Styky's sticky on Carbon Trading

[styky]

Cap-And-Trade For Babies?

Posted 10/19/2009 07:57 PM ET
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysi ... ?id=509554
Earth: An environmental writer mainstreams an idea floating around the green fringe — save the earth by population control and give carbon credits to one-child families. Are we threatened by the patter of little carbon footprints?

It's long been a mantra on the left that people are a plague on the earth, ravaging its surface for food and resources, polluting its atmosphere and endangering its species. Now we are endangering its very climate to the point of extinction. Even the result of our breathing — carbon dioxide — has been declared by the EPA to be a dangerous pollutant.

Treaties like Kyoto and the upcoming economic suicide pact to be forged in Copenhagen have focused on the instruments and byproducts of our civilization. Now the focus is shifting increasingly to the people who built it.

New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin participated in an Oct. 14 panel discussion on climate change with other media pundits titled "Covering Climate: What's Population Got To Do With It?" People who need people they are not.

Participating via Web cam, Revkin volunteered that in allocating carbon credits as part of any cap-and-trade scheme, "if you can measurably somehow divert fertility rate, say toward accelerating decline in a place with a high fertility rate, shouldn't there be a carbon value to that?"

He went on to say that "probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the light or driving a Prius, it's having fewer kids, having fewer children."

"More children equal more carbon dioxide emissions," Rivkin has blogged, wondering "whether this means we'll soon see a market in baby-avoidance carbon credits similar to efforts to sell CO2 credits for avoiding deforestation." Save the trees, not the children.

Rivkin's views are unfortunately shared by people with power and influence. Jonathon Porritt, chairman of Britain's Sustainable Development Commission, believes that "having more than two children is irresponsible" and that people should "connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint."

Earlier this year, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi defended federal contraceptive initiatives as an effort to "reduce costs to the states and to the federal government." For Pelosi, mother of five, the fewer the merrier.

Would this proposed carbon-credit carrot turn someday into a large stick? Would child exemptions disappear after the first child or worse?

After all, we have a White House communications director, Anita Dunn, who considers mass murderer Mao Zedong her favorite philosopher. China has its one-child policy, which it vigorously enforces.

[styky]

What's the real cost of global warming taxes?

By Dennis T. Avery
web posted November 2, 2009

The leftish Brookings Institution and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce basically agree that the energy taxes in the House Waxman-Markey bill could total $9 trillion over ten years. As an economist, I look at these forecasts and wonder "How can we possibly know?"

These estimates cover only the costs of the "user permits" that companies will have to buy. They don't even try to measure the massive reduction in our economic output as energy costs double and triple with scarcity.

Let's look at a couple of "case studies": <a href=http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/1109/1109gwtaxes.htm>continued</a>

[styky]

I'm shocked I tell you, shocked


Friends of the Earth attacks carbon trading
* Ashley Seager
* The Guardian, Thursday 5 November 2009

An FoE report says 'cap and trade' carbon markets have done little to reduce emissions but have been plagued by corruption and inefficiency

The government's reliance on carbon trading schemes is inefficient and could cause a financial crisis similar to that seen with sub-prime mortgages, says Friends of the Earth Link to this video

The world's carbon trading markets growing complexity threatens another "sub-prime" style financial crisis that could again destabilise the global economy, campaigners warn today.

In a new report, Friends of the Earth says that to date "cap and trade" carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions but have been plagued by inefficiency and corruption that render them unfit for purpose.

As the world heads towards the Copenhagen climate summit, Britain and other developed countries want to see carbon trading expanded worldwide. The carbon market, mainly based in Europe, was worth $126bn in 2008 and is predicted to mushroom to $3.1tn by 2020 if a global carbon market takes off.

However, FoE fears that the area has been hijacked by speculators on the financial markets. Sarah-Jayne Clifton, the report's author, said: "The majority of the trade is carried out not between polluting industries and factories covered by carbon trading schemes, but by banks and investors who profit from speculation on the carbon markets – packaging carbon credits into increasingly complex financial products similar to the 'shadow finance' around sub-prime mortgages which triggered the recent economic crash."

