"Cap-and-Trade": the largest tax increase in U.S. history

What would you say to your Congressional representative if they told you they were going to raise taxes on gasoline by $0.53 a gallon?

Yeah, I know. It's not printable on a family blog.

Democrats are marketing a bill -- "The Climate Security Act" (also known as "Cap-and-Trade") -- which will do precisely that while sinking the economy into a deep recession as surely as night follows day.

The Lieberman-Warner bill (America's Climate Security Act) represents the largest tax increase in U.S. history and the biggest pork bill ever contemplated with trillions of dollars in giveaways. Well-heeled lobbyists are already plotting how to divide up the federal largesse... The federal Energy Information Administration says the bill would result in a 9.5% drop in manufacturing output and higher energy costs.

Senator George Voinovich said that the bill "could result in the most massive bureaucratic intrusion into the lives of Americans since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service."

Liberal blogger Matt Stoller ("The Cap-and-Trade Scam") notes that such a system is already used in Europe... to ill effect.

Given these numerous drawbacks, cap-and-trade’s principal justification appears to its political feasibility. Many environmental activists assume that a global cap-and-trade program is more achievable politically than global carbon taxes, because most of the world agreed to Kyoto and most people resist higher taxes. On close analysis, the Kyoto agreement is too weak to signify a meaningful consensus for an effective cap-and-trade system. As we will see, numerous analyses of Kyoto have found that it would have very little effect on climate change even over a 60-year period; and the first effort to apply it in an enforceable way, the European Emissions Trading Scheme, is expected to have virtually no effect on emissions.

Furthermore, the bill ignores the real polluters and instead penalizes the U.S., which is already among the cleanest of all countries on a per-capita basis.


Satellite data indicates that Beijing, China is the "air pollution capital of the world."


The World Bank has warned China is home to 16 of the Earth's 20 most air-polluted cities.


The World Resources Institute reports that, "air pollution in some Chinese cities is among the highest ever recorded, averaging more than ten times the standard proposed by the World Health Organization... In Beijing, 40 percent of autos surveyed and 70 percent of taxis failed to meet the most basic emission standards."


USA Today reports that, "[d]ecades of... pollution have allowed industrial poisons to leach into groundwater, contaminating drinking supplies and leading to a rash of cancers, residents say. In this village, where the air has a distinctive sour odor, the rate of cancer is more than 18 times the national average. In nearby Liukuaizhuang, it's 30 times the national figure..."


AFP discovered that an internal Chinese government report found that nearly half a million persons die per year from pollution. Experts believe that, "China's rapid industrialization is leading to increasing environmental damage, with air pollution likely to rise five-fold in 15 years at the current rate."


Iran is another interesting case. Its pollution problems are visible throughout the capital city of Tehran.


In a single year, 10,000 people have died from pollution-related causes in that city alone.

It begs the question: why "Cap-and-Trade"? Consider the beneficiaries of this massive new tax.

Ms. Boxer expects to scoop up auction revenues of some $3.32 trillion by 2050. Yes, that's trillion. Her friends in Congress are already salivating over this new pot of gold. The way Congress works, the most vicious floor fights won't be over whether this is a useful tax to create, but over who gets what portion of the spoils. In a conference call with reporters last Thursday, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry explained that he was disturbed by the effects of global warming on "crustaceans" and so would be pursuing changes to ensure that New England lobsters benefit from some of the loot.

...$802 billion would go for "relief" for low-income taxpayers... There's also $190 billion to fund training for "green-collar jobs," which are supposed to replace the jobs that will be lost in carbon-emitting industries. Another $288 billion would go to "wildlife adaptation," whatever that means, and another $237 billion to the states for the same goal. Some $342 billion would be spent on international aid, $171 billion for mass transit, and untold billions for alternative energy and research – and we're just starting.

Ms. Boxer would only auction about half of the carbon allowances; she reserves the rest for politically favored supplicants. These groups might be Indian tribes (big campaign donors!), or states rewarded for "taking the lead" on emissions reductions like Ms. Boxer's California. Those lucky winners would be able to sell those allowances for cash. The Senator estimates that the value of the handouts totals $3.42 trillion. For those keeping track, that's more than $6.7 trillion in revenue handouts so far.

