The fatcat ecocrats exposed: Web of ‘green’ politicians, tycoons and power brokers who help each other benefit from billions raised on your bills
- Four of nine-person Climate Change Committee, official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions
Other industries would stand accused of damning conflicts of interest but when it comes to global warming, anything goes…
The Mail on Sunday today reveals the extraordinary web of political and financial interests creating dozens of eco-millionaires from green levies on household energy bills.
A three-month investigation shows that some of the most outspoken campaigners who demand that consumers pay the colossal price of shifting to renewable energy are also getting rich from their efforts.
Enquiries by this newspaper have revealed:
- Four of the nine-person Climate Change Committee, the official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until very recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.
- A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.
- £3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills. One of its biggest deals involved energy giant SSE selling windfarms to one of the new green funds, Greencoat Wind. The Green Investment Bank’s chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin, is also chairman of SSE. The bank says it ‘provided expertise’ to enable BIS to take a £50 million stake in Greencoat, which helped fund the SSE sale.
- The same bank’s chief executive, Shaun Kingsbury, is one of the UK’s highest-paid public sector employees. His £325,000 salary is more than twice the Prime Minister’s.
- Firms lobbying for renewables can virtually guarantee access to key Government policy-makers, because they are staffed by former very senior officials – a striking example of Whitehall’s ‘revolving door’.
Among the most astonishing features exposed by our investigation is the way in which vehement advocates for radical policies designed to curb global warming are making huge sums of money from their work. Here are some of the key figures among the new breed of fat-cat Ecocrats…
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Gomer’s surprise.
Well, it looks like someone learned something from Al Gore afterall……….
Wahl, Mistah Goodwin, ahv cow-erce ya’ll cane. Ya’ll grew up down they-yer. #(:))
(and a most delightful accent it is — hope my characterization isn’t offensive)
Ben U. — Surprise! (heh) But, you “win.” Your version is the better one.
Hip, hip, hurrah!
Hip, hip, hurrah!
Hip, hip, hurrah!
WAY TO GO, DAVID ROSE!!
Wish mainstream U. S. journalists were even half as good as you.
Well… Dare i say it?
We have our own group doing exactly the same as those in Britain only here they are called the EPA. A group of unelected bureaucrats who make regulations which levy fines and taxes. A good number of which are directly connected to green corporations.. But then others elected Obama who’s cronies are being spoon feed with a gold spoon… It starts at the top..
Well, this will raise the blood pressure of those on the committee and many others in the Green ranks.
Of course this news is no surprise to us, but how wonderful to see it in the news and not just in the opinion column, out where everybody can see it. Facts and figures and photographs. This will get the general public fuming, and I hope it does! The general view some years ago seemed to be “Why would they lie?” Well, now [they’re] finding out!
Dare I say, maybe some ministers will wake up to how they are being used?
Hopefully, too, this will trigger other countries to look into their own climate change committees. More of this exposure is essential.
(And here I was thinking Sundays were slow-news days.)
note it’s still being spun as if the victims were being “ethical” & doing their “bit” to “save the environment”:
6 Nov: Guardian: PA: Carbon credit fraud firms closedInsolvency service winds up companies that sold older people worthless certificates for millions of pounds in total
Nineteen firms that attracted investments of nearly £24m from more than 1,500 people by offering “worthless” carbon credits – or certified emission reductions (CERs) – were wound up by the Insolvency Service in the last 15 months…
(Consumer minister, Jo)Swinson said: “This is a particularly contemptible scam as it not only preyed on older people trying to maximise their savings but also targeted their sincere desire to make ***ethical investments…
***”Salesmen played on people’s keenness to ‘do their bit’ to save the environment while making an investment at the same time,” a spokesman for the service said.
“Investors were promised huge returns by selling these credits to corporate giants such as Marks and Spencer and British Airways. But instead most found there was no market for the relatively small amounts they held as companies that trade CERs only trade in high volumes.”
