- "1. The Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University has published science that was integral to the decision of the EU and the UK to immediately implement programs subsidizing the installation of green energy generation systems.
2. Those subsidies amounted to approximately $50 billion U.S. dollars in 2008 alone.
3. Organised crime has already moved to profit from these subsidies, which appear to lack adequate controls to prevent misuse.
4. When the authorised leak of emails and documents resulted in the Climategate scandal of November 2009, it caused considerable havoc in stock market prices of green energy companies, especially when it was followed by Copenhagen, a cold winter, and scandal in carbon certificate trading.
5. East Anglia University commissioned an investigation into the practices of its research unit and asked Lord Oxburgh to chair the panel.
6. Lord Oxburgh is chairman of Falck Renewables, a manufacturer of windfarms and the UK subsidiary of The Falck Group, a Milan-based manufacturer.
7. A sister company of Oxburgh’s Falck Renewables, Actelios, is publicly traded and had suffered serious falls in its stock price during the period of Climategate, etc.
8. Lord Oxburgh’s company, its parent and more than one of its sister companies have had organised crime activities surrounding their acquisition of property and installation of green energy systems.
9. The green energy industry, organised crime investors, Falck Renewables and its parent and sister companies stood to benefit from an investigation the results of which did not overturn the science findings of CRU.
10. The investigation by Lord Oxburgh was perfunctory. The report was 5 pages. It interviewed no-one who was not employed by the University. It reviewed 11 papers that were not part of the Climategate controversy. Those papers were selected either by the University itself or a committee of the Royal Society on which Phil Jones, director of CRU, was a member."...via WUWT
*****
(resuming, examiner): "Some of it is organised crime, as we reported yesterday and Friday. Some of it is just local initiative, taking advantage of lax monitoring procedures. Some of it is by indigenous people who consider it money being tossed around for no good reason that they are just as entitled to as the next person.
From Indonesia: (Reuters) NUSA DUA - "Organised crime syndicates are eyeing the nascent forest carbon credit industry as a potentially lucrative new opportunity for fraud, an Interpol environmental crime official said on Friday.
- Peter Younger, an environmental crimes specialist at the world's largest international police agency, was referring to a UN-backed scheme called reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation."
From Italy: (Financial Times) "Italian finance police, mounting an operation codenamed “Gone with the wind”, said on Wednesday they had arrested two of the country’s most prominent businessmen in the wind energy sector on charges of fraud and are investigating their sales of wind farms to foreign companies.
Oreste Vigorito, head of the IVPC energy company and president of Italy’s National Association of Wind Energy, was arrested on Tuesday in Naples. Vito Nicastri, a Sicilian business associate, was arrested in Alcamo, Sicily. Two other men were arrested in Sicily and the Naples area, while 11 others were charged but not arrested. Police said the charges related to fraud involved in obtaining public subsidies to construct wind farm."
The town of Santa Lucía Tirajana, host to the annual Grand Slam windsurfing championships, was struck this year with gale force. A yearlong investigation by the Guardia Civil — the Spanish gendarmerie — turned up irregularities in a plan to build a new wind park. Now the mayor, five town officials and two wind park developers are fighting criminal charges that include influence peddling, misuse of public office, misappropriation of land and bribery. The motivation? Up to €40 million in European Union subsidies.
...Police investigators have been busy across the Continent in recent months. This year five Corsican nationalists were jailed and fined for skimming €1.54 million in European subsidies for wind farms.
UK (Daily Telegraph): Officers from HM Revenue & Customs searched both residential properties and offices in both Gravesend and London targeting an alleged network of organised crime.
Members are believed to have been trading large volumes of high-value carbon credits from overseas sources free of VAT. The amount was £38 million.
Brussels (NY Times): "The latest bump came last month, when swindlers used faked e-mail messages to obtain access codes for individual accounts on national registries that make up the bloc’s Emission Trading System. Traders and companies who fell for the ploy on Jan. 28 were directed to a rogue Web site and invited to enter their security codes — a practice known as “phishing” in the jargon of the Internet.
The swindlers used the stolen codes to gain access to electronic certificates that represent quantities of greenhouse gases. They then sold the certificates through trading accounts registered in Denmark and Britain. The attack on the German national registry, which appears to have been among the hardest hit, could have netted the swindlers as much as $4 million."
These of course are all anecdotes. Nobody appears to be keeping track of any systematic approach to defrauding governments of subsidy money or gaming the system.
But then, sometimes it's the government (Euractiv): "Hungary's sale of 'used' carbon credits - or 'hot air' as environmentalists call them - had harmed the reputation of cap and trade, an industry lobby said on Friday (20 March), but analysts expected little price impact."
The question of how long green initiatives can retain credibility is actually quite serious. I am a strong champion of solar and other renewable energy sources, and I think that incentives should be used to encourage their adoption.
- How long taxpayers will tolerate these kinds of criminal activities before they demand the plug is pulled is, of course, open to question.
Which obviously means that governments need to do more to regulate themselves in terms of handing out money to anyone who asks.
About the headline: I shamelessly stole the title 'La CO2a Nostra from a commenter at Watt's Up With That with the pseudonym 'Al Gore's Holy Hologram' which I doubt is meant as a tribute to the former vice president." by Thomas Fuller, examiner.com via Tom Nelson 4/26
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