The FoE claims that the first phase of the European emissions trading scheme between 2005 and 2007 failed. And the second phase, from 2008-2012, is likely to fail too, it said. FoE is calling on governments to use more reliable instruments such as carbon taxes, which are harder to avoid and can be effective at changing people's behaviour and reducing emissions.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: "We agree that domestic action by developed countries as well as public finance is essential to meet the challenge of climate change and … the UK is going all-out to get an ambitious, fair and effective deal.

"But carbon trading can also play a role, making it far more likely that we tackle dangerous climate change, get cost-effective emissions reductions and get money to the poorest countries of the world."
<a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/05/friends-of-the-earth-attacks-carbon-trading/print>source</a>

[styky]

Is cap and trade world's largest Ponzi scheme?


By Bert Brown, For The Calgary Herald
November 9, 2009

In a world obsessed with global warming and climate change, the rhetoric rose to a fever pitch with Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, claiming that Manhattan Island would be under water if the ice on the poles melted. He claims the oceans would rise by seven metres, flooding coastal countries. Canadian climate studies in 2008 stated the ocean might rise up to half a metre.

Media embrace disaster. The reason for alarm was blamed on the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide gas released yearly into the atmosphere. Environmental scientists said the release of carbon dioxide into the air could be "one of the factors responsible for global warming." Newscasts responded with dire warnings that carbon emissions are responsible for every type of bad weather and natural disaster around the globe. From hurricanes to earthquakes, droughts to forest fires, even colder winters and lower world temperature are blamed on global warming.

In response to solving the problem of carbon in the atmosphere, the idea of "cap and trade" on carbon emissions was developed in Europe. European countries hailed the idea of putting a cap on industries that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide and rewarding those that don't emit as much. The plan would allow large polluting industries unable to reduce emissions to buy credits from those industries that had reduced or were capturing and storing carbon dioxide gas. An enthusiastic Britain gave out free credits. Buying and trading credits was set up and credit for a tonne of carbon went from free to $50 a tonne.

But cap and trade hasn't worked out so well. Credits fell to a few cents per tonne and emissions in some European countries actually increased.

Recently, cap and trade was described this way: If I had to lose 10 pounds of weight, but was given the opportunity to pay someone else who wasn't overweight for the "credit," wouldn't there still be the same amount of weight in the world?

A Copenhagen meeting of the G-20 countries convenes in December. Not a single country has published a step-by-step plan to reduce carbon emissions 50 per cent by 2050.

Recent news reports stated that a tonne of carbon would cost $200 to capture and store. Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson calculated a tonne of carbon would cost $761 to store, "the cap and trade argument is madness." A woman received a University of Manitoba grant to write her doctoral thesis on an audit of carbon emissions and her conclusion was $784 per tonne.

The controversial TDfunded report by the Pembina Institute and the Suzuki Foundation stated that capture and storage of the carbon emissions from the Alberta oilsands would cost the Alberta government $8 billion a year and may require rebalancing the transfer payments to the provinces.

On the other side of the often emotional argument about climate change and impending disaster, some scientists are doing an about face stating the world press exaggerated their concerns about carbon emissions and possible impact on climate change.

National Post columnist Lorne Gunter recently quoted a speech by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute, a leading climate modeller in the world and author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In Geneva, Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool."

Another group of scientists has suggested that the orbit of the Earth around the sun becomes elliptical with the alignment of the planets and thus every 10,000 years or so, the gravitational pull of the sun increases and can cause the Earth's axis to tilt and that directly effects global climate change.

A pamphlet from the Heartland Institute in Chicago asks the question, "Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?" by Anthony Watts. The study of 70 per cent of the 865 weather temperature stations in the United States concluded, "most of the surveyed temperature stations in the U.S. fall into categories that mean they are unreliable. Only 11 per cent of all stations are reliable." Because of their locations, "they are incompatible with continuous quality of measurements due to waste heat from industrial, government, and business processes." The U.S. weather stations had been considered the most accurate in the world.