Eco Global Markets Limited, one of the companies wound up this summer, took over £8.5m from more than 230 investors, 50 of whom were aged over 70…
One of the victims, an 89-year-old man, told investigators that the firm’s salesman met him near his home twice – once at a train station, where he was encouraged to hand over £20,000 for 2,000 carbon credits…
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/06/carbon-credit-fraud-firms-closed
Typo – “their” should be “they’re” in my comment – sorry!
geran says:
December 14, 2013 at 6:02 pm
“Only after I showed Anthony’s “math expert” was a phony?
(Yup, screen shot here also.)”
Just for your information, your computer renders the HTML page it receives from a server. You can display the HTML source code with the appropriate view option of your browser, save it, modify the contained ASCII text, and create faked versions of the HTML, and render it again with your browser. So you can easily fake any web page you want. Try it! It’s pretty boring, but it might heal your obsession with meaningless screenshots.
Smells a lot like legalized larceny.
Thanks, Janice. It’s to be added to the collection:
Gomer’s surprise
Captain Renault’s shock
Dr. Smith’s pain
Seriously folks, the posted article is a keeper. And a sender.
Assuming that eventually the AGW scam and its perpetrators are effectively dealt with, is there any legal way that the tax payers around the world can be reimbursed even a small percentage of what the warmists have stolen?
For the U.S. I suggest that presidential wanabees for 2016 include promises of such reimbursements through lower tax rates for the number of years equivalent to a complete restitution of the theft.
Point Carbon had first para available without subscription:
Reuters Point Carbon: Danish film lifts lid on “crime of the century” CO2 trading scams
http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/1.2566040
website for the film has the entire article. as is most often the case, the MSM – who pay the Reuters’ subscription fees – failed to carry this article, and i doubt any other country will pick up the film. not that the film is anti-CAGW…but it’s never good to admit any CAGW-associated fraud!
11 Sept: CarbonCrooks.tv: Reuters Point Carbon: Michael Szabo: Danish film lifts lid on “crime of the century” CO2 trading scams
Thefts, fraud and money laundering in Europe’s carbon market have cost European companies and taxpayers more than 15 billion euros ($19.9 billion) since its 2005 inception, according to a new documentary by Danish filmmaker Tom Heinemann.
In “Carbon Crooks”, a 57-minute film that aired on Danish television on Monday, Heinemann said he boiled down 80 hours of film and interviews to explore whether carbon trading has had any impact on rising global greenhouse gas emissions…
Thefts, fraud and money laundering in Europe’s carbon market have cost European companies and taxpayers more than 15 billion euros ($19.9 billion) since its 2005 inception, according to a new documentary by Danish filmmaker Tom Heinemann.
In “Carbon Crooks”, a 57-minute film that aired on Danish television on Monday, Heinemann said he boiled down 80 hours of film and interviews to explore whether carbon trading has had any impact on rising global greenhouse gas emissions…
The film also examines criticisms of the voluntary carbon market and the Clean Development Mechanism, a carbon offset scheme designed under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol climate pact…
Carbon Crooks was part-funded by British non-profit film foundation BRITDOC, support that Heinemann hopes will lead to the documentary being aired on UK television.
http://carboncrooks.tv/danish-film-lifts-lid-on-crime-of-the-century-co2-trading-scams/
You’re welcome.
Great collection, Ben. U.
Here’s another one that might come in handy, someday:
“Round up all the usual suspects.” — Capt. Renaud
Say, Ben, “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“Casablanca” is a gold mine for those, huh?
I’ve been muttering and shouting this since even before reading G&T, notwithstanding all the heavyweight Skeptic Lukewarmers who seem happy with the Arrhenius ECS formulations.
if we just bribe everyone, we’ll get away with this scam!
9 Dec: Platts: DOE to offer $8 billion in clean fossil-fuel project loan guarantees
It will be the first new solicitation in the DOE loan guarantee program in two and a half years…
DOE received billions of dollars in loan guarantee authority in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, but much remains unused…
DOE is eager to see applications for the new fossil energy solicitation that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Davidson said, citing as examples technologies that reduce methane leakage at wellheads and those that reduce water use in hydraulic fracturing. He said energy-efficiency measures related to fossil fuels could also be eligible, giving as an example, combined heat and power projects, in which heat from power generation is sold to industrial customers.
