From the Washington Free Beacon by Zach Noble, how a half page of the Kyoto protocol turned into a free ride for corruption.
Carbon Corruption
The U.N. is funneling millions of dollars worth of tradable carbon credits to corrupt nations worldwide, including Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Uzbekistan in an attempt to encourage clean energy projects in the developing world.
The U.N. Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is defined in Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol. Western European countries fund energy projects in the developing world in order to obtain Certified Emission Reduction credits (CERs), tradable credits that enable Europeans to count foreign emission reductions towards their own domestic emission reduction targets.
“The CDM started from a page and a half in the Kyoto Protocol,” said David Abbass, a spokesperson for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. “In the beginning they thought there would be maybe 600 projects, but now there are over 4,000 projects.”
Iran, Uzbekistan, Sudan, and North Korea are among the more than 70 countries currently hosting CDM projects.
Iran, with 16 separate CDM projects, brings in around 4.8 million CERs, worth about $26 million, every year, despite numerous U.N. sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
Uzbekistan, dominated for the last two decades by the autocratic Islam Karimov, hosts 20 different CDM projects, with a combined annual value of over 7.5 million CERs, or roughly $40 million.
Sudan, whose president Omar Hassan al-Bashir came to power via military coup over 20 years ago and is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Darfur, is on the receiving end of two different CDM projects, with a combined annual value of over 180,000 CERs, or almost $1 million.
North Korea is hosting seven hydroelectric dams, which may generate over $1 million in CERs annually.
North Korea, Sudan, and Uzbekistan are among the 10 most corrupt nations worldwide, according to Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index.
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Full story at the Washington Free Beacon
As far as I know, any government that buy into the AGW and Carbon credit scam is corrupt.
Our tax dollars at work, funding the very countries hell bent on our destruction, all courtesy of the UN. Anyone want to bet how much money went under the table to secure the approvals?
In most 3rd world countries it is an accepted way of life for officials to be paid to approve projects. They get a “commission” in return for placing a stamp on what looks on paper like a very promising project. After all, it costs very little to produce a truly magnificent looking report.
However, the money is quickly siphoned off once it is paid, and little if anything resembling the project on paper actually gets built. The result more often than not is an ecological disaster for the local people living in the area that get kicked off their land in return for promises that never arrive.
Most of the money ends up offshore in trust accounts, where it can never be traced or recovered. That is the beauty of trust accounts, they prevent identification of the true owner of the money, so that the officials involved can safely denied involvement without fear of discovery.
Once they have UN immunity, no court in the world will be able to do anything. They can spend the funds openly without fear or worry.
[Snip. ~mod]
Perhaps the only way to get rid of the lot of this is to take down the banking cartel, who set up the UN, without their ability to print money out of nothing and so manipulate markets and the economies of countries, and to create such nonsense as carbon credits, we’ll all get back to sanity.
http://waketheherd.blogspot.ie/2009/07/international-banking-cartel-is-new.html
Need to know why the UNFCC seeks immunity?
Doesn’t get much stranger than this.
And these projects are? And of course we can see them on Google Earth, right?
what better way for them to end the dominance of western society than to have shoot ourselves in both feet (no death threat intended )
As the evidence of corruption at the U.N. continue to pile up as time goes by coupled with its inability to stop war and violence in the world (i.e. Syria), it becomes increasingly difficult for this taxpayer to understand why we even bother to stay in the organization and pay good money to keep it going. I am not denying that their are good things that they do in the world, but the corruption along with its uselessness in preventing and stopping wars outway the good. Add in the faulty pseudoscience of the IPCC and its goals for a New World Order govenment to strip individual nations of their sovereignty, and you have a good argument to dump the organization.
Oops. Forgive the misspelling in my previous post: I am not denying that there are good things in the world that the U.N. does, but the corruption along with its uselessness in preventing and stopping wars outweigh the good.
What the world needs now more than anything else, is an American President with a backbone.
Fund your enemies.
Weaken your allies.
Decline commodities in favor of a abstract idea.
Promote humans as parasites whose numbers must be drastically reduced.
Link freedom with increased global regulations while degrading the role of the individual.
Ensure murdering tyrants have continuous access to funds and weapons.
Ignore corruption.
Promote scarcity as a means to improve mankind.
Hijack the science and knowledge industry and make it serve the above.
