CO2 Emissions Trading

follow the money, always follow the money . ...

"Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.'

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's cohead of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade."

The Carbon Trading system is modelled on that used - successfully- to reduce Acid Rain. Rather than banning an industrial activity outright, governments instead require companies to pay for ‘licenses’ to produce the pollutant (in this case, carbon dioxide despite being a key natural part of the ecosystem is treated as a form of ‘pollution’) and these permission slips are bought and sold on specially created financial exchanges. The system is said to have worked well in reducing Acid Rain emissions, and to have been more ‘efficient’ than simply banning acid rain emissions.

However, there are important differences when you come to Carbon dioxide. For a start, no one can ban production of it. Animals produce it. The sea produces it. Plants produce it at night. Add to which, strategies to really reduce man-made emissions or to - literally!- bury them are far too prohibitively expensive to ever be implemented.

Not that anyone is trying too hard. Take Russia, Europe’s energy supplier. When the Kremlin signed up to the Kyoto treaty it was given an annual emissions limit based on the dirty old Soviet industries. Since then Russia’s industrial base has contracted so drastically that it uses only a fraction of its allowances. One recent analyst’s report found that Russia had accumulated emissions permits worth about four billion tonnes of CO2. Call it a £50 billion present from Western consumers! And, as the report warned, Russia’s huge starting allowance alone made it difficult to see how the market could ever produce a meaningful carbon price.

So we are left with a carbon trading system that has already operated for five years (since 2005) without any reduction in carbon dioxide levels. On the other hand, lots of money had changed hands.

Permits are bought from governments or from carbon traders, who, naturally, charge a commission. In terms of dollars, the World Bank has estimated that the size of the carbon market was 11 billion USD in 2005, 30 billion USD in 2006, and 64 billion in 2007.

For the City of London the arrival of carbon trading has been ‘a bonanza’, according to The Sunday Times (November 30, 2008) Within just the first few years the new sector already employed about 3,000 people and had created dozens of new millionaires. But that is just seed corn. The amounts of money involved in Carbon Trading are out of this world. A recent article article in the Financial Times predicted the market would rise to over a trillion dollars in just a few years! No wonder canny financial titans like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been busy buying a slice of the action by taking stakes in the Carbon Trading exchanges.

Where’s all that money come from? From making people pay more for energy. The money collected by the United Kingdom Treasury, for example, comes mainly from UK power companies, with the cost added directly to consumers' bills. Hilarious, or just sad, the UK's CO2 emissions have increased, not slackened, since the first trading schemes.

In fact, all the keenest proponents of carbon trading - like the UK- have allowed emissions to rise. But then Carbon exchanges are a topsy-turvy ‘Through the Looking Glass’ world, in which it is not the ‘polluter pays’ principle - but the ‘polluter gets paid’ principle that applies! The more pollution you produce, the more money you can make - for reducing it! Indeed, the notion of future offsets allows canny operators to make spectacular sums for merely threatening to produce CO2.

The complexity of the system leaves it wide open to abuse. One company that produces refrigeration gases at a sprawling chemical plant in Rajasthan, India, was able to make £300m from selling certificates to overseas companies including Shell and Barclays. The Indian company had spent just £1.4m on equipment to reduce its emissions – and then used the profit to expand production of another greenhouse gas, a thousand times more.

Another crazy rule is that Carbon Credits can be traded twice! In March 2010, trading on two exchanges - BlueNext, part of the New York Stock Exchange, and Nord Pool, part of Nasdaq - had to be suspended after some countries were found to be reselling carbon permits that had already been 'used' by large companies to compensate for excess production of CO2.

One country, in particular, Hungary, was identified as carrying out the 'double-dipping' sales and even the head of the International Emissions Trading System, Harry Derwent, warned such tricks could damage the reputation of the entire system.

The reputation, maybe. The profits to be made - likely not. After all, the system had happily survived the discovery in January 2010 that people were using fake email messages to obtain access to the national registries that make the European Union's "Emissions trading system" and then award themselves electronic certificates representing carbon credits - which they promptly sold on the exchanges for vast sums of money.

Governments would not have been too bothered by that as each trade brings in revenue via Value Added Tax, of course. However they were disgusted to discover in 2009 that some dealers were "cheating governments" (as the papers put it) by selling carbon credits and then disappearing - without paying the sales tax! The sums involved were huge too- one racket alone ran represented five billion Euros. Yep, you read it right, five billion Euros, (approximately 6 billion US dollars) in lost income.

If the December 2009 Climate Conference at Copenhagen was a fiasco, one little glimmer of light emerged. According to reports in the Guardian, the so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment" – including the UK, US and Denmark (well, it was their conference) agreed to force everyone to sign up to a delightful economic strategy in which a new non-UN body would supervise 'climate finance'.

So who benefits from 'Emissions Trading'? Could financiers be manipulating governments and markets alike to create vast profits? Well, whether they are manipulating or working for the commonweal, they are certainly at the centre of events.

The oil billionaire Maurice Strong is the ultimate example of "a wolf in sheep's clothing". Along with his apprentice, Al Gore and some of the top guys from Goldman Sachs, including Henry Paulson who became the Secretary of the USA Treasury under President Obama (major campign donor - Goldman Sachs) it is Maurice who founded the 'Chicago Climate Exchange' (CCX) in the city where Henry began his Goldman Sachs career.