It's inevitable that once a flag was raised by Al Gore's exaggerated danger to our Earth's climate, scientists would take another look at their first cautionary claims that carbon emissions could possibly affect climate change.

There are few among us who do not want to see less waste, less consumption of fossil fuels, who don't want cars (like the prototype Volt) to go 200 kilometres on a few litres of gas.

New homes are far more energy efficient through solar energy, better insulation, less energy-consuming appliances. People who live in cities can cut gas consumption in half by car pooling.

We must, as a world population, reduce our carbon output; why not charge more to the consumers, not the producers? One way or another, we will pay for the energy we use to travel and the energy consumed to manufacture the products we buy. Why not let those who consume more, pay more? It's the fair way to encourage us to consume less and pollute less.

Alberta Senator Bert Brown Is A Member Of The Senate's Energy, The Environment And Natural Resources Committee

<a href=http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/trade+world+largest+Ponzi+scheme/2200478/story.html>source</a>

[styky]

Cap-and-fraud fiasco

Massive scams threaten 'credibility' of carbon trading and could cost us billions

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

Last Updated: 17th December 2009
Forget the freak show in Copenhagen to embarrass Canada, led by radical greens with their tiresome "Fossil" awards, shamefully promoted by grandstanding Toronto Mayor David Miller, who "accepted" one claiming he, too, was embarrassed.

Ignore the destructive attacks by Ontario and Quebec on Alberta, proving premiers Dalton McGuinty, Jean Charest and their environmental mouthpieces, are the small men of Confederation.

Ignore the freaks who cut down our flag from Canada's High Commission in London, threatening to smear it with oil, the American "Yes Men" with their juvenile antics and European warmists comparing Canada to Saudi Arabia.

They're all buffoons.

Focus instead on the real scandal as 192 world leaders, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, gather in Copenhagen for their final, self-laudatory communique on climate change, which will declare victory and propose more UN meetings to save the planet.

The real scandal is that Europol, the European law enforcement agency, has uncovered a massive fraud by large-scale, organized crime in Europe's carbon trading markets.

Rob Wainwright, director of Europol's serious crime squad, told the Telegraph it has "endangered the credibility" of carbon trading.

Police estimate over $7 billion was stolen in just 18 months and say criminals may next target Europe's electricity and gas markets.

Up to 90% of all carbon trading in some European countries -- supposedly to help lower global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions -- may have been fraudulent.

The U.K., France, Spain, Holland and Denmark were hit. Denmark, according to the Guardian, passed emergency legislation related to the fraud just as the UN climate change meeting in its capital of Copenhagen was getting underway.

Fraudsters would set up in one country, buy tax-free carbon credits from other nations and then sell them domestically, adding on the value-added tax. But instead of forwarding those taxes to the government, they would disappear with the cash and set up somewhere else.

Canadians should care because Copenhagen is really about establishing a global cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions, in which Canada would have to participate.

$100 billion annually

Carbon markets -- led by Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) -- are already worth over $100 billion annually. Carbon trading -- whose earliest corporate backers were Enron's fraudsters because they saw an easy way to make money -- could be worth $3 trillion annually within a decade, twice the value of today's oil markets.

The stock used in carbon trading, a "carbon credit", gives the bearer the right to emit one tonne of carbon dioxide, allegedly because someone else didn't. Its value hinges entirely on the ability of governments to "cap" greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The system is only as strong as its weakest national regulator -- meaning opportunities for fraud are huge. One way of generating credits -- the UN's Clean Development Mechanism -- is rife with allegations of profiteering and corruption.

The ETS has driven up energy costs for consumers, provided windfall profits for big business and done nothing for the environment.

Canadian investors (public and private) could now be fleeced for billions, lowering our standard of living.

And when the speculative carbon market crashes, it will make the recent global stock market meltdown and recession look like a minor correction.

