Corruption and crime already taking place in the carbon market
Opinion piece by Julie Bishop, Deputy Leader of the Opposition (Australia) 20th July 2011
Carbon offsets have already run out of credit
“…..It is alarming that the Prime Minister has given no indication that she is aware or has any understanding of the recent history of the operations of international carbon credit markets.
Just six weeks ago, the World Bank reported that the international market in carbon credits has suffered a debilitating collapse and expressed doubt about the ongoing viability of global markets.
According to the World Bank, trading in credits commenced after the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 2005, and about $25 billion was generated over the years to 2009……….
He detailed the first arrival in 2009 of “carbon cowboys” offering villagers “sky money” for the right to use their land in international carbon trading schemes.
This led to alleged corruption of local officials who also stood to gain from these get-rich quick schemes.
Prime Minister Gillard is proposing in her carbon tax policy that an estimated $57 billion of Australian taxpayer funds will be sent offshore to buy “carbon offsets” to enable this country to reach Labor’s new target of an 80 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050.
Deloittes Australia has warned that carbon credit fraud is “the white collar crime of the future”……
h/t to reader Jessie
Now you can underrstand why economists like Garnout and ex-bankers like Turnbull (Opposition MP) are so keen for the imposition of a tax. There’s huge money to be made in that there air! And I think many Australians are begining to see this too.
Let’s see if I understand this. The Prime Minister wants to export $57 billion in cash to buy the right to emit the same or more CO2 as previously, but to feel better about your sin. In Martin Luther’s day, they used to call these indulgences. They weren’t falsifiable either, but the church sure made a lot of money.
Yep I picked up on this as well: http://justmeint.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/gillard-leading-us-into-corrupt-action/
Some questions asked after Ms. Bishops writing seem to indicate that readers are confused at to IF Ms. Bishop is simply against buying O/S carbon credits, or is she also against – anti AGW
“This led to alleged corruption of local officials who also stood to gain from these get-rich quick schemes.
Prime Minister Gillard is proposing in her carbon tax policy that an estimated $57 billion of Australian taxpayer funds will be sent offshore to buy “carbon offsets” to enable this country to reach Labor’s new target of an 80 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050.
Deloittes Australia has warned that carbon credit fraud is “the white collar crime of the future”……”
Money… power… corruption… ad nauseum.
I asked a while back just who people (like us) thought might be in the business of making money offa this scheme……. I do believe the plot is unfolding and the public needs to be kept informed. We must not let this go into ‘quiet mode’……. pressure must be applied at all times.
If Carbon trading was ever to get established where I live, I was going to print out the following and leave copies around the various coffee shops that I frequent:
http://www.probeinternational.org/files/10WaystoGametheCarbonMarkets_Web.pdf
Some information on Carbon Trading
http://www.suite101.com/content/carbon-trade-ends-on-quiet-death-of-chicago-climate-exchange-a305704
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=532610
Drat! And I haven’t been able to get my shorts in place yet!
Bob
This corruption is unprecedented. It appears that the intent of the Gillard governent is either to steal 100 billion A$ or to destroy Australia. Or both, if possible.
Give away $57b for the right to commit economic suicide. What a bargain…
Unfortunately the Liberal (conservative) Opposition is still having a bet each way on the subject of AGW. At least their direct action proposal will have beneficial side effects, i.e. injection of carbon into the soil in farming practices via subsoil exhaust when drilling seed and no till, and tree planting on marginal soils. We already do that, and have become independent of imported building timbers in the last thirty years.
Hopefully, when in power Tony Abbott will be able to say “Climate Chance is cr*p” more often, as he has done so on at least one occasion.
In another thread, Tallbloke asked a great question …
Repeating what I said then: If this sucker drags down anyone other than the dimwits that voluntarily became involved, woe be to them. Remember that Enron and Ken Lay and most other large-scale Wall Street fiascos were primarily driven in the media by the collateral damage to innocent 3rd (or 4th really) parties.
This thing should have been labeled an ENRON pump-and-dump from the beginning. Now there is two birds with one stone! The public can easily relate to the comparison, and, the green machine (pun intended) gets stuck with a label that will drive them certifiably insane.
But then I see today in this thread …
Talk about poetic justice. However, when the bottom falls out on their pension statements, they will of course suck up to the taxpayers for a bailout anyway. You cannot win.
