Newsweek International on March 12.

Decreasing emissions is no guarantee. But under cap-and-trade, rent-seeking companies work with the government to construct the market and invest in projects that will emit less carbon dioxide. They stand to profit while ordinary citizens and the poor lose as higher costs are passed on to them.

“Cap-and-trade proposals would be the largest single tax increase in the history of America,” Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said on February 14. “While certain large companies may benefit from these schemes, the American people would be greatly harmed, particularly the middle class, the working poor and low-income families.”

Horner agreed. “Carbon dioxide taxes and rationing schemes are regressive: they disproportionately affect poor people and seniors,” he wrote in his book.

In fact, this green plan may take quite a bit of green from your wallet.

“The environmentalist group Resources for the Future counted that cap-and-trade is actually about four times as expensive to the economy as an energy tax designed to achieve the same outcome,” wrote Horner.

In his book, Horner includes figures for the cumulative loss of gross domestic product by 2025 from three separate cap-and-trade policies that have been introduced in the Senate. The losses range from $331 billion to $1.4 trillion.

http://www.businessandmedia.org/article ... 15544.aspx

[styky]

Creators of carbon credit scheme cashing in on it

By Judi McLeod

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

There's an elephant in global warming's living room that few in the mainstream media want to talk about: the creators of the carbon credit scheme are the ones cashing in on it.

The two cherub like choirboys singing loudest in the Holier Than Thou Global Warming Cathedral are Maurice Strong and Al Gore.

This duo has done more than anyone else to advance the alarmism of man-made global warming.

With little media monitoring, both Strong and Gore are cashing in on the lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as "the world's first and North America's only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil."

Gore buys his carbon off-sets from himself--the Generation Investment Management LLP, "an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C." of which he is both chairman and founding partner.

To hear the saving-the-earth singsong of this dynamic duo, even the feather light petals of cherry blossoms in Washington leave a bigger carbon footprint.

It's a strange global warming partnership that Strong and Gore have, but it's one that's working.

Strong is the silent partner, a man whose name often draws a blank in the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of a beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the Unites States. That's because he spends most of his time in China where he works to make the communist country the world's next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is big cheese in the world of climate change, and is one of the main architects of the coming-your-way-soon Kyoto Protocol.

Gore is the glitzy, media approved front man in the partnership, the flashing neon lights on the global stage warning the masses of the end of Earth, as we know it, and Hollywood's poster boy for greening the silver screen.

The skeptics of man-made global warming believe that Gore and Strong have made climate change "the new religion". Climate change is not the first religion both parties have tried to make stick. Along with former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Strong, currently president of the Earth Council, has been boasting of replacing the Ten Commandments with the Earth Charter, a golden rule guide for how the masses should treat the environment.

Gore, who has given sermons at the United Nations sponsored Cathedral of St. John the Divine Church in New York City, is a promoter of the religion known as Gaia.

The two environmental gurus also share a belief in radical Malthusian population reduction. According to them, too many people, particularly in the U.S. are polluting the planet, emitting excessive Freon through their refrigerators and jacking up the air conditioning.

But the conduct of Al Gore and Maurice Strong in the capitalist world is one for the books. It's a side of them that may have remained unknown had it not been for the investigative talent of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of An Inconvenient Truth traveled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste.Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.

"Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day. First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm's registered lobbyist, and Gore's former top Senate aide," wrote EIR.

"Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers' cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.

"With Al Gore's Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal's stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding. When, in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers--including Maurice Strong--sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value. On Oct. 20, 1996--a Sunday--the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.

"On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a share.By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class action suit against the company and its directors. Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with Maurice Strong in another insider trading case, involving a Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was also a lead shareholder. The AZL case closely mirrored Molten Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong's role in scamming the value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before selling it off.

In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, the Korean man found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.

In that year, Gore, still U.S. vice president, was making news for "taking the initiative in creating the Internet."

The leaders of the man-made global warming movement, you might say, get around.

Meanwhile Jumbo's still in global warming's living room, but the duo with the tiniest carbon footprints on earth continue to just tiptoe past him.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/cover031307.htm

[styky]

Carbon confusion
Buying emission offsets is a challenge for consumers

Everyday, more and more environmentally conscious people flock to websites such as e-BlueHorizons.com in hopes of paying to offset their carbon emissions. Though popular, these "offsets" are not yet regulated, and consumers can't always be sure what they are buying. The video above is the story of one environmentalist, her $150, and the dubious ends to which it was put. (Video by Dina Rudick / Globe Staff)
By Beth Daley, Globe Staff | March 12, 2007

This is the second in a series of occasional articles examining climate change, its effects, and possible solutions.


