End US War Machine: California 'cap and trade' is a massive corporate fraud and does nothing for environment. Greenpeace: 75% carbon offsets are garbage

1. 5/21/10, "Polluted by Profit: Johann Hari on the Real ClimateGate," IndependentUK, Johann Hari

"Suddenly, these forests they run become assets, and they are worth

billions in a carbon market as offsets."...

Johann Hari subscribes to CO2 endangerment but says today's environmental movement will only make it worse. He notes the normal 'conservation' movement was derailed in the 1980's when 'green' groups started taking big money from polluters. Players mentioned include BP, WWF, the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, Duke Energy, American Electric Power (AEP), the El Paso Corporation.

Hari, 5/21: "For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous –

yet in the US it is now taken for granted....

Charles Komanoff, who worked as a consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council for 30 years, says:

"We're close to a civil war in the environmental movement.

For too long, all the oxygen in the room has been sucked out by this beast of these insider groups, who achieve almost nothing....

Yet when I ask her to explain how Conservation International justifies the conceptual holes in the entire system of offsetting,

her answers become halting. ...

There is a broad rumble of anger across the grass-roots environmental movement at this position. ...

"At Copenhagen, I couldn't believe what I was seeing," says Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch, an organisation that sides with indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin to preserve their land.

"These groups are positioning themselves to be themiddlemen in a carbon market. They are helping to set up, in effect, a global system of carbon laundering...

that will give the impression of action,
but no substance.

You have to ask – are these conservation groups at all?
They look much more like industry front groups to me."
So it has come to this. After decades of slowly creepingcorporate entanglement,
some of the biggest environmental groups have remade themselves in the image of their corporate backers: they are putting profit before planet....

It seems the US "green" groups have come to see the world solely through the funnel of the US Senate and what legislation it can be immediately coaxed to pass. ...By definition, if a bill can pass through today's corrupt Senate, then it will not be enough to prevent catastrophic global warming. Why?
Because the bulk of the Senate – including many Democrats – is owned by Big Oil and Big Coal. ...
As MacDonald says, "Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes,
they have become something like satellite PR officesfor the corporations that support them."
It has taken two decades for this relationship to become the norm among the big green organisations."...
2. 7/25/10, "European Climate Exchange website hacked," Indymedia Australia

"In a protest against carbon trading as a method for acting on climate change, on Friday, July 23 at just before midnight, the public website of the European Climate Exchange (ECX), the

leading marketplace for trading CO2 emissions in Europe, was targetted by hacktivists of the autonomous tech collective *decocidio* (#?).

In a public act of digital direct action, the ECX website was taken offline and replaced with a message in an effort to try to raise awareness about carbon trading as a dangerous false solution to the climate crisis, in support of the grassroots activists aiming to oppose the power structures and

companies profiteering from the dysfunctional Cap & Trade scheme....

In 2009 Friends of the Earth UK released a report warning thatcarbon trading could trigger a second 'sub-prime' style financial collapse and fail to protect the world from global warming catastrophe. A copy of the full report, 'A Dangerous Obsession', is available at:http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/dangerous_obsession.pdf....

According to the hack message:

"The Cap and Trade system (as implemented in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme) has a whole range of issues:

* It's main purpose is not to reduce emissions, but to help polluters meet "reduction" targets in the cheapest way possible, in a business-as-usual scenario. * Leaves room for unverifiable manipulation. * Generates outrageous profits for big industry polluters, investors in fraudulent offset projects, opportunist traders and new 'marketplaces' such as the European Climate Exchange. * It distracts attention from the wider, systemic changes and collective political action that needs to be taken to tackle climate change and it's fundamental root causes.""
****
"ECX website is unavailable due to technical reasons. We apologize for the incoveniency, and
expect to be online again soon."...
"The carbon markets themselves were designed by many of the same
Chicago School economists who brought us

derivatives trading,
and they adopt a similar logic."...2/1/09, Guardian UK, Reyes.
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3.
Christian Science Monitor, 4/20/10, "Buying Carbon offsets may ease eco-guilt but not global warming," by Doug Struck.
"Carbon offsets are the environmental equivalent of financial derivatives: complex, unregulated, unchecked and – in many cases – not worth their price." ...
"“I think you are looking at 75 percent of them as garbage, at least,” says Rolf Skar, a forest conservationist and seniorinvestigator for Greenpeace in San Francisco."...
"Harvard Law School urges students to buy offsets when they travel for job interviews."...
"An investigation by The Christian Science Monitor and theNew England Center for Investigative Reporting has found that individuals and businesses who are feeding a $700 million global market in offsets are often buying
vague promises instead of the reductions in greenhouse gases they expect.
They are buying into projects that are never completed, or paying for ones that would have been done anyhow, the investigation found.
Their purchases are feeding middlemen and promoters seeking profits from green schemes
that range from selling protection for existing trees to the promise of planting new ones that never thrive. In some cases, the offsets have consequences that their purchasers never foresaw,
such as erecting windmills that force poor people off their farms.
Carbon offsets are the environmental equivalent of financial derivatives: complex, unregulated, unchecked and – in many cases – not worth their price.

