A Financial Times investigation into this century’s version of the tulip trade*;
A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.
Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.
The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a “green gold rush”, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go “carbon neutral”, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.
The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.
The FT investigation found:
■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.
■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.
■ Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.
Previous: Terrapass– Business Week investigates the carbon offset trade.
What else could be expected when science à là Tammany Hall is put into play?
I’d watch for how the greeies try to wing-ding their way out of it.
the key points sound like the liberal sponsorship legacy.
-little or no value
-worthless
-brokers
The real crime would be not to take a stupid person’s money.
There was a talented cone artist in Russia, whose name was Mavrodi. He founded a company called MMM and started issuing so called ‘tickets’ and putting them for sale. MMM was the only authority that set the current price at which the tickets could be bought back. The prices have gone up about 100 times when the balloon exploded: it was almost physically impossible to sell at the higher prices due to the huge lineups at the MMM office buying windows, but the selling windows were always available. People bought the tickets at higher and higher prices, but could not realize the ‘profit’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_(pyramid)
Find any similarities?
It appears “carbon trading” has the makings of a massive worldwide scam.
Will Canadain MSM investigate the workings of
“Carbon trading” in Canada or will it be left for the internet to do the dirty work?
In my view if Canadian MSM pimps “carbon trading” as a sop to the boiling earth, Suzuki-Gore lot, the more Canadians should suspect MSM as enablers of those corporations involved in the carbon trading business.
Gee , for the life of me I just can’t figure out why regulating an invisible , necessary to life , odorless gas would be such a chore .
It’s really quite funny how so many of our sophisticated and cynical generation aren’t clever enough to “follow the money”.
I guess when it comes to a pet “cause”, overseen by the Anti-Bush, they are suddenly struck blind, and dumb.
I like to print up my own carbon credits on my inkjet and use them to start the barbecue.
PM Harper was right about carbon offsets. Every dollar spent on carbon offsets is a dollar wasted, and a drain on wealth-producing nations.
As the Liberals made clear with their self-congratulatory passing of Kyoto (followed by… nothing), western actions on global warming are largely about self-congratulatory appearance rather than substance.
Compliant and complacent populaces will be content to be told that Kyoto targets are being reached, regardless of the actual effect on global warming, which, if Kyoto succeeds, will range from miniscule to infinitessimal.
Sound pollution-curbing measures can be supported by all, but C02 is not a pollutant, and this is not just dumb, it’s scary.
Meanwhile, now that we know that northern trees are “bad”, will the environmentalists be apologizing to the clear-cutters who were doing their utmost to rid the world of the scourge of C02?
Bwahahahahah…and then the poor little greenie who put all his money into his carbon credits can laugh all the way to his nice little mud hut.I say carry on. The less money in the hands of twits who believe this hoax,the better.
Carbon credits remind me of funny-money like the 1961 Diefendollar.
Check it out at
http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/fr/collection/artefacts/M999.66.1.2
I like the fact that you connected this to that great boondoggle of the Tulip Trade!
That idea was tickling the back of my mind for a while and I never got to the point of articulating it! But oh my … how apropos!!!
The theme music for this should be ‘Crime of the Century’ by Supertramp!
This is about THE MONEY. It maybe that assorted despots and dictators will get richer with this scheme. Those that it the trading business, these are the low life bottom feeders, will make a lot of money with hardly any investments at all, with support of governments, how can you go wrong.
The unfortunate part is that the crowd that says, hit me again, will be just asking for more controls and will not read the valid information that does not support these theories full of hot air, in fact makes it clear that climate cycle is a natural occurrence.
One clearly can not avoid saying it, then repeat the obvious: FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Go ahead and laugh, but it ain’t gonna seem so funny when this multibillion-dollar skimming operation shows up – real soon – in the cost of everything you need, your utility bills, your grocery bill…
Now they are planning the scam of the century
Well what will it be?
Read all about their schemes and adventuring
Its well worth a fee
The GREEN plan and see
And they scrape the balance sheet
How they’ve gone from bad to worse
Who are these men of lust, greed, and glory?
Rip off the masks and let see.
But thats not right – hey greens, whats the story?
Theres you and there me
we’re all green as can be
cant be the best
The Ascension of Saint Suzuki
Patron Saint Suzuki of the Global Warming Fuss
Harangued the carbon sinners from his diesel pulpit bus.
From his wingy, island redoubt, all across the land
He brought the Sacred Message, that carbon must be banned.
Across the prairie powr’d the bus on its own big carbon wave
“I sin myself”, the Saint declared,” that you all might be saved.