-- Sara Demetry thought she had found a way to atone for her personal contribution to global warming.

The psychotherapist clicked on a website that helped her calculate how much heat-trapping carbon dioxide she and her fiance emitted each year, mostly by driving and heating their home. Then she paid $150 to e-BlueHorizons.com, a company that promises to offset emissions.

But Demetry's money did not make as much difference as she thought it would. While half of it went to plant trees to absorb carbon dioxide, the other half went to a Bethlehem, N.H., facility that destroys methane -- a gas that contributes to global warming. The facility has been operating since 2001 -- years before the company began selling offsets -- and Demetry's money did not lead the company to destroy any more methane than it would have anyway.

Moreover, the project received a "dirty dozen" award from a New England environmental group in 2004 because it burns the methane as fuel to incinerate contaminated water from the landfill, emitting tons of pollution each year in the process. This method of destroying methane can emit more pollution than other burning methods.

"I really thought I was doing something good," Demetry, 42, said after being told what became of her money. "I thought if I contributed this much money it would be helping the environment that much more."

Demetry's $150 purchase is part of the fast-growing world of voluntary carbon offsets -- an unregulated, largely on line marketplace.

Although specialists say some of the money is well spent, it can be difficult for consumers to figure out if they are buying any new environmental benefit.

Sales of voluntary offsets skyrocketed worldwide from $6 million in 2004 to $110 million last year, according to Abyd Karmali of ICF International a consulting firm.

Everyone from the Dixie Chicks to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain now invests in greenhouse gas-reduction projects to offset personal emissions. The projects can include planting trees, destroying methane, or harnessing wind, solar, or other types of renewable energy that reduce demand for fossil fuels. The trend is so hot that the New Oxford American Dictionary declared "carbon neutral" -- the balance between producing and reducing carbon -- the 2006 word of the year.

The Globe found more than 60 websites that sell offsets to US consumers, but there is no government oversight of these sites, nor is there a uniform standard for what constitutes a legitimate offset. Price and quality vary greatly.

Some websites provide scant information about the criteria they use to pick projects and how much they charge for overhead, making it difficult for consumers to sort out effective offsets from projects that have little true environmental value.<a href=http://www.boston.com/news/local/vermont/articles/2007/03/13/carbon_confusion/>Continued...</a>

[styky]

Canada Emissions Trade Seen Worth C$12 Bln - CIBC

TORONTO - A Canadian interprovincial emissions market, seen as part of a wider plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions, could be worth as much as C$12 billion (US$10.3 billion) a year, CIBC World Markets said Tuesday.


Emissions trading, which allows entities to buy and sell rights to produce greenhouse gases, takes place on a mandatory basis in Europe, while the Chicago Climate Exchange operates a voluntary US emissions trading market.
The Canadian government has said it will unveil regulations before the end of the month aimed at curbing industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

"It remains to be seen how a cap and trade system would be implemented in Canada -- or how much of that C$12 billion in emissions credits would be traded across provincial borders," CIBC chief economist Jeffrey Rubin said in a research note.

Rubin said that current emissions are skewed heavily to the western provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, due to the booming oil and gas industries, as well as to their high proportion of coal-fired electricity generation.

Those provinces, along with New Brunswick, are seen as heavy buyers of credits, while Quebec and Manitoba, which rely heavily on cleaner hydroelectric power, would likely be sellers.

"With an already-skewed distribution of greenhouse gas emissions looking to become even more unbalanced in coming years, it's easy to envision a healthy interprovincial trade in carbon permits," said Rubin.

He based the C$12 billion figure on a minimum price of C$30 per tonne of emissions and 2004 figures showing 410 megatonnes of annual carbon-equivalent emissions from industrial and commercial sources.

Greenhouse gas emissions are a hot-button issue for Canada's minority Conservative government, which could face an election in coming months.

The Toronto Stock Exchange plans to compete with the Montreal Exchange over a domestic emissions market.

Montreal owns a majority stake in the Montreal Climate Exchange, which is not yet operational, as it awaits government plans.