One question naïve folk ask, is whether the fact that as (post-Copenhagen) there is not going to be any international agreement on reducing CO2 levels, and hence no ‘cap’ on production, the carbon trading must stop? Certainly countries with large amounts of credits are starting to off-load them. But equally, the price has not dropped to zero. How is that possible? But it is possible as carbon trading costs only consumers - everyone else makes money! The system will carry on regardless of whatever happens to atmospheric CO2 levels - let alone the Earth’s climate.

So who benefits from 'Emissions Trading'? Could financiers be manipulating governments and markets alike to create vast profits? Whether they are manipulating or working for the commonweal, they are certainly at the centre of events.

The oil billionaire Maurice Strong is the ultimate example of "a wolf in sheep's clothing". A Canadian industrialist and diplomat who, since the 1970s, has helped create an international policy agenda for the environmentalist movement. Strong has described himself as “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.” His former job titles include “senior advisor” to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, “senior advisor” to World Bank President James Wolfensohn and board member of the United Nations Foundation, a creation of Ted Turner. The 78-year-old Strong is very close to Gore. Along with his apprentice, Al Gore and some of the top guys from Goldman Sachs, including Henry Paulson who became the Sec of the USA Treasury he founded the 'Chicago Climate Exchange' (CCX) in the city where Paulson began his Goldman Sachs career.

CCX owes its existence in part to the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago-based liberal foundation that provided $347,000 in grant support in 2000 for a preliminary study to test the viability of a market in carbon credits. On the CCX board of directors is the ubiquitous Maurice Strong.¹

And don't lets entirely forget Chief Climate Alarmist, Al Gore. Al is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). The London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are going green. “Generation Investment Management, purchases — but isn’t a provider of — carbon dioxide offsets,” said spokesman Richard Campbell in a March 7 report by CNSNews.

GIM appears to have considerable influence over the major carbon-credit trading firms that currently exist: the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) in the U.S. and the Carbon Neutral Company (CNC) in Great Britain. CCX is the only firm in the U.S. that claims to trade carbon credits.

One question naïve people ask, is whether the fact that as (post-Copenhagen) there is not going to be any international agreement on reducing CO2 levels, the carbon trading must stop? Certainly countries with large amounts of credits are starting to off-load them. But equally, the price has not dropped to zero. How is that possible? But it is possible as carbon trading costs only consumers - everyone else makes money! The system will carry on regardless of whatever happens to atmospheric CO2 levels - let alone the Earth’s climate.

In terms of dollars, the World Bank has estimated that the size of the carbon market was 11 billion USD in 2005, 30 billion USD in 2006,[62] and 64 billion in 2007.

George Soros, a man who makes him billions from speculating on the stock markets, is a key funder of (as it were) 'pro-Global Warming' research. According to the Global Warming campaign newletter, aka The Guardian, he is planning to create an organization to 'advise policy makers on environmental issues', which will receive an annual stipend of $10 million over the next 10 years.

Soros, founder of the hedge fund Soros Fund Management LLC and the policy think tank The Open Society Institute, made the announcement in 2009 at a meeting in Copenhagen organised by Project Syndicate, an international association of 430 newspapers. He explained there that he was going to "insist that the investments make a real contribution to solving the problem of climate change"...

According to the website 'Alt Energy Stocks'², Carbon Trading could be the next 'big bonanza' for investors. The site points out that both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been busy buying a slice of the action by taking stakes in the Carbon Trading system and its exchanges. And an article in the Financial Times predicted the market could rise to over a trillion dollars in just a few years!

psst! Remind me - is carbon dioxide really that bad?

For what it's worth (which is not much) 'the fact is', that it is the 'outgassing' of CO2 from the oceans that drives atmospheric levels of this essential, life-giving gas. Those Ice Cores Al Gore got back to front did find a tendency of CO2 to increase in the air - AFTER temperatures rose. As one commentator at the Times Higher put it: "The CO2 rise that lags temperature is inevitable as CO2 is less soluble in warm water. The oceans contain 50 times as much dissolved carbon (in various forms) as the atmosphere, it is their temperature that determines the equilibrium atmospheric CO2 concentration." ³ This is a welcome additional piece in the 'climate jigsaw', but, of course, there we still have to take into account all the other factors that determine temperature - including CO2 levels themselves. At least everyone can test this theory very easily with two glasses of a fizzy drink. Put one in the fridge and one in the warm air and see which goes flat (loses its carbon) first.

But onto the BIG question:

NEUTRALITY NOTES: CO2 Levels

Are they as high as we're told? Most Climate Change theorists start with the 'brute fact' of 'record CO2 levels' - higher than they have been since recorded time. But, a book published in 2007 by Ernst-Georg Beck, (Energy and Environment, Vol 18 No 2,) gives a different story. An analysis of more than 90,000 contemporaneous measurements of atmospheric levels of CO2 between 1812 and 1961. The record starts in 1812 at 390 ppmv, (and that was the year of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, when he arrived back in France with only 10% of the troops who had stared the march , most of them being lost to the arctic cold conditions encountered en route.) CO2 levels peaked in 1825 at 450 ppmv, (still in the little ice age, remember,) then fell back, and peaked again at 440 ppmv in 1942.

Those references in full...

The 'Follow the money box': Source: From rollingstone.com via the Bishophill blog
- http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine/7
- http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/12/12/the-madness-of-warming.html#comments

The 'Danish Text' leak, from: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/copenhagen-climate-summit-disarray-danish-text

Trading tricks: From 'Green Inc.: Crisis in Carbon Trading Credits, IHT March 26 2010)