And if the message requires that I must sin yet more
You will buy my carbon credits from my Fellow Saint, Al Gore.”
But as He did address the crowd, a gentle wind did waft
Then came a hot air thermal that bore the Saint aloft
He rose above the treetops, he rose above the hill
The thermal gust continued and He may be rising still.
When His words were heard no more and His Body out of sight
A hand appeared within the clouds and then began to write:
“By this sign shall ye know the truth, in spite of His loud rants,
‘Tis the sun that warms the earth; the carbon just feeds plants.”
Verse inspired, in part, by the illustration of this phenomenon of nature, which can be found in the editorial cartoon in the Wpg. Free Press of March 3, 2007.
Thank God the US markets are atill Laissez faire and unmanipulated enough to still reject vacuous marketing premises.
Unfortunately in Canada we should worry as we do not have demand economics here nor a free market…we have a deep government intervention in trading and productivity and a deeply entrenched corporate welfare/protectionist culture here that will openly embrace the concepts of being paid to not produce…subsidized for maketing thin air…it’s a natural for the anti-competative corporate welfare clientel who have helped establish the corporate-bureaucratic Canadian kleptocracy.
The fellas who know how to turn a buck from this scam also have one strength that keeps ’em in the money chain: they know how to give succor to scientists, a group of people who were formerly used to being shut out of the social mainstream. This kind of people-massaging was what the real Tammany Hall was good at too.
As I mentioned in an earlier post you do not have to know anything about carbon credits to know it’s doomed to failure. Just look who’s promoting it and even more so who’s running it. Just look at the source, stupid will always be stupid, only sheeple look at it as being right and usefull.
The FT investigation sounds just like Auditor General Sheila Fraser’s reports, namely a litany of malfeasance.
The financial markets need another Enron inspired wipeout like a hole in the head.
Lets have some fun:
“In particular, they tell us that, on February 24, 1637, the self-regulating guild of Dutch florists, in a decision that was later ratified by the Dutch Parliament, announced that all futures contracts written after November 30, 1636 and before the re-opening of the cash market in the early Spring, were to be to [sic] interpreted as option contracts. They did this by simply relieving the futures buyers of the obligation to buy the future tulips, forcing them merely to compensate the sellers with a small fixed percentage of the contract price.”
“In particular, they tell us that, on February 24, 2007, the self-regulating guild of Kyoto Environmentalists, in a decision that was later ratified by the Energy Parliament, announced that all futures contracts written after November 30, 2006 and before the re-opening of the cash market in the early Spring, were to be to [sic] interpreted as option contracts. They did this by simply relieving the futures buyers of the obligation to buy the future tulips, forcing them merely to compensate the sellers with a small fixed percentage of the contract price.”
Carbon mania coming to city near you.
When I buy tulips it is for my garden, when I buy carbon it is most often for my fuel tank.
Can I buy a carbon futures contract to protect myself from rising energy prices?
Sure you can!!
My name is Kenneth Lay and here is my friend Jeffrey Skilling. We can launder your money so cleanly even the makers of Tide detergent will be em-bare-assed.
The scams will be exposed and then of course the UN will be asked to save the day. Nice little start to a worldwide UN governed plunder and tax system.
Can’t say this surprises me that much. I’ve long since noticed that there are no real enforcement/audit/verification mechanisms in Kyoto — which gave me and a buddy of mine the idea to become stinkin’ filthy rich simply by selling “carbon offsets” to all comers, complete with fancy-shmancy certificates of “carbon neutrality” that we’d send to our mark… er, clients in the mail (or, if they’d prefer that we not kill trees, we’d send them a PDF via e-mail, for a small additional fee, of course).
My one regret? It looks like a bunch of other people have beaten us to it… Ah well, there may be a strictly limited supply of resources, but there appears to be an essentially infinite supply of the gullible out there. I’m sure another opportunity will present itself soon enough.
There are two very different market maxims that I think of when I consider “carbon offset trading.”
“The money is being returned to its rightful owner.”
“There is no sense in being stupid if you can’t prove it.”
It is the latter that I particularly like when I heard of the Goracle throwing his money away on carbon offsets, although, I have to give him credit since he was an owner of the company he sold too!
When I was younger, I planted tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of trees. I was paid a pittance, but now I’m wondering – did I build myself a legacy? Should I be selling myself as a carbon credit? Am I qualified to buy an SUV? I also helped kill a bunch of mountain pine beetles, thus preserving a few trees for a couple of more years. Does that count? Who makes the rules? Where can I pick up a set? Because I’ve been such a model citizen will I get a discount? Enquiring minds want to know.