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory ... /story.htm

[styky]

You just new this was going to happen sooner or later......<a href=http://search.ebay.ca/search/search.dll?sofocus=bs&sbrftog=1&catref=C6&from=R10&satitle=carbon+credit&sacat=-1%26catref%3DC6&sargn=-1%26saslc%3D3&sadis=200&fpos=R3J+1P8&ftrt=1&ftrv=1&saprclo=&saprchi=&fsop=1%26fsoo%3D1&coaction=compare&copagenum=1&coentrypage=search&fgtp=>Buy carbon credits on EBAY</a>

[fourhorses]

You just new this was going to happen sooner or later......<a href=http://search.ebay.ca/search/search.dll?sofocus=bs&sbrftog=1&catref=C6&from=R10&satitle=carbon+credit&sacat=-1%26catref%3DC6&sargn=-1%26saslc%3D3&sadis=200&fpos=R3J+1P8&ftrt=1&ftrv=1&saprclo=&saprchi=&fsop=1%26fsoo%3D1&coaction=compare&copagenum=1&coentrypage=search&fgtp=>Buy carbon credits on EBAY</a>

"But it Now Price " $ 10.00 US or $11.56 Cdn


End time: 24-Mar-07 15:01:39 EDT
Ships to: Worldwide
Item location: Bridgeville, PA, United States
Quantity: 20 available

Item Description:
No Joke.
Go on doing what you do.
I will plant a tree for you.
In return, after planting your tree, I will email you a picture of me next to your tree. If you wish, I will email you a picture of your tree at it's one year birth of being planted. Do your part. Buy it now. $10
Thank you. All tree's will be planted on Arbor day, April 27, 2007.


--------------------

I know a another guy in PEI who is trying to purchase CO2 credits from the homeless for resale.

Go figure

.

[doggedlyright]

I give to give the ebay guy, credit for doing this.

IN Toronto, companies with the assistance of the City are planting areas with trees.

Now an enterprising you guy can sell pictures of these trees over and over to people for 10 bucks.

The carbon scam continues and filters down to the little guys on the street.

[styky]

Smith: Don't copy Gore's carbon credits use
JEFF SMITH
Tucson Citizen
The idea was so hilarious, I couldn't get anybody to run it in their newspaper.
Who'd-a-thunk Mr. Sensitivity Al Falfa-sprouts-green Gore would put on his straightest face and proclaim it to the world as his solution to global warming and an uncomfortably guilty conscience.
My idea was based on the modern concept of the physical plant. You will recognize it as that smallish adjacent building that sits beside every major office structure. What goes on in the physical plant is what goes on in every organism: processes that a tidy person - or corporation, institution or nation - wants nobody to notice.
My solution to this embarrassing inevitability, on the macro level, was to sub the job to some third-world country.
We could send them our private moments when even the family doctor averts his gaze.
But how does it grab you when the former vice-president boasts that his home in Dollywood is green as collards with possum haunches because he trades carbon credits through a brokerage that offsets his and Tipper's wretched excess against some third-world wood burner who's trying to keep her baby from freezing to death.
Of course it's not as simple as that. Never is. The complicated reality is a lot more loathsome, involving profits to carbon-trading companies that Gore and his political family helped found and operate, profits to brokers every time they buy or sell - just like pork bellies - and the customary convoluted tax laws that guarantee profitability to anyone with a clever (as in costly) lawyer.
Carbon credits are not something you and I are going to get with Google.
Thus the legacy of the Clinton administration: lace-shirted liberalism a la Marie Antoinette. If the food bank had some cake, we could buy some cake with our food stamps, if Clinton and Gore hadn't killed off the food stamps.
Well, never fear they're gonna kill off the greenhouse gases, especially with this bait-and-switch carbon brokering.
A rich, conscience-afflicted guy buys carbon credits from his profiteering broker, who takes his commission and pays a polluter somewhere in Musialstan to cut his pollution output in an amount equal to whatever the party of the first part needs to relieve his conscience. You tell me just how this is going to reduce global warming.
The first guilty party is too rich to be bothered with altering his lifestyle - or too busy, being important, famous, powerful or inspirational, like Al Gore.
The grubby guy on the other end is getting paid for being so dirty he can actually clean up his act using whatever minimal amount Al Gore's carbon credits amount to, stacked against the party of the second part's filthy footprint, and do so without breaking a sweat.
Plus he gets paid for sweeping a little dust under the rug. You think he's going to kill this golden goose?
I wouldn't insult your intelligence even by hinting so. But Al Gore would.
Gore's family home uses 20 times the electricity the average American home consumes. There's simply no excuse for this profligacy, especially from the avatar of the green gaseous conglomeration.
What comes most readily to mind is the curiously corrupt custom during the Civil War of substitution and commutation.
If a man were drafted and had no certifiable disability or qualifying family dependency, he could dodge the draft - and the bullets - by hiring another man to substitute for him or paying $300 to the government to commute his draft eligibility.
If this sounds as though it favors the rich over the poor, it goes to show some things never change.
The very idea of such a social inequity probably is an outrage to you now - it is to me - but remove the blood, sweat and tears from the equation and ask if allowing the wealthy to assuage their guilt today, and perhaps avoid civil penalties in the near tomorrow, is essentially different.
I would argue that it isn't.
And remember, Abe Lincoln was a Republican. Puzzle that out.
Columnist Jeff Smith is neither a Republican nor a carbon trader. He may be reached at (520) 455-5667 or jeffyboy@wildblue.net.
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/opinion/46973.php