And often, those who get the “green credits” thinking their own carbon emissions have been offset, are fooled. The Vatican was among them....
"
The analytic firm Ecosystem Marketplace says

the industry “resembles the Wall Street of the 1800s –

with information closely guarded by those who profit from it.”...

The San Francisco offset provider 3Degrees, for example, sells offsets through an ATM-like kiosk recently installed, with much publicity, at the San Francisco International Airport. Travelers can use the machine to offset emissions from their flights – at $13.50 a carbon ton – expecting to buy a new carbon savings somewhere.
In fact, they are paying 3Degrees to send money to two environmental groups – The Nature Conservancy and the Conservation Fund – for a promise not to cut down trees on land the environmental groups already own. The groups estimate how much carbon would be lost if they opened their northern California forest to logging, and they sell that amount as an “offset.”...
Tens of thousands of buyers purchase carbon offsets yearly to help neutralize their global-warming pollution. They pay $5, $10, $20 or more from green-swathed sites on the Internet, or pay extra for offsets when they purchase airline tickets, rent a car, or ship a package.
Companies buy them in bulk to help project a “green” image. Government agencies and civic organizations get offsets
believing the purchases will make their actions “carbon neutral.”
They have created a worldwide market estimated by analyst Ecosystem Marketplace at $705 million in 2008. In the United States alone, offset sales have tripled in five years.
But these offsets – some sold through respected environmental organizations – come with almost no rules: There is little regulatory oversight of them in the US, no enforcement of requirements to prove their environmental claims, no certain way of measuring the carbon savings being sold, and no guarantees that planted trees or other projects will be finished or continued long enough to work.
The result, critics say, is a “Wild West” market ripe for fraud, exaggeration, and poorly run projects.

The investigation by NECIR and the Monitor found examples of irregularities in the market that include:
•An offset project in India that cleared plots of traditional tribal farmlands to build windmills for green electric power, upending some farmers’ livelihoods and – in the end – generating significantly less power than expected.
•A tree-planting project in Panama that promises profits for logging as well as calling itself a certified offset program when it is not. Few trees have even been planted.
•Scams in Australia that have prompted the alarmed government to launch a crackdown....

•An Israeli charity that is selling offsets that are supposed to create brand-new projects, for tree plantings it has been doing for 60 years.
Such examples are causing some supporters of carbon offsets to back off what they once saw as a promising tool to help the environment. And the troublesome record concerns those who want a national carbon cap-and-trade program in the US that would use offsets.
“I think you are looking at 75 percent of them as garbage, at least,” says Rolf Skar, a forest conservationist and senior investigator for Greenpeace in San Francisco."...
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4.

Bloomberg News, 12/4/09,"Carbon Capitalists warming to climate market using derivatives"

An NRDC trader says trillions of dollars will be needed in global warming transition,
Bloomberg, 12/4/09: "Companies need the financial markets to help them drive down their greenhouse gas emissions at a reasonable price, says the NRDC’s Andy Stevenson.
“There are trillions of dollars needed to make this transition, and companies need the banks,”
says Stevenson, a former trader for London-based hedge fund firm Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP."
(Behind the talk about clean air, children, and helpless animals are business profits and political turnover bigger than most of us could imagine.

We all want clean air, clean water, and to preserve our environment. We don't need the new political system being promoted by NRDC trustee Robert Redford, the rest of NRDC, and vast corporate interests.) ed.

Redford spoke to the George Soros climate pressuregroup Ceres in April 2009
and reportedly said one of the 3 reasons Al Gore's 2006 movie was a turning point was:
"Wall Street realized there was money to be made in 'going green."...
""George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator,says money managers would find ways to manipulate cap-and-trade markets. “The system can be gamed,” Soros, 79, remarked.... “That’s why financial types like me like it -- because there are financial opportunities.""...

10/8/10, "Murder on the Carbon Express: Interpol Takes on Emissions Fraud," Mother Jones, by Mark Schapiro

"More than 80 percent of carbon trading houses in Denmark were fronts for tax fraud."...

6. 2/3/10,

"Climate Crime: Phishing Scam Cripples European Emissions Trading," Der Spiegel

"It estimates that in some countries up to

90% of the market volume was caused by fraudulent activities."...

7. Californians, if you care about the environment, please vote YES on Prop. 23. "Cap and Trade" is what you'll be getting which as you know has been fronted by billionaire hedge fund profiteers who with their business practices have brought suffering to untold numbers of people.