Seek universal immunity to prosecution.
Replace truth with consensus.
Um…
Who wouldn’t want this organization ruling the world? GK
Can we have a referendum on the UN?
Not related to carbon credits. But there’s an interesting article in the National Post about North Korea’s prison system, and the UN Commission of Inquiry.
Jonathan Kay on ‘Escape from Camp 14′: A shocking exposé of North Korea’s ‘hidden gulag’
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/06/14/jonathan-kay-on-escape-from-camp-14-a-shocking-expose-of-north-koreas-horrific-gulags/
G. Karst says:
June 14, 2012 at 10:04 am
Fund your enemies.
Weaken your allies.
Decline commodities in favor of a abstract idea.
Promote humans as parasites whose numbers must be drastically reduced.
Link freedom with increased global regulations while degrading the role of the individual.
Ensure murdering tyrants have continuous access to funds and weapons.
Ignore corruption.
Promote scarcity as a means to improve mankind.
Hijack the science and knowledge industry and make it serve the above.
Seek universal immunity to prosecution.
Replace truth with consensus.
Um…
Who wouldn’t want this organization ruling the world? GK “]
xxxxxxxxxxxx
+10
Climate policy is taking money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor (corrupted) countries.
Odenhoefer (?)
So it is finally revealed: Carbon credits are simply a device for extorting financial assets from countries which manage them well and redistributing them to other countries which manage financial resources very poorly. It is a ‘rob from the rich and squander it all’ scheme.
As we were taught in thermodynamics, the only condition where everything can be equal is at Absolute Zero.
I am not denying that there are good things in the world that the U.N. does,
Name one?
The general rule is, that the better it sounds, the worse the corruption and waste is. UNICEF (the UN childrens fund) is a prime example. 90 cents out of every dollar collected goes on high living for unelected UN officials.
Question: How many carbon credits does it take to make an ICMB missile and are there additional credits for nuke warheads added to the ballistic missiles? It could be a twofer.
“The U.N. Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)” is [in my view] a way to get rich nations to pay for infrastructure projects in third world nations.
So the UN, the most corrupt political organization the world has ever seen, is funneling money to the most corrupt countries in the world, via the most corrupt “trading (financial) system” in the world, all set-up and or run by the most corrupt politicians in the world…. This is news?
Sorry folks, just keep moving along. Nothing to see here. Pay no attention to the money “stolen” from your pay check via the tax system (opps, did I say carbon trading was the most corrupt “financial” system?) being sent to worthless causes and tyrants all over the world.
“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, Vintage Muggeridge: Religion and Society
Pointman
And what controls are there, to stop these really honest nations from doubling and trebling these credits, while nobody is looking?
The banks, with all their checks and balances, have frequently been subject to ‘black hole’ accounting scams – so what of these Carbon Credits?
G. Karst said at 10:04 am
Who wouldn’t want this organization ruling the world?
GK, Clarification please-
Is that the current US administration or the UN you’re talking about?
Or maybe something even higher-up…
BH
Not sure that my understanding of this carbon credit scheme is correct, but this is how it appears to me. A developed country (say Germany) funds a green project (say a hydroelectric damn) in a developing country (say Kenya). The developed country then gets issued “saleable” Certified Emission Reduction credits, which count toward the developed country’s CO2 reduction requirement under the Kyoto accord.
Okay, that’s a way for a developed country to meet its CO2 reduction goals,without having to reduce it’s CO2 emissions internally. Plus the developed country gets something for its foreign aid.
What I don’t understand is the the “saleable” part. Saleable to whom? Can a country sell them on a carbon exchange? Sell them to industry? From the posted article it appears that CED credits can be worth more than the project costs. Is this a way for a developed country to make money on its foreign aid?
It seems that the complaint in the article is that some of the projects (45 out of over 4000, or less than 1% ) are in countries that are on the “bad guy” list. Regrettable. But what about the other 99% of the projects? Are they doing some good in areas of the world that are on the “good guy” list?
Putting aside the stupidity of trying to reduce CO2 emissions in the first place, what is wrong with a country milking the system to pay for its foreign aid?
I know I must be missing something. The money has to come from somewhere, but where? Anyone have a detailed explanation? And no “your tax dollars” is not a detailed explanation. I want to know how this works.
And you know that all that money going to North Korea is helping kids and puppies.