[OC]

How carbon markets work

According to many politicians lining up behind the idea of greening the economy, cap-and-trade carbon markets are an ideal market-based solution to the problem of carbon emissions and, far from hindering the economy, promise economic opportunity instead by rewarding carbon efficiency with credits to sell as a sort of added value asset to a company's stock. Of course, by themselves markets would never in the first place have come up with the idea of trading something so intrinsically valueless as regulatory room for carbon outputs unless an artificial value had been forced on it through regulated scarcity, so calling it a market-based solution is a bit of corruption of idiom designed to confuse and mislead. Nevertheless, market actors will naturally respond to incentives even if they are artificial and arbitrary in making, and it is this characteristic of markets that political actors hope to steer to a desired effect. One must first suppose, of course, that the politicians who hope to be in charge of the carbon market regime will be somehow more immune to corruption in the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/05/ncarbon05.xml">allocation of carbon caps</a> than they are in their use of language to promote it.

But it turns out in any case that, as a proposition, economic opportunity itself is of far more interest to politicians as an abstract quality relating to vote potential than it is to businesses acting in the market. Businesses, we find out, are far more interested in financial opportunities instead. So what's the quickest and easiest path to carbon efficiency and realize the financial opportunity of marketable space under an emissions cap? As this post in the <a href="http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDZlODQyZjc0ZGI5NjFjMWVlM2Y4N2NkMGY1YjFjZjA=" target="blank">National Review</a> shows,, the most efficient method is to just stop making things, or stop making things in countries that impose caps and move production to countries that don't.

Now, in Galicia, a manufacturer announced that last year it earned more from selling credits than ceramics (reminding me of an email I once got in which a French pharma company announced that selling credits was where its future lies, not pharmaceuticals).

Their statement was couched in terms of thanking the government for generously (that is, "over-") allocating ETS credits to them (for free, as industry lobbyists already demand of Congress), and noted that with the credit price having skyrocketed (before collapsing) they were able to reap a windfall by selling what the government had given them. They lamented that the price collapse, however, indicated this wasn't, er, sustainable.

Buried in this however was the phrase that, taking that price spike into account, they had decided to "equalibriate" their operations so as to maximize profits with an ideal mix of selling allocations and using them by, well, using electricity to make stuff...which is to say they also went into the business of making nothing, dedicating more of their operations to the task, which is far less labor intensive. That is, they found it more profitable to partially shut down, to idle workers.

Political interventions in the market are designed to promote political objectives — it would be naive to suppose that they are actively calculated with genuine understanding or regard for the market at the same time. Even if an effectively unchecked exercise of control in any aspect of the market did not result in at least some corruption counter-productive to the scheme's intent — an unlikely prospect — its exterior and pre-eminent motives will result in perverse consequences for the market.

Paying people to make nothing is just the cost of doing business in the green economy. It's a sound scheme only as long as the money to pay for it is made from nothing as well. To be sure, there are financial opportunities at least in the green economy, but real economics will trudge on its implacable way without it.

posted by MapMaster at 4/23/2007 10:05:00 PM

http://thelondonfog.blogspot.com/2007/0 ... -work.html

[littleharbour]

Strong and Gore are both adherents to the Barnum and Bailey school of economics.

[styky]

Carbon boondoggles
Aid bureaucracies are the only winners when they repackage outdated development projects into supposed carbon savers

Grainne Ryder
Financial Post


Thursday, April 26, 2007


To reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, Canada's federal government plans to push Canadian corporations into buying carbon credits under the so-called "Clean Development Mechanism" (CDM), a system established under the Kyoto Protocol by which companies in rich countries buy "rights to pollute" from companies in poor countries. The poor-country companies, in exchange, promise to give up their own greenhouse-gas producing activities.

The scheme, if implemented on the large scale sought by its backers at the World Bank and other Western development agencies, may or may not lead to reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions in rich countries. It will certainly succeed in harming the environment and the livelihoods of millions of farmers, fishermen and indigenous peoples in the Third World.