The bill also tries to buy off businesses that might otherwise try to defeat the legislation. Thus carbon-heavy manufacturers like steel and cement will get $213 billion "to help them adjust," while fossil-fuel utilities will get $307 billion in "transition assistance." No less than $34 billion is headed to oil refiners. Given that all of these folks have powerful Senate friends, they will probably extract a larger ransom if cap and trade ever does become law.

In these turbulent economic times, Democrats are proposing to increase the price of gas, outsource millions of jobs to overseas providers, and create a massive new bureaucracy funded by your (additional) tax dollars.

The American Consumer summarizes the fatally flawed "Cap-and-Trade" approach.

By creating tradable financial assets worth tens of billions of dollars for governments to distribute among their industries and plants and then monitor, a global cap-and-trade program also introduces powerful incentives to cheat by corrupt and radical governments. Corrupt governments will almost certainly distribute permits in ways that favor their business supporters and understate their actual energy use and emissions.

Meanwhile, the world's worst polluters continue choking the atmosphere with toxic fumes and poisons.

Vote accordingly in 2008.

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Quote o' the day

Charles Krauthammer:

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd], you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue.

Update: Gore visits Gaia.

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Line o' the day: just right

George Will (via Diamond Bullet):

The housing perhaps-not-entirely-a-crisis resembles, in one particular, the curious consensus about the global warming "crisis," concerning which, the assumption is: Although Earth's temperature has risen and fallen through many millennia, the temperature was exactly right when, in the 1960s, Al Gore became interested in the subject.

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Gore, Schumer and Pelosi: Let them eat dirt

It all started out as a simple, money-making scam. In the late 1990's, members of the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were tasked with assessing the scientific validity of the Kyoto Protocol. They subsequently produced the Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry. The report found that "carbon offsets" and "carbon trading" were viable ways to barter the right to pollute for new forestry initiatives.


But members of the panel, such as Pedro Moura-Costa (above) and Gareth Philips, had major conflicts-of-interest. They owned or worked for businesses -- such as Ecosecurities and SGS Forestry -- that would benefit from the report's conclusions. But the mainstream media did not report these conflicts and instead piled on the "global warming" and "carbon offset" bandwagons.


The carbon offset market quickly exploded. In fact, $92 billion worth of offsets are expected to change hands in 2008. But wanton profiteering alone appears to be at the very heart of "carbon offsets." Put simply, a wide range of respected scientists, environmentalists, researchers, agriculturalists, and activists believe that carbon offsets are a "scam", "fantasy", "fiction", "nonsense", "fraudulent" and worse. And they've been saying so since 2000, though to read the newspaper you wouldn't know it.


To demonstrate the fraudulence of the carbon offset market, one need only request quotes from various carbon offset sellers.


The price for offseting a flight from London to Toronto and back?

• $85: from Climate Care (UK), which says 6 tons of CO2 must be offset.
• $60: Carbon Neutral (UK), which says 4.3 tons of CO2 must be offset.
• $195: Climate Friendly (Australia) asserts that 11.63 tons of CO2 must be offset.
• $180: Green Seat (Netherlands) says 8.68 tons of CO2 must be offset.

In other words, they're all basically making it up as they go along.


The result of these frauds, with which the mainstream media has been stunningly complicit, goes well beyond what most of the scammers would ever have anticipated.


For one, food prices haves skyrocketed as biofuel production has eroded the world's ability to produce basic foodstuffs.

"Why are we putting food in our gas tanks instead of our stomachs?" asked Richard Reinwald, owner of Reinwald's Bakery in Huntington, N.Y., and an active member of the Retail Bakers Association...

...Joseph Glauber, the chief economist at the Department of Agriculture, said ethanol production has led to higher prices for corn and soybeans... [and]...George Braley, the vice president of America's Second Harvest, said food banks nationwide are having trouble stocking their shelves...

But biofuel production isn't the only culprit.


The rise in food prices is also due, in part, to high oil prices. Earlier this week, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) described his reluctance to pump oil from the United States' Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

What does the president do? He takes out the old saw of ANWR. ANWR wouldn't produce a drop of oil in ten years...