Remeber that this is a debt-fueled developed world now so by extension it is a debt-fueled carbon scheme also and debt financed UN and debt financed hydro project and debt financed defense department o monitor Iran and NK. Hurry up with the spaceship to get off this rock.
As I said before:
Time to de-fund the UN
Shocked, truly shocked.
It is past time for the UN to be disbanded
Larry Geiger said on June 14, 2012 at 11:41 am:
And other potential emergency food sources. It’s pretty bleak over there.
I’m getting pounded with TV ads from the ASPCA and local animal shelters due to the overpopulation of “pets”, as in cats and dogs. Which is a shame, as I’m certain there are enough caring people who would be willing to charter planes to take the excess to North Korean families eager to adopt.
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North Korea is hosting seven hydroelectric dams, which may generate over $1 million in CERs annually.
Those would be the ones where they first dig down deep, put in a largish concrete building which is filled with pumps, lots of plumbing, and a large pressure vessel, then flood the valley with many tens of meters of covering water.
Makes for quite an amazing hydroelectric project. All the surveillance satellites can notice is the water behind the dam is strangely warmer than it should be, and it will be noted the dam normally produces electricity far exceeding what is possible for the amount of water flowing from it. Perhaps they’ll find it’s making electricity without any water at all being released. Isn’t technology miraculous?
I am not a fan of the CDM process as it has a lot of problem such as encouragement for deforestation, etc. However, I am wondering how many of the discussants have read the text and procedures of the CDM process. First, the CDM is an initiative of a private company in the Annex I or developed country with a project in a developing country. So the first point of scrutiny is the company in a highly democratic, transparent, saintly, incorruptible country initiating projects with those countries mentioned in the article. Second, while there is a self CDM process, the cost is quite high especially if the methodology is not developed. Third, the process is not as simple as a registration of any project. The project has first to be certified by an operational entity and because of the complexity of getting accredited as an operational entity, almost all of the operational entities are from the incorruptible, democratic, and democratic western countries in the Annex I. Fourth, before the credits are registered and certificates issued, the project emission reduction from the baseline is validated by the same or another operational entity. Fifth, not all carbon credits have the same price. On the broader scheme, carbon credits from countries with high risks would command a low price compared to credits coming from stable, transparent and democratic countries. There is a high risks that the operational entity might be validating the project reduction based on false data or other factors. Six, it is a company in a democratic, incorruptible western democracy who buys the credits and pays for it. So if the western company does not want to pay a cent for the CDM credit from those countries listed in the above article, the credits have no value. The UN actually collects money from the sale of the credits to cover the overhead and as well as for special adaptation funds. Lastly, when the western company operating in an incorruptible, transparent and democratic western country is going to register the credits purchased in their country registry, the incorruptible, transparent and democratic western government could impose all the bureaucratic red tapes in registering CDM credits from those countries that for all intent and purposes, the company initiating or purchasing the credits would have second thoughts. What is lacking in the article, is the list of companies from incorruptible democratic western countries initiating the CDM projects in those countries mentioned and the operational entity.
The U.N. is a funny little organization.
“eo says:
June 14, 2012 at 3:51 pm”
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Thanks eo, for the information and bringing some content to the discussion. After looking at the UN website for a couple hours, I still don’t understand the process. But apparently it is private companies that do the project and buy the carbon credits. Though I’m not sure how that counts toward a developed country’s carbon reduction.
And I’m not sure who ultimately pays for the project. Maybe it really is as simple as “the country’s tax payers.”
Who says that these are “corrupt”? Compared to the US, UK and Israel, in terms of number of people killed, amount of tax payer money looted by the political classes and their companies, I doubt that any realistic metric would find the Iranian Administration anymore “corrupt” than ours. Birth Certificate anyone? indefinite detention without charge, legal representation, family visits or trial anyone? Torture, anyone? Nuclear weapons anyone? White Phospour, anyone? Landmines? Illegal settlement construction? Ethnic cleansing? The list goes on!
For more background on this issue, read
“The European Emissions Trading Scheme”
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/emissions_trading_scheme.html
“Another Day Another Dollar – CFC’s And The UN”
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/another_day_another_dollar.html
“A Nest of Carbon Vipers” http://sppiblog.org/news/a-nest-of-carbon-vipers
Turns out that one of the bigger and higher-volume holes in the beer barrel is the stipulation that the project’s carbon-reduction effect must be incremental, above and beyond what would have happened anyhow.