Over the last four decades, Western development agencies such as the World Bank, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, and national aid agencies such as the Canadian International Development Agency, have financed massive hydro dams, the removal of Amazon forests, and industrial projects in the Third World, leading to the forced relocations of hundreds of millions of people from rural lands and the wanton pollution of urban communities. The development agencies were forced to back off only after opposition from local peoples became fierce through riots and hunger strikes, and public opinion in the West turned away from these ruinous megaprojects. Hundreds of hydro dams, rainforest highways, industrial tree plantations and other boondoggles have been cancelled as a result since the late 1980s.

Today, with the Kyoto treaty and Clean Development Mechanism strengthening their hand, the very same development agencies are now repackaging the boondoggles as carbon-saving projects qualifying for carbon credits that can be sold on the global carbon market.

To qualify as a CDM project, projects must be large-- the UN typically favours projects expected to save millions of tons of greenhouse gases per year. As a result, smallholders are being expropriated by large private or public corporations, or otherwise coerced into selling out. In the case of a CDM forestry project, for example, a land mass of about 1,000 hectares would need to be assembled. In countries where land holdings are small, the landholdings of hundreds of families would need to be assembled into plantations. Even in relatively prosperous countries such as tiny Costa Rica, where the average landholding of family plots is about 50 hectares, 20 farms would need to be assembled to create a single CDM project. To exacerbate the problem, the needed land assemblies will need to grow incessantly to meet UN targets. Costa Rica, total area five million hectares, needs to assemble at least 15,000 hectares per year to meet FAO targets, leading local community organizers and environmentalists to prepare for expropriation battles.

Most of the CDM projects to date are slated for India, which has about 350 CDM projects in the works, including large hydro dams and nuclear plants. India's record to date is not promising. For example, Jindal Steel and Power, which runs the world's largest spongeiron plant, is developing four CDM projects, courtesy of the sale of carbon credits and amid claims of forged documents that allowed the controversial projects to go through. These projects are being fought by 32 communities that have suffered air and water pollution in the surrounding area for years.

Likewise, villagers are protesting Nalwa Sponge Iron, MSP Steel, Salasar Industries, Shivshakti Factory and Anjani Steels -- all Indian CDM beneficiaries -- for polluting their croplands. In 2005, villagers resorted to blocking a national highway in protest against Monnet Steel Industries' plans to seize 120 hectares of their land. Protests also broke out in India against another land grab -- this one by Ind Agro Synergy, another firm with a UN-validated CDM project. Protests against CDM projects, in fact, are o ften the order of the day. They have occurred in Thailand, where protests have stalled a biomass power plant, and in West Bengal, where villagers oppose a textile factory's pollution, among numerous other examples.

Against the backdrop of CDM-created confrontation in developing countries that are presumably benefiting from the carbon credits, large questions arise as to whether CDMs even accomplish their goal of economically reducing greenhouse gases.

In the case of Costa Rica, studies by the FAO and the Forest and Climate Change Project in Central America concluded that they don't have the data to account for increased or decreased carbon storage since plantations began in the 1990s.

In Ecuador's Andes, an 8,000-hectare plantation set up by a group of Dutch power companies is absorbing far less carbon than expected. Because it is also prone to fires that release unanticipated carbon into the atmosphere, some now estimate that the net carbon balance is negative. As with other CDM projects, the local communities are aggrieved, claiming that their environment has been damaged and that the promised benefits -- well-paying jobs --never materialized.

In some cases, CDM projects fail because local opposition wins the day. In Uganda, where the indigenous Benet people were left homeless and hungry after their forest lands were expropriated to make way for a plantation, the courts have set back a CDM project after the Benet took the government to court. The Benet have won the right to return to their traditional land, with the right to farm, but the conflict is carrying on.

The only clear beneficiaries of CDM projects are the aid bureaucracies that oversee growing fiefdoms, and the corporations that have learned to game the system. A striking example of how Third World corporations cash in on CDMs came earlier this week, with revelations from India of SRF, a company that produces refrigeration gases. After spending a mere $3-million to reduce its emissions, SRF then used its CDM earnings to expand production of another greenhouse gas, one that is 100 times more damaging than CO2. SRF now stands to make a profit of $670-million from its expansion, paid for by British companies Shell and Barclays. In the last year, more egregious examples still have emerged. There can be no doubt that billions of dollars that could be well spent in legitimate development are being squandered on CDM schemes that are unwelcome in the Third World, where they do harm to the environment and the economy alike.

GrainneRyder@nextcity.com

- - - - Grainne Ryder is policy director at Probe International, a Toronto-based environmental group. www.probeinternational.org.

<a href=http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=6f2a8484-60e3-4c7b-a5d6-f4d053ba76cd>source</a>