Unfortunately, that's exactly what Democrat Bill Clinton said fourteen years ago, when he vetoed legislation that would have permitted drilling in ANWR's coastal plain. Had Clinton signed off then, we'd have started producing oil four years ago. And billions of barrels of oil lie untouched, available to U.S. consumers, in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) areas.


The oil lies, patiently waiting for us, in areas around the US. But Democrats have "repeatedly blocked environmentally safe exploration in ANWR... We could produce plenty of oil," said Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). "We could meet our own needs right now if we wanted to."


The red areas in the accompanying maps depict "The No Zone." These are the regions surrounding the United States in which Democrats have forbidden any oil exploration. From the tiny spit of land within the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to the OCS, Democrats have uniformly opposed every form of exploration that would allow us to stop sending our funds overseas and given us the time to transition to clean energy technologies.



In the mean time, Cuba has leased drilling rights to foreign countries, which will permit them to drain the Gulf of Mexico of its oil. For example, Cuba recently granted China drilling rights in the Gulf. And, in fact, China will be drilling within 50 miles of Florida.


Instead of thinking strategically, Democrats have proposed various short-term fixes to address high oil prices.

"We believe there ought to be a gas-tax holiday, but Big Oil ought to pay for it," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

In other words, jack up prices to consumers even more because the oil companies will be forced to raise costs in order to continue their exploration and R&D functions (and pay shareholders like you and I).


Put simply, Democrats want more expensive energy.

All that said, the real problem — and the reason Pelosi really does deserve blame — is that Democrats’ political goal of reducing carbon emissions continues to trump their populist rhetoric on gasoline prices. The two stances are impossible to reconcile. Try as they might to blame oil companies for the pain Americans feel at the pump, the Democrats want higher prices for gasoline — and for all forms of energy that emit carbon. Economic barriers against CO2 emissions are a requirement for environmental progress in the Democrats’ view, and this is the entire purpose of the carbon cap-and-trade system they will put before the House this summer — to create economic disincentives for emitting CO2.

There's that phrase again: carbon trading.

It all comes back to carbon offsets, the "global warming" scam promoted by the UN's IPCC. And now, a group of scientists has formally petitioned the IPCC, asking that they cease and desist marketing the message that CO2 emissions relate to warming temperatures. The scientists go on to renounce the unintended consequences of the UN's position: that the policy of burning food (to produce biofuel) has driven food prices sharply higher and is causing hunger and deforestation in countries around the world (especially the poorer countries).

The net result? In Haiti, for example, citizens have been forced to eat mud patties consisting of dirt, oil and sugar.

Furthermore, scientists are now coming to the conclusion that "green" fuels can't replace oil anytime soon.

* * *
The hunger and high oil prices are certain to continue until we come to grips with reality. That is, fossil fuels are required for the world to survive the next several decades. The transition to green technologies will take significant time.

Unless we wish to see mass starvation and economic ruin, Democrats must allow America to take advantage of its immense storehouse of energy.

Vote accordingly in 2008.

Linked by: Junk Science and Parkway Rest Stop. Thanks!

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Is it just me, or is it warm in here?

• South Dakota was slammed with 48 inches of global warming and 60 mile-an-hour winds.

• The diversion of food to biofuel production has resulted in soaring food prices throughout the world. Among the hardest hit: Haitians have been forced to eat mud patties, which consist of dirt, oil and sugar.

• Perhaps this explains why one UN official called the biofuel frenzy a "crime against humanity." The biofuel boondoggle -- a humanitarian disaster -- needs to be rectified, and fast.

Let's hope Al Gore wins another Nobel Prize for this lunacy. It'll keep him from tinkering with more stuff that can go horribly, fatally wrong.

Update: Tom Nelson has an excellent digest of climate-change folderol.

Update II: Noel Sheppard links Rex Murphy's blistering commentary on biofuels (hat tip: Larwyn).

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There will be no questions allowed during the Planetary Emergency

Remember - the science is settled and there is no dispute that anthropogenic global warming is real.

That's why it's standard practice for Al Gore to ban the press during his (very expensive) appearances.

Gore, who reportedly receives $100,000 for personal appearances, apparently has a standard contract that bans the fourth estate from all of his speeches. No one seems to know why, and we can’t ask — on account of we’re out here, and he’s in there.