One thing is for sure, this should never have been be allowed. NEVER! The BBC investing in something they are actively campaigning for, similar to GE here in the USA with windmills and other crap, there should have been a bright line and prison for everybody that willingly crossed over it.
Now we have the precedent of Ken lay (remember making false and misleading statements) in place for the next group of convicts. Al Gore, BBC executives, Pauchuri, Hansen and any other player that pumped up this Carbon Trading scheme while scaremongering about the end of the world.
Please let me live long enough to see their perp walks.
Didn’t Europe see massive ‘carbon trading fraud’ back in 2007 / 8 / 9?
It seems that some people do not learn from the mistakes of others.
It is just the selling of indulgences in the modern time!
Con men have been trying to sell nothing, for a whole lotta of something, since the beginning of time. I find it interesting that BP was the first oil company to get into carbon trading, sitting on a board for several years. Two months before the “spill” that Homeland Security and local police guarded from land and air like the KGB, BP left that board, declaring they were going to do their own Carbon Scheme through their company.
I’m going to guess that we have many politicians, that have invested in this snake oil that does zero for the planet, but make them very rich and continues their redistribution agenda.
It also allowed the Al Gores to continue their over-the-top, extravagant lifestyles, essentially money laundering their wealth, and cover from the charge of fraud with the sheep that follow them. I can’t wait till they share a cell with Bernie Madoff.
Corrupt science at its worst, for sure!
A good man driven from “the science that pays”
http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/climate.php
Never thought I’d see somebody trying to bailout a thin air market.
From R. M. Lansford on July 23, 2011 at 11:01 pm:
Switch to boxers, less positioning required.
===
Minor quibble about something in the full article:
The United States withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001 and has indicated it will not commit to any replacement treaty…
I thought the US was never really in it, it was never ratified by the Senate nor enacted in federal policy, thus there was no “withdrawing” from Kyoto.
What is being referred to? Was there an official declaration that VP Al Gore scribbling his name on it didn’t count?
Casper says: July 24, 2011 at 12:15 am
I do not understand this as the selling of indulgences in the modern time.
Western democracies are secular governments. This is an issue of the science, the development of policies, including international trade agreements and questions of integrity in fiscal spending decisions/directions. WUWT have previoulsy discussed this under national security issues.
Perhaps of further interest is the 2002 FBI media release on white collar crime
http://www2.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel02/wc3030602.htm
and the media release provides further explanation in the paper
Barnett C, (undated) Measurement of White Collar Crime using Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Data
Note lack of classifications and descriptors as discussed in the report. Also Appendix A
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/nibrs/nibrs_wcc.pdf
source: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr
Dam easy way to make dam good money , you can see way some are attracted to it .
People have always shown a willingness to hand over cash for what they known quite often is worthless , this is just doing on a government scale.
Gary Mount, you are giving instructions to scammers, and at the end, you still assume that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and needs regulating.
Search for what Vaclav Klaus has to say. (23/07 10.35am)
I am surprised that corruption is rife in the carbon trading market. Sorry I left out the word ‘not’ so it now makes sense.
All carbon trade markets are corrupt, American, European, Australian, need I go on?
My cry to Australia to ‘Vote Gillard Out’ seems to have fallen on deal ears.
I meant ‘deaf not ‘deal’. Sorry it the age creeping up.
Two days ago my husband received a phone call from of all places, Gibraltar, the person asking him whether he is interested in buying carbon credits to offset a particular business. My husband does the books for our son’s business here and in the U.S. The business name commences with an ‘A’, so perhaps they are just going through the business phone book. Is this the usual approach? How would anyone know how many or what type to buy over the phone even if they wanted to? Maybe this is the first of many calls to come.
John Marshall
We would love to vote Gillard out. If the polls are correct then there would only be 28 Labor members in the 150 member Parliament. Gillard exists as PM on the vote of two Independants, both of whom support her against the wishes of their conservative electorates. If an election was called they would lose their seats as would the single Green in the Lower house. The only way we can have an election before the next one is due in two years time is if a Labor member dies, resigns or crosses the floor. None would be courageous enough to cross the floor. In the meantime we put up with one lie after another from this truly inept and deceiptful government. Julia hopes we will be forgiving enough in two years time to vote them back in. The anger I see is as it was in NSW and the voters just bided their time to decimate Labor in that state. Next March Queensland goes to an election and looks set for a Labor wipeout. People are furious and will punish anyone of the Party. Even ex labor politicians are scathing in their criticism of Julia’s tax.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
The intent is to move money around in ways that make it difficult or impossible to prove corruption. Once the money has been set in motion, some of it can be collected by the politicians and their friends.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: July 24, 2011 at 1:13 am
Good point. More homework needed.