There are lots of others. Not doing something with high emissions that you say you were going to do but really weren’t is an instant no-outlay winner, e.g. Credit now for lots of promised extra tree planting later is another.
But I bet it would be possible to fill a normal page with one-line descriptors of ways to rip off CDM.
Certainly, the measured, objective change in CO2 levels or even output as the result of any CDM project is vanishingly close to zero. The concept is inherently crooked.
Old engineer– Under Kyoto Protocol each country has an assigned reduction although as an exception Australia is allowed to increase its emission by 8 per cent. If you run a power plant that generates 2,000,000 tons of CO2 per year and your country is committed to reduce its emission by 5 per cent, you are given a certificate to emit 1,900,000 tons and to produce a certificate to cover the 100,000 tons. If you own a very old plant with a very low efficiency you could reduce it to say 1,700,000 tons per year you have 200,000 tons of certificate that you could sell in the market. If you have already an efficient plant and you could not reduce your emission anymore, you could buy from the old plant owner 100,000 of his 200,000 surplus from the market. The certificates have to be registered in the country’s national registry to be valid and reflected in the UNFCCC country registry as well. If you are manufacturer of a say super critical boilers and would like to sell it to a electricity authority in a developing country, you initiate a CDM project with the authority. The project gets an operational entity (OE) to do the design or methodology, register it with the CDM board and when it operational the OE validates and calculate the actual emissions above the agreed baseline. The CDM board issues a certificate emission reduced in the registry of the country hosting the CDM. As manufacturer of the super- critical boiler, you may agree to get part of your payment in certificates ( after you have over priced your boilers) and request for transfer of the certificate to your country’s registry. If you got say 300,000 tons of credits you could sell this in the market or negotiate with the power plant owner who needs 100,000 of credits. The power plant owner will naturally prefer to buy the 100,000 tons from the other power plant owner who have a surplus of 200,000 rather than the manufacturer of the super critical boiler. First, he knows them personally, they belong to the same association and they are covered by the same laws if there are problems with the credit certificate. So the owner of the 300,000 tons credit will give a hefty discount say 50 per cent so the power plant needing 100,000 tons will only pay half the price. If the developing country has a good reputation the discount could be just 10 % or running to 90 % if the developing country has such a bad reputation. After all, the 300,000 tons out of which he gets his 100,000 is already registered in his country’s registry. Some companies initiates the CDM themselves to avoid the pitfalls of getting certificates of doubtful value. In addition to CDM, there is joint implementation or JI which is between one annex I country to another, say Germany and another member of the EU. JI credits normally command a better price than CDM credits. Then there is the “hot air” credits, which are credits earned by Annex I like the Russia when their emission went down because of economic downturn. The EU has decided not to touch those hot air credits. As you will note the impact on the power plant is only 5 % if he buys it from the other power plant who has a surplus, 2.5 % if he uses CDM with 50 per cent discount. Compared to the overall cost of running the power plant, the reduction would be around 0.1 per cent increase. Australia would be the first Annex I country who will tax 100 per cent of the emissions at rates higher than the current market rates of the carbon credits. Australia would be an interesting place to track in the next few months.
“eo says:
June 15, 2012 at 3:45 am”
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Thanks again eo, I appreciate the time you spent in your explanation. It appears to me that the whole Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a shell game to be exploited by those who have taken the time and money to figure out how to make it profitable to them.
Apparently this is not a topic that is of interest to most of the readers of WUWT, with only 37 replies. However, with Rio+20 just around the corner, I expect that CDM will be put forward as one of UN’s successes in “sustainable development.” I, for one, am going to investigate the CDM more.
Fifty percent funded by the USA – isn’t there a law or a sanction on this transfer of cash?
“The U.N. is funneling millions of dollars worth of tradable carbon credits to corrupt nations worldwide, including Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Uzbekistan in an attempt to encourage clean energy projects in the developing world.”
— I don’t know what the REAL reason is, but I’m willing to bet everything I have that there is something else to it besides “encouraging clean energy projects in the developing world.”
Nobody is clear about corruption on carbon use. If there are a lot of countries who practices carbon corruption just wait till it will all come back to you.
Lessen Harmful Emissions