The Smoking Gun has Gore's standard contract. Terms include:

* No press, no questions, no statements, no interviews
* No photographs (perhaps they make Gore's ass look fat)
* No recording (audio or video) of Gore
* An Apple MacBook Pro must be provided for his presentation.

Brother, can you spare a carbon offset?

Hat tip: Vanderleun.

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Hungry Africans thank Al Gore

Thanks, Al Gore.

The world just had one of the coldest winters on record.

And the price of food has skyrocketed...

...thanks to your "global warming" -- oops, I meant "climate change" -- initiatives.

Problem is, researchers, environmentalists and scientists of all political persuasions say that your "carbon offset" businesses are money-making scams and do absolutely nothing for the environment.

And the current lack of sunspots likely indicates a solar cooling cycle beyond human control.

We're hungry, Al Gore. Thanks for all of your help.

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Oops. Another Line o' the Day.

Bidinotto:

Katie [Couric], forget worrying about "carbon footprints." The only footprint you should worry about is the one soon to appear on the backside of your skirt, when CBS finally bounces you out on the sidewalk of 52nd Street.

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RFK, Jr.'s latest hilarious satire

We last heard from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. when he promoted the whackadoodle leftist meme that the Rethuglicans stole the 2004 election. Not the 2000 election, mind you, but 2004 -- the very year the Kerry campaign bused thousands of out-of-state voters to Wisconsin where they could easily vote early and often in a state with "same day voter registration."

83,000 people executed a same-day registration for Milwuakee County, which is more than 20% of all voting-age residents in the county. Now, Wisconsinites may procrastinate a bit, but in order to believe that number, you'd have to expect that 20% of the county had moved or became newly eligible within the past two years (after the previous national cycle). Not only that, but the state now reports that 10,000 of those registrations cannot be verified, a whopping 12% of all same-day registrations and almost the entire margin of victory for Kerry for the entire state.

While RFK's Rolling Stone story is worthy of its own laugh-track, his latest in Vanity Fair is sure to cause giggling even in the rarefied, low-oxygen atmosphere of Kosworld.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to ‘abolish’ carbon usage and sees a direct comparison to the end of slavery.

According to Kennedy, “industry and government warnings” about avoiding “economic ruin” should not be heeded because abolishing slavery did not cripple the British economy as was predicted “Instead of collapsing, as slavery’s proponents had predicted, Britain’s economy accelerated,” he argued.

...The piece ended on a utopian note with Kennedy imagining that carbon abolition would result in America "[living] free from Middle Eastern wars and entanglements with petty tyrants who despise democracy and are hated by their own people.”

Kennedy didn't describe now the U.S. could eliminate carbon emissions, which will require retooling all automobiles, humans (who exhale carbon dioxide) and volcanoes.

Update: Global Warming Insanity looks like a promising new site that will track much of the carbon craziness.

Update II: Bidinotto highlights the climate menace represented by the Olympic Torch.

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Can "green" fuels replace oil? Short answer: hell, no.

CNet has the bad news.

4.2 billion ...That's how many rooftops you'd have to cover with solar panels to displace a cubic mile of oil (CMO), a measure of energy consumption, according to Ripudaman Malhotra, who oversees research on fossil fuels at SRI International... [in other words,] we'd need to equip 250,000 roofs a day with solar panels for the next 50 years to have enough photovoltaic infrastructure to provide the world with a CMO's worth of solar-generated electricity for a year. We're nowhere close to that pace.

Many of these stats and a far lengthier discussion of the issue will be found in a book coming from Oxford University Press by Crane, Malhotra, and Ed Kinderman called A Cubic Meter of Oil... And judging by some of the stats Malhotra gave me, the book will alarm policy makers, environmentalists, and pretty much anyone else interested in weaning ourselves from fossil fuels...

One of the more compelling aspects of Malhotra's research is how it highlights the amount of energy, particularly in the form of fossil fuels, that the world consumes. Oil provided about one-third of worldwide energy (1.06 CMO) in 2006 followed by coal (0.81) and natural gas (0.61). Together, the three fossil fuels accounted for 2.48 CMOs of the 3 CMOs consumed that year.

The figures drop quickly after that. The fourth largest source of energy is biomass, mostly in the form of burning wood. Biomass, however, only provide 0.19 CMOs, while hydroelectric and nuclear provided, respectively, 0.17 and .015 CMOs...