US signed (?1997) but did not ratify. Did not get to approval of Congress for ratification.
US ratified the Earth Summit (Rio 1992) and were listed under Annex 1 and 11 countries.
Confessions Time… she (Julia) intends spending your hard earned tax dollars, maybe even your invested superannuation money…. or where ever she can get her money from, on Carbon Credits from some – as yet to be named – international carbon broker. Well you have to go thru a carbon broker and, by doing that lots of people can make lots of money right?
This entire thing seems very wrong to me. But trying to understand her mind, I went looking for information. If Julia is not doing everything she can to bankrupt this nation, if she is not totally loopy and on heavy medication (now there’s a thought) then she must really believe in what she is doing – or she is being pushed into it from another source that holds power/sway over her decisions.
http://justmeint.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/dem-darn-carbon-credits/
Old woman of the north says:
July 24, 2011 at 1:41 am
Gary Mount, you are giving instructions to scammers, and at the end, you still assume that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and needs regulating.
…
It has been a year or so since I last read that document, and I am not even sure if it’s the same as the original one I read, so was unaware of the additional “Carbon Dioxide Is Pollution” statement.
I know with absolute certainty that the extra amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is not causing climate change in any way, shape or form, and that in fact we should be trying to get the level up closer to 1,000 ppm.
I know with absolute certainty that Global Warming / Climate Change is a scam, it is a fraud, and saying it is a hoax is far too kind of a term to use for what is being perpetrated by our governments and their proxy organizations.
As for providing instructions for/to scammers, actually my intent was for the layperson to catch a glimpse of how easy it can be to scam the system, hoping to spark some outrage, which is actually the original intent by those who created and published the original document.
Gillard’s entirely hopeless. The whole Australian carbon tax scheme is a bribe to keep her coalition partners, the Greens, on side. There is absolutely no plan to change the way base-load electricity is generated. Wind and solar photovoltaic will be heavily subsidised, but only by requiring power companies to buy excess power and exorbitant prices, which they are expected to pass on to consumers, who will supposedly be compensated in full from the proceeds of the carbon tax. Consideration of nuclear and hydroelectric options is banned. No money will be spent on carbon sequestration. Petrol for private cars will NOT be taxed, but fuel for public transport WILL be taxed. It’s a total mystery how CO2 emissions might be expected to decrease, unless the objective the carbon tax is to confuse businesses and consumers to the point where the economy into recession and thereby reduces both production and consumption by 5% before 2020. The goal is to reduce emissions by 80% come 2050. It’d a dead cert Gillard won’t survive past 2013, when the next election’s settled. I’d say odds are better than even she won’t make it that far.
Corruption in the carbon trading market.
A double SCAMMY.
Of course this is no surprise ……
In the EU – The Europol organisation found that billions of Euros of Carbon Trades were fraudulent, and tax had not been paid on transactions either. What a boondoggle !
https://www.europol.europa.eu/content/publication/organised-crime-energy-supply-scenarios-2020-753
https://www.europol.europa.eu/content/press/further-investigations-vat-fraud-linked-carbon-emissions-trading-system-641
The opportunities for fraud in selling certificates, which confer a right to emit an invisible gas, must surely be irresistable to the con-artist and swindler. The average grifter knows a good scam when he sees one, and wantes a “piece of the action”. Who can blame them?
Several hundred million Euros went missing in Denmark if I recall correctly, the money was simply handed out to people who had filled in the requisite formage stating they were doing something carbon-righteous.
Trading carbon offsets off-shore over the long term is unsustainable anyway. Why would a country start such a practice? And if we are saving the world from CO2 we need to cap carbon emissions.
Interestingly $57 billion is about the same amount Australia earns from exporting coal, mainly to China. Why not just stop…[unthinkable]…instead of buying offsets.
Don’t forget that the EU is based on fraud and corruption. The EU accounts have not been passed clean by their auditors since the early 1990’s.
From the common agricultural policy (another CAP scheme) creating distorted markets for all sorts of crops (wine lakes, butter mountains, sugar and olive oil etc.) through to the latest carbon (dioxide) scams, make no mistake the socialist evil that is the EU.
Don’t get me started on the representatives expenses and allowances.
The EU stands full square for fraud and corruption.