Gore is holding onto his own, no wonder he looks bloated, selling carbon offsets to his own company,he can’t lose.
The real losers are the ones listening to the big fat-head. Big ass too in more ways than one.
Use some common marketing sense here folks.
“Trading” in credits for the production or consuption of a common atmospheric inert gas that humans produce with each breath and plants consume like fertilizer is a game for suckers.
First, it is insane to trade in any commodity with as infinite supply as CO2…Trading in frains of sand is even more tangible.
…second the measurement of the consuption or reduction of this inert gas is as imprecise and prone to fraud as anything can be.
You are, de facto, selling and buying thin air purely on the speculation of the integirty of the buyer or seller who have no way of empirically examining the quantities of the comodity they trade in have actually been exchanged.
Calling this thin air “market” ludicrous is an understatement….it is a rogues game…concieved by scoundrels and confidence men to enrich themselves at the expense of the self-deprecating gullible.
This environmental movement has the same markings as the Catholic church during the Medieval times. First, they want to silence those who claim that global warming is nothing more than a theory as “deniers”, which was the church’s equivalent to heretics, and now they want to sell carbon credits to those who are heavy polluters like Al Gore, which is similar to indulgences, money that you paid to the church if you sinned. The environmental movement will eventually fly apart when another Great Depression or war starts. The world economy can only support this snakeoil nonsense as long as there is money by the trainload floating around. When it disappears, people will care less about the environment and more about survival.
Umans are prone to blowing bubbles; bubbles is not the next door.
If you have the original of Hogarth’s print, let moi know; it’s next to worthless, really.
…-
Hogarthian image of the South Sea Bubble, by Edward Matthew Ward, Tate Gallery …
J. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Cresset Press, London 1960). …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_South_Sea_Company
They say a fool and their money are soon parted.
That is as it should be.
What I object to is the government making stupid manditory for all of us.
A Liberal’s Prayer:
You can fool all the people some of the time.
You can fool some of the people all the time.
But you can’t fool all the people all the…
Well, hell, maybe you can try. 😉
Kakola,
You raise a really good point. Who owns the carbon credit. Clearly the company owning the emission owns the problem of reducing.
So is it below a certain level that you get credit? SO is there an incentive to build a really bad emission producer only to falsely improve it.
Imagine you build a plant with all of the carbon emissions equipment, you leave it turned off for the initial measurement period. Then you turn on the equipment and get this amazing decrease in carbon emissions….do you have a credit to sell, will companies game the credits by managing their emissions to create a market or increase value, some will.
Could you set up a business to emit carbon and then get others to pay you to stop, by stopping and selling the credit?
All of these options could exist if a trading market is not built properly. Markets require cetification, liability , enforcement, trust, property rights. Not saying it cant be done but the FT article just points to what I would have been concerned about…how does Al Gore or anyone know that their “credit” actually offset the carbon they emitted, and what if it doesnt, who would you sue, and what are the damages and to whom would those damages flow.
And could you as a carbon emuitter now be sued by others because you didnt exercise due and proper care in figuring out if your credit was valid or not……what an amaing asshole we can all disappear up….
Meanwhile back in Afghanistan Osama Bin Laden doesnt care about his carbon footpirnt, purchasing credits or any other such nonesense….just saying
Liberals usually only have to fool around 40% of the people on voting day.
I just wish the conservatives would stay conservatives in office.
I like the latest – Because of the massive economic dislocation of Russia with the implosion of Communism – they have been awarded simassive credits. Now Gazprom which sells natural gas to Europe is marketing gas and at more profit – offseeting credits for the gas – so you get to sell the same thing twice – only in U.N. land!
My questions:
HOW are greenhouse gas emmisions measured -that is colourless, odourless carbon dioxide and water vapour (steam).
WHO measures these almost virtually unmeasurable non polluting emmisions?
(hmmmmm – Liberal brown baggers probably already lining up I would think – just like the corrupt home energy auditors in the old Liberal home energy retrofit program thankfully revised now)
WHO are these “measurements” then reported to? (more Liberal brownbaggers lining up)
WHO are these true or manipulated figures then reported to?
You know the old “mafia” trick of paying off the construction inspectors? THIS scam will be even more lucrative and organized crime, Liberals and other corrupt people don’t even have to DO anything!!!!!
Sheesh. A business could shut down half of their activity, lay off a whack of staff and then get paid credits for literally doing LESS!!!
Are we NUTS!!!!!!!
The scams will be exposed and then of course the UN will be asked to save the day. Nice little start to a worldwide UN governed plunder and tax system.