The minuscule size of renewables, unfortunately, also means progress will come slowly. Some more comparisons: A large hydroelectric dam can generate about 18 gigawatts of power a year. To get an annual CMO from new hydroelectric dams, you'd need to build the equivalent of 200 Three Gorges Dams. There aren't that many available rivers in the world left to dam up. Solar thermal? 7,700 plants, or 150 a year for 50 years, required for an annual CMO. One plant went up last year, and it was the first in over 15 years. In his calculations, Malhotra takes into account the fact that solar, wind, hydroelectric, and even nuclear plants don't operate at optimal conditions 24-7; in other words, he has baked in real-world assumptions.

If consumers worldwide could replace 1 billion incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, it would save only 0.01 CMOs in a year...

"What is truly humbling is that we aren't going to make any impact on CO2 emission levels for the next 20 to 30 years," Malhotra said. Much of the growth for energy demand will come from emerging markets...

Saying that we may need oil for the next few decades is like telling someone in the path of a hurricane that they may experience moisture.

Update: Charlie Foxtrot: "Starvation = Greener Planet."

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The scariest photo you will see all day

Writing in The Australian, Phil Chapman -- geophysicist and former NASA astronaut -- sounds the alarm claxons for climate change. Problem is that it relates to catastrophic cooling -- not global warming.

Is this the scariest climate photo ever?

The sun: sans sunspots. Not a good sign.
What's the big deal you might ask?

No sunspots. Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.

That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.

It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.

There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.

Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.

There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.

The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.

The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.

The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.

By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.

Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.

If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale...

It just goes to prove the old adage about Al Gore: beauty is only skin deep, but stupid goes down to the bone.

Hat tip: catmman. Gateway Pundit has the essential linkfarm.

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World temperatures keep falling while CO2 keeps rising

A group of scientists has formally petitioned the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to cease and desist on their message that CO2 emissions relate to warming temperatures.

And they issue this challenge: "If you believe there is evidence of the CO2 driver theory in the available data please present a graph of it."

The letter is signed by Hans Schreuder (Analytical Chemist), Piers Corbyn (Astrophysicist), and Dr Don Parkes Svend Hendriksen (1988 Nobel Laureate), and a copy is available at a website operated by the International Climate Science Association.

Evidence presented in the letter goes well beyond putting the “hockey stick” graph, made famous in Al Gore's movie, in doubt. The hockey stick presented exponentially increasing global temperature in the near future due to uncontrolled increases in CO2 – and got its name from the shape of the graph – an apparently long stable period with an upward increase in CO2 and temperature during the industrial age. The UN panel claimed that human activity was driving what Mr. Gore explained as a certain end to civilization as we know it, if extreme political and economic measures are not taken.

The scientists assembled a graph based on actual measurements and did not find evidence that CO2 was the main driving force behind temperature. In fact, temperature increases and decreases, showing little interest in CO2 level.

The scientists go on to renounce the unintended consequences of the UN's position: that the policy of burning food (to produce biofuel) has driven food prices sharply higher and is causing hunger and deforestation in countries around the world (especially the poorer countries).

Given the economic devastation that is already happening and which is now widely recognised will continue to flow from this policy, what possible justification can there be for its retention?

Easy answer: money. The carbon offset market, which environmentalists, researchers and scientists decry as utterly "fraudulent", represents more money than the UN and its related entities can walk away from. And, yes, that's a preposition I ended that last sentence with.

Update: AJ Strata has more. Hat tip: Larwyn.

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Another UN Scandal: Carbon offset market bogus from day one!

Executive Summary: the UN has facilitated a "fraudulent" market worth tens of billions of dollars that was justified by a critical report; this report was authored by the very project developers and "auditors" who would profit from the report's publication. This appears to be a major UN scandal that could surpass the Oil-for-Food Program in terms of total economic impact.

This weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the multibillion-dollar experiment created to control global warming is faltering as officials questions the program's efficacy.

[Companies] ...can pay for the right to pollute by buying "carbon credits," essentially permission slips to spew carbon dioxide. Sale of the credits is supposed to help fund clean-air projects in China and other developing countries that would otherwise be too costly to build...