Finally, we'll be paying billions of our tax dollars annually to some of the world's most corrupt regimes, in the faint hope they'll lower their GHG emissions.

That's the real scandal in Copenhagen.

<a href=http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2009/12/17/12184076-sun.html>source</a>

[styky]

Cap and Trade in Practice
How to get paid for laying off workers.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 5330.html#
* DECEMBER 17, 2009

The world's carboncrats are beavering away this week on a vast new global cap-and-trade scheme that President Obama wants the U.S. to join. But before we do, maybe Americans should understand how this already works in practice. Union workers, take note.

The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 required signatories to reduce their carbon emissions, and the European Union in 2005 launched its own cap-and-trade system. The program sets a limit on carbon emissions, and companies are issued free carbon allowances that they can buy or sell based on their emissions needs.

Fast forward to this month's news that Corus, Europe's second-largest steel producer, is shuttering a giant U.K. steelmaking plant at Redcar, cutting 1,700 jobs. Corus blames the recession that has cut steel demand and says the British government hasn't done enough to help it.

Whatever the truth of that, there's little doubt that cap and trade made the closure much easier. The decline in steel production means European steelmakers have surplus carbon allowances. According to Carbon Market Data, a European research firm, in 2008 Corus had the second largest surplus of EU carbon allowances—7.5 million.

The EU is looking for ways to drive today's depressed allowance price of about $21 apiece back up to former highs of about $50, so Corus has the potential for a $375 million windfall. By closing Redcar's annual capacity of three million tons of steel, Corus will produce six million fewer tons of CO2. That means more carbon allowances, which could translate into about $300 million a year if credits hit $50. Corus is essentially being paid to lay off British workers.

Corus will also profit if it moves the production to India. As part of Kyoto, the United Nations created the Clean Development Mechanism to encourage Western companies to invest in developing-world factories. Participants are financially rewarded based on the amount of carbon they "save" with more efficient plants.

Corus was bought in 2007 by Tata, India's largest steel company. The Indian steel industry is set to more than double production to some 124 million tons a year by 2011-2012. Were Corus to move production to a "clean" Indian factory, it could receive hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the Clean Development Fund. The kicker is that none of this results in fewer carbon emissions. A Corus plant in India might be more efficient by Indian standards, but it will be no more efficient than Redcar.

We should add that all of this is precisely what Kyoto envisioned. The idea is to tax Western industry and then send the proceeds to developing countries as an incentive to join the anticarbon crusade. But unless governments close their borders to foreign investment, business will flow to where the carbon tariff is least punishing. China and India understand this, which is why they won't agree at Copenhagen to anything that reduces this advantage.

The Corus story also shows that cap and trade isn't really a free market. Markets develop to efficiently allocate resources and capital. Carbon cap and trade is a government-rigged market, in which carbon allowances are dispensed based on political influence. Such a system is ripe for manipulation, and Corus is merely the latest example.

To summarize: Cap and trade is a scheme that would impose heavy carbon taxes and allowances on U.S. industries, which would then have an incentive to move overseas themselves, or to sell those allowances to overseas companies that could use them to become more competitive against U.S. companies. Like the 1,700 Brits at Redcar, American workers would be the big losers.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page 11

[styky]

Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri
The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.
20 Dec 2009
No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.

The issue of Dr Pachauri’s potential conflict of interest was first publicly raised last Tuesday when, after giving a lecture at Copenhagen University, he was handed a letter by two eminent ‘climate sceptics’. One was the Stephen Fielding, the Australian Senator who sparked the revolt which recently led to the defeat of his government’s ‘cap and trade scheme’. The other, from Britain, was Lord Monckton, a longtime critic of the IPCC’s science, who has recently played a key part in stiffening opposition to a cap and trade bill in the US Senate.

Their open letter first challenged the scientific honesty of a graph prominently used in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and shown again by Pachauri in his lecture, demanding that he should withdraw it. But they went on to question why the report had not declared Pachauri’s personal interest in so many organisations which seemingly stood to profit from its findings.