Posted by: irwin daisy at April 26, 2007 10:57 AM
———————-
Irwin,
That got me to thinking: will the U.N. do anything about those polluting Kassam rockets that the terrorists shoot into Israel?
Not likely, I’ll bet.
Enter Dwight Duncan, Ont Environment Minister, for another side of this CO2 studpidity. He announced that scrubbers would not be installed on coal fired generating plants because, gasp, they only get rid of smog (ie-real pollution), and not CO2.
So, in the world according to moonbat, not only will we spend vast $$$ on tulips, I mean carbon credits, we will only spend money on technologies that capture CO2, even if they reduce pollution. Why am I not surprised?
Mississauga Matt, just you wait…there is a carbon-reduced weapon that can be provided and I suspect that Iran is busy working away on it…the UN will likely help to subsidize the production when they hear about the CO2 generating rockets.
http://www.standard-freeholder.com/webapp/sitepages/content.asp?contentid=502332&catname=Local%20News&classif=
Hmmm…cracks in the consensus???
I’m still trying to figure out what a “cone artist” is. Is it like a pyramid sheme, only shaped like a cone?
Madonna was a cone artist at one point…blonde ambition tour i think
“Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” — a great read. I expect AGW and the Kyoto hysteria will be added to some future edition.
All of you nitwits are missing the whole point . These are dire times for Gaia . Liposuction rids a human body of excess , nasty fats . If only we had a vacuum mechanism big enough to literally ” suck ” all the CO2 from Gaia’s thighs and belly…. hold on ….the solution to our problem is …..SPACEBALLS . I’m calling Mel Brooks as I type this . Developing ….
These people are all insane. They are spending billions on nothing. How much credit can I get for holding my breath for a minute?
Comment by Wayne | April 26, 2007
(From Jack’s newswatch)
Insanity quote? Coming up:
“Ambition disregards wrong as long as it succeeds in its aims.”
AGRIPPINA
mother of the lunatic Roman Emperor Nero from a letter to her son begging for her life when she discovered Nero planned to kill her, Nero had her strangled at the behest of his mistress [Gaia?]. …- (concentric-net)
Now Layton is busting a blood vessel over Canada “not meeting our international obligations in Kyoto.”
What about our international obligations in NATO?
Oh…that’s different…right, Jack?
Frickin’ hypocrite!
Drudge and Rush have stories up from the Financial Post re the scam of carbon trading. Seems those selling these credits for environmental purposes are pocketing the money themselves. Is anyone surprised at this.
OT but really funny. Seems thousands of japanese purchased poodles from Australia, as fashion accessories, from a co called Poodles for Pets. Then they complained their poodles didn’t bark or eat dog food, and when going to get paws clipped discovered they had hoves. They bought SHEEP. No wonder people are falling for the goresuzuki crap, like the watermelon party and talibanjack.
They paid 1600.00 for their poodles, and thought they were getting a bargain as they sell for 3200. in Japan.
What a surprise … Carbon Markets loaded with corruption and suspicious transactions … knock me over with a feather!!!
Which pic of the Toronto skyline was used? Not this one from that great pollution machine, the CBC-Pravda:
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/006020.html
…-
With Kyoto dead in Canada, Tories come out with their own green plan
Quote:
“For the television cameras, a Lake Ontario pier with the Toronto skyline in the background was chosen to symbolize the happy relationship of environment and economy in the plan.”
…-
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2007/04/26/4132486-cp.html
Anyone can May on Duffy today? Her anger was palpable, talking about despicable Tories who, get this, know they are headed for electoral defeat. Again she speaks to “what Canadians want” with zero evidence, from a party that has never had parliamentary representation in Canada.
Where is her plan? Where is Dion’s and Layton’s plan? Then we have Dalton’s remark about great Liberal “leap forward” on environment.
You can’t make this stuff up. The left has been outflanked again and is really, really angry.
Chucker and friends are having a ball with this:
gASSHOLE
The boys from Twisted Sister have been reunited to help me sell how hip and edgy carbon sequestration is …-
[Time to Flick oFF. Lights out.] …-
http://www.chuckercanuck.blogspot.com/
CHUM Says ‘Flick Off’ As Part Of New Energy-Saving Campaign
CHUM Television and MuchMusic want everyone to just ‘Flick Off’. …-
http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_10283.aspx
The Alberta Tar Sands make up 3% of Canada’s CO2.
3%!!!!!!!
For that 3% the economic engice of the country has been the target, the scorn and the political football for the enviro-wackos, the lefty politicos, Suzuki, Al Gore.
Get it. 3%!!!!!! And 100% of the Kyoto mania wacko abuse.