UN carbon trading fraud continues, nothing done to stop it, but demand $30 billion more from taxpayers to continue the crime

It has long been known billions have been lost via carbon trading fraud. Now they say they're thinking about writing some proposals to do something about it. Taxpayers were forced to give money which is easily robbed, a crime, and no one objects. This is a slave mentality, certainly a suicidal one. And they want more money.

• 10/26, "EU plans to clamp down on carbon trading scam," Guardian UK, D. Carrington

"The European commission is planning to clamp down on a £1.6bn carbon trading scam. The use of carbon permits from industrial gas projects in China could be banned because of their "total lack of environmental integrity", the climate change commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, has told the Guardian.

Billions of euros' worth of the controversial permits were used between 2008-09 in the European Union's emission trading scheme (ETS), in which companies must exchange pollution permits for any emissions produced. The ETS allows some of those permits to be bought in from developing countries.

• The most popular of these so-called offsets come from projects that destroy the greenhouse gas HFC-23, a by-product of the manufacturing of the refrigerant gas HCFC-22. In June, the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency said
  

many Chinese chemical companies were manufacturing HCFC-22 primarily to earn the money from destroying HFC-23, which can be

• five times the value of the refrigerant gas the plants are ostensibly set up to create.

The industrial gas offsets have attracted criticism, with suggestions that

• some plants only existed to earn money from the offset scheme, which is administered via the UN's clean development mechanism....

"Why should the Chinese put a stop to these projects if they get money for continuing to create HFC-23? Here we have a perverse incentive."

Such projects were not genuinely cutting greenhouse gas emissions, she said, and so were not real offsets.

• Her office will publish proposals
  

• in the next few weeks
  

on how to end the use of industrial gas offsets in the ETS. Crucially, the power to ban their use already exists within the ETS directive, making it far easier to achieve.

Hedegaard suggested the credibility of all carbon markets, which the EU ultimately wants to see cover the entire globe, depended on such reform....

Also "absolutely key" was for rich countries delivering on the pledges of

• $30bn (£19bn) of "fast start" climate aid
  

to developing countries between 2010-12."...

• No kidding. ed.

via Tom Nelson