The letter, which included information first disclosed in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, was circulated to all the 192 national conference delegations, calling on them to dismiss Dr Pachauri as IPCC chairman because of recent revelations of his conflicting interests.

The original power base from which Dr Pachauri has built up his worldwide network of influence over the past decade is the Delhi-based Tata Energy Research Institute, of which he became director in 1981 and director-general in 2001. Now renamed The Energy Research Institute, TERI was set up in 1974 by India’s largest privately-owned business empire, the Tata Group, with interests ranging from steel, cars and energy to chemicals, telecommunications and insurance (and now best-known in the UK as the owner of Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley Tea and Corus, Britain’s largest steel company).

Although TERI has extended its sponsorship since the name change, the two concerns are still closely linked.

In India, Tata exercises enormous political power, shown not least in the way it has managed to displace hundreds of thousands of poor tribal villagers in the eastern states of Orissa and Jarkhand to make way for large-scale iron mining and steelmaking projects.

Initially, when Dr Pachauri took over the running of TERI in the 1980s, his interests centred on the oil and coal industries, which may now seem odd for a man who has since become best known for his opposition to fossil fuels. He was, for instance, a director until 2003 of India Oil, the country’s largest commercial enterprise, and until this year remained as a director of the National Thermal Power Generating Corporation, its largest electricity producer.

In 2005, he set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.

However, since Pachauri became a vice-chairman of the IPCC in 1997, TERI has vastly expanded its interest in every kind of renewable or sustainable technology, in many of which the various divisions of the Tata Group have also become heavily involved, such as its project to invest $1.5 billion (£930 million) in vast wind farms.

Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.

Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.

Even odder is the role of TERI’s Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to “sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries’ concerns about energy and the environment”.

TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world’s largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives much of its own funding from the EU) and two world leaders in the international ‘carbon market’, between them managing more than $1 trillion (£620 billion) worth of assets.

All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.

Under the CDM, firms and consumers in the developed world pay for the right to exceed their ‘carbon limits’ by buying certificates from those firms in countries such as India and China which rack up ‘carbon credits’ for every renewable energy source they develop – or by showing that they have in some way reduced their own ‘carbon emissions’.

It is one of these deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to transfer three million tonnes of steel production from its Corus plant in Redcar to a new plant in Orissa, thus gaining a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (and putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).

More than three-quarters of the world ‘carbon’ market benefits India and China in this way. India alone has 1,455 CDM projects in operation, worth $33 billion (£20 billion), many of them facilitated by Tata – and it is perhaps unsurprising that Dr Pachauri also serves on the advisory board of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the largest and most lucrative carbon-trading exchange in the world, which was also assisted by TERI in setting up India’s own carbon exchange.

But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world’s top ‘climate-change official’.

In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in ‘sustainable technologies’, where he was expected to provide the Fund with ‘access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level’,

In 2008 he was made an adviser on renewable and sustainable energy to the Credit Suisse bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined the board of the Nordic Glitnir Bank, as it launched its Sustainable Future Fund, looking to raise funding of £4 billion. He became chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, whose CEO was confident it could soon raise £100 billion.

In the same year he became a director of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva, set up by EDF and E.On, two of Europe’s largest electricity firms, to promote ‘bio-energy’. This year Dr Pachauri joined the New York investment fund Pegasus as a ‘strategic adviser’, and was made chairman of the advisory board to the Asian Development Bank, strongly supportive of CDM trading, whose CEO warned that failure to agree a treaty at Copenhagen would lead to a collapse of the carbon market.

The list of posts now held by Dr Pachauri as a result of his new-found world status goes on and on. He has become head of Yale University’s Climate and Energy Institute, which enjoys millions of dollars of US state and corporate funding. He is on the climate change advisory board of Deutsche Bank. He is Director of the Japanese Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and was until recently an adviser to Toyota Motors. Recalling his origins as a railway engineer, he is even a policy adviser to SNCF, France’s state-owned railway company.

