Carbon trading profiteers making global warming worse, not better, another sub-prime like scam in the making

• Rampant carbon trading fraud is "compounding the threat of global warming and climate change and

• not reducing it....
• fraudulent carbon dioxide emissions permits and allowances...are now
  

flooding into the poorly regulated and weakly supervised global carbon exchanges."

• ...(This from another author who believes in global warming but that it's been taken over by commercial interests who not only won't help the planet, will damage it. The carbon market is unregulated, done with a click on a computer and already infested by organized crime. Who will stop it?). ed
  

June 6, "The global carbon market is the most recent and perhaps the most glamorous ‘poster-child’ of globalization ever.

• Within a decade it has grown from relative obscurity to an estimated US$180-200 billion in value by the end of this year....

Further the market is projected to grow by one-third this year. This is all the more remarkable, as it follows a compounded annual rate of growth of 90 per cent for the period 2005 to 2009.

• As previously discussed, the bulk of the global carbon market is centred on the segment dealing with trades in carbon dioxide emissions allowances and permits.

The European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is the largest, accounting for about two-thirds of the volume.

• The US ten-state regional cap-and-trade programme for power plants, which I have previously classed as ‘voluntary’ because there are no federally mandated emissions controls, is projected to reach a
  
• value of US$2.2 billion

and an approximate volume of one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide this year. This clearly suggests that if the United States establishes its own mandatory cap-and-trade system similar to the EU’s, the global carbon market

• could reach unimaginable heights.

The second and much smaller segment of the market deals with projects that generate carbon offsets (including forest carbon) under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the Joint Implementation (JI) has also grown spectacularly....

Clearly therefore, the future growth of the global carbon market is heavily dependent on 1) a replacement of the Kyoto Protocol 2) full economic recovery and

• 3) the US adoption of a national cap-and-trade system to regulate its emissions of carbon dioxide.

As the highly favoured poster-child of globalization, the global carbon market is portrayed as one of two fundamental solutions for coping with the (alleged, ed.) global climate problem....

The carbon price...

Of course these price benefits will only be secured if markets are competitive and efficient. Indeed, if the market were rigged in any way, whether through

• fraud, corruption, insider trading, monopoly, information withholding or other such illegal actions,
  
• these benefits would not be realized.

Greed, however, more often than not motivates players in major markets, leading to market failure. To prevent this from occurring requires strict regimes of oversight and regulation so as to ensure neither illegalities nor excessively risky behaviour occurs. Unfortunately, as I shall reveal in later columns, the spectacular rise of the global carbon market has been accompanied by the equally spectacular

• rise of market depredations and deformations.
  

It will be left for readers to judge whether these have reached a stage where

• market failure is compounding the threat of global warming and climate change
  
• and not reducing it.

Such an outcome would not be unique to the global carbon market. The previous poster-child of globalization has been the financial and credit market. Tellingly that too was riddled with market abuses, which recently led to the near-collapse of the global financial system and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In the coming weeks I shall argue that just as the world has come to realize at the heart of the recent financial collapse was the toxic private household mortgage – backed securities of the US, there is a

• real danger of its later repeat in the growth of toxic carbon offsets and
  
• fraudulent carbon dioxide emissions permits and allowances, which are now
  

flooding into the poorly regulated and weakly supervised global carbon exchanges."

• "The global carbon market: the new 'poster-child' of globalization," by Dr. Clive Thomas, Stabroek News (Guyana) via Tom Nelson

The carbon trading scam has been up and running for years-having no interest in the environment.

• They knew they'd get away with it because big media would cover for them. They would never go against Soros. ed.