Who are the “News Staff?” That’s a new one on me. I didn’t know Anthony had staff.
Maybe I’ll have my people get with Anthoy’s people and we can do lunch ;o)
The “Ten Ways to Game the Carbon Market” probably left out twenty other ways to game the carbon market. It will only be a matter of time before it comes down to individuals gaming the market for lunch money to go out to Taco Bell.
Bringing corruption to the Carbon Trading Market is coals to Newcastle. Every participant within reach of US law should be prosecuted under RICO.
‘Fools and their money are soon parted’
Except that it is OUR money the governments are giving away!
One sort of amusing story involves China – they were producing a legal CFC but the byproduct was an extremely ‘bad’ CFC. The EU gave 1,000 times more money to destroy this bad CFC than it cost. The Chinese, not being fools, started producing this bad CFC in quantity. The last I heard the EU had paid out 4 billion Euros!
Let’s not forget all the billions in profits being made on wind farms and solar farms.
It is surprising how much ‘profiteering’ is being allowed in the ‘war’ against climate change. Of course the main beneficiaries are rich people – the people who matter. Not the kind of people who do things on a ‘cost only’ basis for the public good!
Although green organisations seem to have incredible influence, certainly in the EU, if you ‘follow the money’ then the question is how much green organisations are being controlled by those who really profit from their pseudo-science?
Considering that CO2 warming is a trailing and not a leading indicator, shows that it has not a causal role in planet warming. Human caused Global Warming based on CO2 is totally discredited. Carbon Credit selling/buying is the greatest snake oil type scam in human history, For that and that alone, Al Gore may go down as the greatest charlatan of all time.
We see how evolution of humanity progressed us to the moon and exploration of the atom while ‘royalty’ just sat there and wallowed with the degenerates relying on perf for sustinance. Of course the ‘carbon tax’ will fail, utterly. It is just another scam to help the royals avoid work. Of course every street punk will want a piece of the action. Will we see a grass roots effort of going door to door taking note of who is on vacation and which houses are vacant to facilitate ‘environmental collection’ for purposes of resource ‘liberation and reestablishment’ by the ‘NWO’?
Aussies-
Couldn’t Gillard be dumped by a “spill”? I seem to recall that term from my five enjoyable years in Melbourne during which Whitlam got turfed out.
IanM
Tony Windsor is aware of this, because I sent him the details about the waste in carbon credits that are failing to cut emissions. I also alerted Julie who asked in parliament why pay the UN
Climate Change Fund $600 million a year from Australia to be distributed to poorer countries suffering from damage to their environment caused by climate change caused by US. But they never gave a correct answer. Not USA or China etc. Tony is on a fact finding tour in Europe to see what is happening there. His comment was ‘at least they are doing something’ but with all the negatives he should be intelligent enough to state ‘their efforts have done nothing to cut carbon emissions’ and not vote for this carbon tax. We in his electorate are eager to find out what he has to say? As from rallies and forums in his electorate surely he can’t ignore the facts, the science is loaded with mistakes even manipulated data, especially when the government science
report ‘The Critical Decade’ contained a disclaimer on page 2? Has he woken up to the fact that
carbon trading is a bankers dream (or growing nightmare?) and it is rumoured that some politicians have invested in carbon trading already and risk losing millions. Not only that why should Australia boost up the EU failing scheme to our chagrin.
Gary Mount,
As for providing instructions for/to scammers, actually my intent was for the layperson to catch a glimpse of how easy it can be to scam the system, hoping to spark some outrage, which is actually the original intent by those who created and published the original document.
Friends of the Earth and cafe lattes in Melbourne….
Well I usually put this reality out (link below) around the cities, because human beings are far more important than walk-a-thons and backyard vege gardens. Because I understand and know humans are able to effect positive change in their environment. And I especially don’t like listening to leaders, elders and self-identifieds speak when I rarely hear the general person have their say. Maybe they are frightened to speak? Maybe they don’t live in a democracy? But I may be skeptical eh?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/killers-should-no-longer-expect-leniency-in-the-nt/story-e6frg6po-1111117338543
(graphic story)
I wonder what would happen if we took the variable of alcohol out of the story and listened to the people that lived in the alcohol-free communities- would similar stories be available? Or is that raw data hidden by a permit system too?
Just came across this video in regard to security.
Karoly 00.8-1.46 let out more CO2 from his mouth than I have observed in years. I thought my grammar was poor, Karoly didn’t even fullstop or comma in his verbals.