Meanwhile, back home in India, he serves on an array of influential government bodies, including the Economic Advisory Committee to the prime minister, holds various academic posts and has somehow found time in his busy life to publish 22 books.

Dr Pachauri never shrinks from giving the world frank advice on all matters relating to the menace of global warming. The latest edition of TERI News quotes him as telling the US Environmental Protection Agency that it must go ahead with regulating US carbon emissions without waiting for Congress to pass its cap and trade bill.

It reports how, in the days before Copenhagen, he called on the developing nations which had been historically responsible for the global warming crisis to make ‘concrete commitments’ to aiding developing countries such as India with funding and technology – while insisting that India could not agree to binding emissions targets. India, he said, must bargain for large-scale subsidies from the West for developing solar power, and Western funds must be made available for geo-engineering projects to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.

As a vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri repeated his call for the world to eat less meat to cut down on methane emissions (as usual he made no mention of what was to be done about India’s 400 million sacred cows). He further called for a ban on serving ice in restaurants and for meters to be fitted to all hotel rooms, so that guests could be charged a carbon tax on their use of heating and air-conditioning.

One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials.

As for TERI itself, Dr Pachauri’s main job for nearly 30 years, it is so coy about money that it does not even publish its accounts – the financial statement amounts to two income and expenditure pie charts which contain no detailed figures.

Dr Pachauri is equally coy about TERI’s links with Tata, the company which set it up in the 1970s and whose name it continued to bear until 2002, when it was changed to just The Energy Research Institute. A spokesman at the time said ‘we have not severed our past relationship with the Tatas, the change is only for convenience’.

But the real question mark over TERI’s director-general remains over the relationship between his highly lucrative commercial jobs and his role as chairman of the IPCC.

TERI have, for example, become a preferred bidder for Kuwaiti contracts to clean up the mess left by Saddam Hussein in their oilfields in 1991. The $3 billion (£1.9 billion) cost of the contracts has been provided by the UN. If successful, this would be tenth time TERI have benefited from a contract financed by the UN.

Certainly no one values the services of TERI more than the EU, which has included Dr Pachauri’s institute as a partner in no fewer than 12 projects designed to assist in devising the EU’s policies on mitigating the effects of the global warming predicted by the IPCC.

But whether those 1,700 Corus workers on Teesside will next month be so happy to lose their jobs to India, thanks to the workings of that international ‘carbon market’ about which Dr Pachauri is so enthusiastic, is quite another matter.
<a href=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847227/Questions-over-business-deals-of-UN-climate-change-guru-Dr-Rajendra-Pachauri.html>continued</a>

[styky]

Lawyers, not engineers, key to carbon capture

By BOB WEBER The Canadian Press
Mon. Dec 28 - 4:46 AM

EDMONTON — Before you start putting carbon in the ground, you first have to put lawyers in a room.

After a year that saw billions of dollars in public funds sprayed around a variety of carbon capture and storage pilot projects, the focus in 2010 will shift from splashy press conferences to quiet boardrooms where officials will work out exactly how all that money will be spent.

"We’re currently working on grant agreements," says Karen Karbashewski of Alberta Energy. "We expect to have them signed early in the new year."

The province doled out about $2 billion in 2009 to back a series of large-scale, real-world projects to collect carbon dioxide from emitters, pipe it to a wellhead and inject it deep underground.

But skeptics warn making the technology an effective weapon in the fight against climate change — which federal and provincial governments are counting on — will take a lot more than working out funding details.

"At the same the governments of Canada and Alberta are providing significant subsidies for carbon capture and storage, we haven’t even announced an outline for a national approach to reducing greenhouse gases," says Simon Dyer of the Pembina Institute, an environmental think-tank.

Last fall saw a series of high-profile funding announcements.

In October, Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited a coal-fired power plant west of Edmonton to unveil $779 million in federal and provincial money for a project that could, in about five years, be injecting about one million tonnes of CO2 deep underground every year.

