NOTE: See updates below, it appears a green group, Climate Justice Action claims responsibility and apparently attacked ECX.eu in a tiff over carbon credit policy.
The Independent Media Centre of Australia is reporting that the sister website of the flatlining Chicago Climate Exchange, the European Climate Exchange (ECX), had it’s main page hacked and replaced with the image above. I’ve confirmed this with Google cache of the ECX website available here, Screencap of the cached page here. [Update: Wikipedia now has a larger screencap online here]
While they have since taken down that image, video, and text, the main page and the rest of the website appears to still be mostly nonfunctional (as of this writing) as you can see in the next screencap.
Indymedia writes:
In a protest against carbon trading as a method for acting on climate change, on Friday, July 23 at just before midnight, the public website of the European Climate Exchange (ECX), the leading marketplace for trading CO2 emissions in Europe, was targetted by hacktivists of the autonomous tech collective *decocidio* (#?).
In a public act of digital direct action, the ECX website was taken offline and replaced with a message in an effort to try to raise awareness about carbon trading as a dangerous false solution to the climate crisis, in support of the grassroots activists aiming to oppose the power structures and companies profiteering from the dysfunctional Cap & Trade scheme.
The hacked page shows the embedded video of The Story of Cap and Trade with links to activist groups Earth First, Climate Justice Action, and the Hack Bloc. The purpose of the hack was to expose carbon trading as a scam:
According to the hack message:
“The Cap and Trade system (as implemented in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme) has a whole range of issues:
* It’s main purpose is not to reduce emissions, but to help polluters meet “reduction” targets in the cheapest way possible, in a business-as-usual scenario.
* Leaves room for unverifiable manipulation.
* Generates outrageous profits for big industry polluters, investors in fraudulent offset projects, opportunist traders and new ‘marketplaces’ such as the European Climate Exchange.
* It distracts attention from the wider, systemic changes and collective political action that needs to be taken to tackle climate change and it’s fundamental root causes.”
In 2009 Friends of the Earth UK released a report warning that carbon trading could trigger a second ‘sub-prime’ style financial collapse and fail to protect the world from global warming catastrophe. A copy of the full report, ‘A Dangerous Obsession’, is available at: http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/dangerous_obsession.pdf
IndyMediaAU full story here, h/t to Tom Nelson
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In other news, if you are interested in Carbon Trading, there’s a manual for it:
Above: thanks to Kate at smalldeadanimals.com
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Update: For the record, to prevent some from jumping to conclusions, I don’t condone hacking of websites. I also don’t condone carbon trading as I think it is indeed a recipe for easy abuse and “gaming” of the system.
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Update2: The hacker or hackers identifies on Wikipedia:
Excerpt:
Decocidio #ϴ is an anonymous group of hacktivists describing themselves as an autonomous tech collective. They take action in the spirit of Climate Justice Action, pursuing the same goals.
In a bizarre twist, it appears that one group of greens (CJA) attacked another (ECX.eu).
h/t to WUWT reader Neil
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Update3: It appears that the ECX website is back to normal now, but look at what is on the main page:
It’s worse than we thought.
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wws writes:
“It truly is a *massive* fraud, and I mean that in the exact, literal, dictionary entry meaning of the word FRAUD. It promises to do something it cannot possibly do for the sole purpose of parting innocent people from their money.”
It is Enron written large and in stone. Only an MSM drinking the koolaid could forget Enron and fail to Connect the dots to Cap’n Fraud.
Anthony – Those graphs you included in your reply to Mike (July 25, 2010 at 11:15 am) are real slam-dunkers, and there’s another great urban-rural comparison graph at that source. If you have not already done an article on those findings – which I may have missed – that sure would be interesting.
Obviously this hack was the antisocial act by green extremists who have a mindset which is beyond rational democratic debate, but that does not make it insignificant. It is an act of civil war inside the AGW movement.
Without condoning what the cranks have done it is still possible to understand the frustration of green activists who take the scare stories at face value. Look at it from their point of view: Carbon trading is not doing the job it was designed to do and big non green businesses are milking the scheme for easy money.
Worst of all the IPCC has a chairman, Pachauri, who owns a big slice of the Chicago and Indian Carbon Exchanges through his connections with TERI. In other words the man who leads the organisation that set up the failing carbon trading scheme is one of the businessmen who gains financially from every carbon transation that takes place.
