Crush Liberalism

Carbon "offsets" shell game

Those of us who don’t buy into the junk science of global “warming” and the indulgences-like “feel-good hype” scheme known as carbon “offsets” don’t find thing like this all that surprising:

Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a “green gold rush”, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go “carbon neutral”, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.
…
The FT investigation found:

■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.

■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.

■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.

■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

■ Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

Francis Sullivan, environment adviser at HSBC, the UK’s biggest bank that went carbon-neutral in 2005, said he found “serious credibility concerns” in the offsetting market after evaluating it for several months.

“The police, the fraud squad and trading standards need to be looking into this. Otherwise people will lose faith in it,” he said.

You can’t lose faith in something in which you never had faith to begin with, sir. Carbon offsets are a fraud, pure and simple, no other way around it.

By the way, ask yourself this: if Big Oil, Big Pharmaceutical, or Big (insert bogeyman industry here) were doing any of the bulletpoints above, do you think the MSM would be as quiet about it as they are about the greenie fraudsters? Me neither.

Nice work by Citizens Journal on the Photoshop

April 26, 2007 - Posted by crushliberalism | economic ignorance, global warming