The previous week, Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt was in Edmonton to announce an $865 million federal-provincial subsidy for a $1.35-billion carbon capture and storage project at Shell’s Scotford oilsands upgrader. <a href=http://thechronicleherald.ca/Canada/1159670.html>continued</a>

[styky]

Carbon trading fraud in Belgium – “up to 90% of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities”
12 01 2010

From the <a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jan/11/eu-carbon-trading-carousel-fraud>Guardian:</a>

Belgian prosecutors highlighted the <a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/03/copenhagen-summit-carbon-trading-scam>massive losses faced by EU governments from VAT fraud</a> today after they charged three Britons and a Dutchman with money-laundering following an investigation into a multimillion-pound scam involving <a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/carbon-emissions>carbon emissions</a> permits. <a href=http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/12/carbon-trading-fraud-in-belgium-up-to-90-of-the-whole-market-volume-was-caused-by-fraudulent-activities/>continued</a>

[styky]

The next big scam: carbon dioxide

Attempts to create markets for tradeable CO2 are shaping up to be the next Oil-for-Food-sized fraud

By Patricia Adams

Deloitte Forensic calls it “the white collar crime of the future.” Kroll, a business risk subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan, the global professional services firm, calls it “a fraudster’s dream come true.”

These two global financial services firms are referring to carbon trading markets, a business that is estimated to explode from $132-billion in 2009, mostly in the European Union, to $3-trillion by 2020 as jurisdictions around the world join in carbon trading, part of the “cap and trade” system that governments are embracing.

Under cap and trade, companies need permits for the right to emit CO2 as part of their operations. The permits, in effect, guarantee that excess carbon emissions will be “offset” by third parties that will, for example, sequester carbon by growing trees. These permits, which are being traded on carbon exchanges, akin to stock exchanges, have caught the attention of law enforcement officers, who have seen an upsurge in fraud.

<a href=http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2010/01/13/the-next-big-scam-carbon-dioxide.aspx>Click here to read more</a>... (Financial Post)

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I'm shocked I tell you shocked

Graft Threatens Indonesia's Carbon Offset Billions: Report

JAKARTA - Billions of dollars set to flood into Indonesia under a U.N.-backed forest protection scheme are at risk because of graft unless the country puts strong oversight mechanisms in place, a report released on Tuesday warned.

Indonesia has the world's third largest area of tropical forest and stands to gain billions of dollars every year from a proposed greenhouse gas offset scheme called reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) that was formalized at recent global climate talks in Copenhagen. (Reuters)............ <a href=http://planetark.org/wen/56317>continued</a>

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Cross link

http://www.freedominion.com.pa/phpBB2/v ... p?t=127288

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[styky]

Alternate title..........Carbon traders forced to look for "real jobs"


Carbon Traders Fear Pink Slips

Date: 12-Mar-10
Country: US
Author: Timothy Gardner - Analysis
Wall Street was supposed to become the capital of a global carbon trading market worth a trillion dollars a year but now many who thought green trading desks would be the next big thing are fearing the pink slip. <a href=http://planetark.org/wen/57098>continued</a>

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Cap and Trade: A Gigantic Scam

As I pointed out in December:

James Hansen - the world's leading climate scientist fighting against global warming - told Amy Goodman this morning that cap and trade not only won't reduce emissions, it may actually increase them:

The problem is that the emissions just go someplace else. That’s what happened after Kyoto, and that’s what would happen again, if—as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, they will be burned someplace. You know, the Europeans thought they actually reduced their emissions after Kyoto, but what happened was the products that had been made in their countries began to be made in other countries, which were burning the cheapest form of fossil fuel, so the total emissions actually increased...

See also <a href=http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/12/worlds-leading-global-warming-crusader.html>this</a> and <a href=http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-leaders-of-the-rich-world-are-enacting-a-giant-fraud-1837963.html>this</a>.
Environmental groups such as <a href=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8343489.stm>Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace</a> are also against cap and trade (and see <a href=http://www.foe.org/subprimecarbon>this</a> and <a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/05/friends-of-the-earth-attacks-carbon-trading>this</a>), as is the <a href=http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/12/head-of-californias-cap-and-trade.html>head of California's cap and trade program</a> for the EPA.