The green movement has a conflict at its heart. It feeds hotheads and now the hotheads are turning on the organisation that primed them to behave in an irrational and unstable way.
Squidly says:
July 25, 2010 at 10:54 am
Are you saying that these netweeds (crackers) borrowed time on networked computers to do this? The same process as SETI or the genome?
So, the Green Church is now divided in two groups, the gnostics, the true believers in Gaia and the agnostics, those who only care for the formal/political side of the issue, the ones with a more practical vision, who will collect the alms while selling indulgences.
Delicious!
You should know this: Do you know, or even imagine, how much these nice guys have offered native amazon indians for each forest hectare, which according to their sacred “gospel” can capture 5,500 tons of sinful “carbon”?
Just US$3 per hectare!….and because of these 3 bucks, which, thanks to a generous “market spread” would transform into at least US$125,000.-, 35 policemen died more than one year ago:
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/jun/07/violence-deepens-in-peru/
Natives were cheated that their lands were going to be sold to foreigners and they killed disarmed and captive policemen. Foreign representatives of NGO´s were seen at the scene. (If land continues in the hands of natives is nobody´s land and it is exploited for timber with no replantation whatsoever). Obviously NGO´s want the “stato quo”. Lovely!, isn´t it?
Oh dear diddums, th’ Ecofascists are fighting among themselves. tch, tch.
… What’s the bet that before long they’ll be blowing each other up and assassinating one another….. and the media will blame us poor bemused bluddy skeptics who are standing on the sidelines armed only with facts.
Perhaps I’m being a pessimist. But I put nothing past the media or the eco nuts anymore.
“We apologize for the inconveniency…”
Or inconvenience as it’s known in English.
It amuses me that both sceptics and greens agree that emission trading schemes of all stripes are a waste of time and money. It seems only the politicians like them, probably because it creates the illusion that you’re doing something when you’re not really doing anything.
Steve says:
July 25, 2010 at 2:14 am
“So, lets look at the evidence. There’s seems to be a rash of bad schoolboy-error grammar errors in the hacker’s text, especially with an inability to correctly spell “its”, i.e. the possessive of it.”
“…”
“Now let’s look at Anthony’s text introducing the hack:
“the European Climate Exchange (ECX), had it’s main page hacked””
“Hummmmm. Watson, what do you make of it?”
Well, Steve, it is evident to me that you are more Inspector Lestrade than Sherlock Holmes, and there is no doubt in my mind that Holmes would be decidedly unimpressed by your rush to draw attention to someone else’s minor lapse in grammar while exposing in your comment your own rather obvious shortcomings in this area. For example, how about what should be (even for a schoolboy) the glaringly obvious error in “There’s seems to be …”? Or how about the multiple errors in “… a rash of bad schoolboy-error grammar errors …”? This latter example not only has errors of punctuation and redundancy, it also uses a noun, i.e.,”grammar”, in lieu of the required adjectival form, i.e., “grammatic” or “grammatical”. The tortured phrasing, moreover, is obviously the result of your over egging the verbal pudding in order to try to maximize your snarky insult to Anthony.
On this evidence, if asked to deduce your own educational attainments, I would think that Holmes might well quip: “Elementary, my dear Watson”.
rbateman says:
July 25, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Gail Combs says:
July 25, 2010 at 10:20 am
They (real Greens) are starting to realize that they have thumbed a bad hitchhike.
They are starting to get that they will be among the first to be tossed under the Bus, should Cap & Trade succeed, up front or by bureaucratic fiat.
________________________________________________
The Green (watermelons) need to read:
Attacks on Intelligentsia:
“In the years immediately following their accession to power in 1917, the Bolsheviks took measures to prevent challenges to their new regime, beginning with eliminating political opposition….
In 1919, he [Lenin] began mass arrests of professors and scientists who had been Kadets, and deported Kadets, Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Nationalists. The Bolshevik leadership sought rapidly to purge Russia of past leaders in order to build the future on a clean slate….”
Unfortunately they never read history and if they do they do not think it applies to THEM.
While hacking is generally bad, it seems it is the best way to find out what the wackos are up to. Oh well…