***The solicitation is the first for a DOE loan guarantee program in which municipalities, universities and port authorities will be eligible, Davidson said. Universities could apply for microgrid projects, he said…
The loan amounts could be as little as $25 million, although there is no upper limit, he said…
Davidson said DOE is considering a new solicitation next year for nuclear energy projects including small modular reactors. The solicitation would come from the unused loan guarantee authority from the 2005 energy bill…
“We’re trying to figure out how we can be helpful to the nuclear industry,” he said…
http://www.platts.com/latest-news/coal/washington/doe-to-offer-8-billion-in-clean-fossil-fuel-project-21927884
Yes, Janice, but I only wish that I could find a clip of Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber saying that he’s not a common criminal but an extraordinary criminal.
“£3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills.”
The UK now has a Department of BS…..to manage their greenmail scam….
Well, at least they got the acronym right…
The Obama Administration is about to nominate 50 new judges. Just in time for this, Sen. Reid has taken the nuclear option, and removed the filibuster. This will allow for wildly activist judges to be appointed in the next few months to defeat legal challenges to many Obama policies and mandates.
The Administration is also ready to appoint 180 to positions in the major bureaucracies such as the EPA, DOE, HHS and IRS.
They need to all be scrutinized for precisely these green NGO and renewable energy connections. And these bureaucracies have been used to target political opponents already.
Forgive me for being ponderous and long winded but I do not think people appreciate how important this story is or what it means. I will try to explain especially for US readers.
Although the BBC, like the ABC in Australia, both publically funded broadcast networks of a decidedly left wing view in the UK the Press, although a fading force, is still a national and powerful one. And as such the Mail has become the most dominant appealing to middle England.
The politicians have made very attempt to muzzle the UK press, there is a current try on now, above all because it reveals their peculations.
Moreover the UK law is inimical to a free press and so allows them to suppress stories by the mere threat of legal action.
Nothing the Mail has published here is unknown to those who pay attention to these things but the politicians have been able to keep it out of the public eye. More or less. So it will be news on Sunday breakfast tables. Some millions of them.
Since the Mail has put it on public view I am certain that neither the Mail’s management, its editors, its reporters and above all else its lawyers would have done this and named names and money unless they were absolutely sure that they could defend the story in court.
Which opens the dam, mere threats of legal action will not stop others from making allegations. The bond of self serving secrecy is broken.
And to a public deeply suspicious of politicians feathering their own nests.
What will happen now only time will tell.
But if I lived in No. 10 I would not be sleeping easily tonight. As perhaps others with their fingers in the pie might be worried.
No doubt the government lickspittles will gloss over it.
But with an election due in just over a year I doubt that will be effective.
Kindest Regards
“Enjoy the science, that’s what this site is about. — mod.”
Long since dropped that potato. As for David Rose – in fact checking quarters, his reporting is seen with bemusement. Next week, one assumes, he will run his microscope over the GWPF. Thought not. No, have nothing substantive to say other than how predictable for a science site to reprint this article.
As is ever the case, the CAGW is just the most egregious world wide example.
All the “save the world solutions” have these things in common.
Money is forcibly taken from the many(thro taxes, fees and compulsory indulgences).
Then given to the well connected few.(Who “intend”to help the imaginary victims)
The solutions are feel good and do nothing to reduce the supposed harm.
These actions are imposed by our bureaucracies, production difficulties multiply, real wealth shrinks.
The politicians and bureaus double down, more regulations and enforcement.
Real wealth falls further,civil unrest increases, militant enforcement increases.
In the case of politicians and bureaucrats feasting at the trough, whilst controlling the flows of public treasure, it is treason.
These individuals all swore oaths.
But who watches the watchdogs?
If it weren’t for thousands of Brits dying each year because of high energy costs initiated by these crooked bastards this story would put a smile on my face. The monies they’ve received should be reclaimed and used to protect those survivors still exposed by the worst energy policies on the planet.
This will not be news to anyone who has been following BishopHill, where very heavy hints have been made for years now.
However, few Britons read (or are even aware of the existence of) BishopHill. It takes a widely read national daily, with considerable legal resources behind it, to be able to safely spill the truth to a population.
This will take some time, but the British people will rise up.