Hansen also told Goodman that (notwithstanding Paul Krugman's assertions) most economists say that cap and trade won't work:

I’ve talked with many economists, and the majority of them agree that the cap and trade with offsets is not the way to address the problem.

As I have previously pointed out:

* The economists who invented cap-and-trade say that it won't work for global warming

* European criminal investigators have <a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/03/copenhagen-summit-carbon-trading-scam>determined</a> that there is a tremendous amount of fraud occurring in the carbon trading market. Indeed, organized crime has <a href=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/14/fraud-europes-cap-trade-red-flag-critics-say/>largely taken over</a> the European cap and trade market.

* Former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro <a href=http://www.carbontax.org/blogarchives/2009/06/03/waxman-markey-politics-as-usual-meets-climate-change/>says</a> that the proposed cap and trade law "has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives."

* Our bailout buddies over at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and the other Wall Street behemoths are buying heavily into carbon trading (see <a href=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704500604574481812686144826.html>this</a>, <a href=http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/10/27/street-cred-goldman-sachs-buys-into-carbon-credit-developer/>this</a>, <a href=http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-BusinessofGreen/idUSTRE58D3MH20090914?sp=true>this</a>, <a href=http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/goldman-sachs-buys-into-carbon-offsets/>this</a>, <a href=http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2008/05/trading-sub-prime-carbon-52326>this</a>, <a href=http://www2.goldmansachs.com/services/advising/environmental-markets/business-initiatives/trading-and-cap-markets.html>this</a> and <a href=http://www2.goldmansachs.com/ideas/environment-and-energy/goldman-sachs/low-carbon-world.pdf>this</a>). As University of Maryland professor economics professor and former Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission Peter Morici <a href=http://www.counterpunch.org/morici12052008.html>writes</a>:

Obama must ensure that the banks use the trillions of dollars in federal bailout assistance to renegotiate mortgages and make new loans to worthy homebuyers and businesses. Obama must make certain that banks do not continue to squander federal largess by padding executive bonuses, acquiring other banks and pursuing new high-return, high-risk lines of businesses in merger activity, carbon trading and complex derivatives. Industry leaders like Citigroup have announced plans to move in those directions. Many of these bankers enjoyed influence in and contributed generously to the Obama campaign. Now it remains to be seen if a President Obama can stand up to these same bankers and persuade or compel them to act responsibly.

In other words, the same companies that made billions off of derivatives and other scams and are now getting bailed out on your dime are going to make billions from carbon trading.

One the largest boosters for cap and trade <a href=http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/12/woman-who-invented-credit-default-swaps.html>invented credit default swaps</a> - which were supposed to increase financial stability, but instead were a large part of the reason that the world economy crashed last year

Jeanne Roberts <a href=http://www.celsias.com/article/emissions-related-tax-fraud-surrounds-eu-carbon-pr/>provides</a> an update at environmental website Celsius:

The E.U. carbon emissions trading fraud is huge, but perhaps nothing compared to the potential for cheating that will become available in the United States once Waxman-Markey, or some similar scheme for reducing carbon emissions, emerges from the Senate to become law.

***

As Bloomberg notes, a carbon trading market organized around derivatives (sometimes known as credit default swaps, or CDS) is “open to manipulation,” in the words of billionaire hedge fund investor George Soros.

In fact, some old-school environmentalists see the whole carbon trading scheme as not a way to curb climate change, but merely a way to make the rich even richer at the expense of the rest of us. As Larry Lohmann, the founding member of the Durban Group for Climate Justice, says, “Dishonesty is rife throughout the carbon offset market.”

In January, investigators from Belgium said that in some E.U. countries, 90 percent of the market volume in carbon trading was based on criminal activities.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/05/ ... -scam.html