...U.N. regulators are... concerned that some independent auditors of these projects, who are responsible for vetting their environmental legitimacy, have been letting project developers push through ventures of questionable environmental value.

...Developing-world projects like [wind farms and palm-oil plants] are part of the burgeoning global carbon trade [which] last year was worth 40.4 billion euros...

The carbon market was created by the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 global treaty underlying environmental rules...

A dozen or so project developers, most based in Europe, dominate the business. Among the largest is EcoSecurities...

Three auditors dominate the business... Det Norske Veritas, Tüv Süd AG, ...and SGS Group...

Let's hit the pause button right there. Those company names sound familiar.

Let's rewind to the year 2000. The World Rainforest Movement published a bulletin ("Sinks that stink") decrying the emerging carbon trade as suffering "the taint of intellectual corruption". In effect, the WRM and other evironmentalists assert that the entire carbon market is a "scam", "fantasy", "fiction", "nonsense", "fraudulent" and worse.

But why? WRM states:

...some of the most polluting countries are trying to find ways out of their commitments, using potential loopholes in the Protocol which may allow them to plant millions of hectares of trees in Southern countries as a substitute for cutting emissions at [the] source...

in order to assess the scientific validity of this approach, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) appointed a panel to put together a Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry. The report, released in May, has disappointed many activists by giving a "scientific" stamp of approval to a carbon market which would generate profits for a small number of mostly Northern companies and consultants...

...one of the reason's for the report's failure is, sadly, surely quite simple: some of the authors (and the companies they work for) will benefit financially from having drawn the conclusions they drew... [just] a few examples:

Pedro Moura-Costa, another important author of Chapter 5, is a UK-based executive of Ecosecurities..

Gareth Philips..., another Lead Author of Chapter 5, works for Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS) Forestry of Geneva...

The bulletin concludes:

These and many other authors and editors of the IPCC Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees. They should therefore have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such "offset" projects...

That's where I've heard of EcoSecurities and SGS before.

In short, the very authors of the original UN climate report that justified the carbon market were themselves poised to profit from that market. And, now, the UN does business directly with firms like Ecosecurities and SGS, enriching the authors of the original report!

Furthermore, the project developers and the "auditors" co-wrote the chapter justifying the carbon offset market! In what other field -- aside from the UN, that is -- would companies and their "auditors" both be permitted to conspire in such a fraudulent manner?

If any of us thought the corruption in the UN ended with the "Oil-for-Food" scandal, it appears we were all sadly mistaken. The UN has no right doing business with any of these firms. By continuing to do so, they are reinforcing America's image of the organization: that it is utterly useless and thoroughly infested with corrupt officials.

Related: The World Rainforest Movement, which buys into anthropogenic global warming (note: I do not) runs a website completely devoted to monitoring the carbon offset trade: SinksWatch.org.

Update: Linked by Pajamas Media. Thanks!

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Energy use dimmed during Earth Hour: North Korea celebrates

Energy authorities say the impact of last night's Earth Hour event was the equivalent of the entire country of North Korea going without lights. Which they do every night.

Kim Jong-Il was said to be pleased with the demonstration.

Update: Linked by Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities. Thanks!

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What a record year for snowfall meant for a friend's backyard

 
Global warming notwithstanding, it turns out to be a record year for snowfall in many places around the world.

T sent along some before-and-after pictures of his backyard.


June 2006 (a gentle bank descends to a tiny creek, which is hidden by the foliage)

March 2008 (after the most recent 20 inches of snow melted and the resulting flood tore out a good chunk of the backyard)

T wanted to know whether he could sue the town for some out-of-control runoff. I helpfully suggested he go after Al Gore. John Edwards may be available.

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Line o' the Day: It's (not) settled

 
Edmonton Journal:

Only about one in three [of 51,000] Alberta earth scientists and engineers believe the culprit behind climate change has been identified, a new poll reported today.

The expert jury is divided, with 26 per cent attributing global warming to human activity like burning fossil fuels and 27 per cent blaming other causes such as volcanoes, sunspots, earth crust movements and natural evolution of the planet.

A 99-per-cent majority believes the climate is changing. But 45 per cent blame both human and natural influences, and 68 per cent disagree with the popular statement that "the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled."

A mere 51,000 specialists -- licensed to practice by the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta -- were surveyed.

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