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apothecary

Businesses hold world hostage over carbon credits

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If you think this won't happen here, that's foolish. Frankly, it is obvious to me that it is ALREADY happening. ETS in it's current form is a sticky sticky mess from an environmental and financial perspective. I don't like it. We should have a hard rolling tax on emissions (not just carbon) which increases YoY and by usage as well as a tarriff on any imported products which are not meeting stringent emissions rules. That way the polluters pay and they can't just offshore to China to sell our resources back to us.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php/index.php?pageId=118953

By Jerome R. Corsi

© 2009 WorldNetDaily

WND research reveals the European Union's cap-and-trade exchange is vulnerable to a sophisticated form of corporate extortion in which EU bureaucrats in Brussels are manipulated into paying hundreds of millions of dollars in carbon permit bribes to keep companies from moving jobs to Third World nations.

In fact, it appears the scam is already under way.

The crux of the scheme is this: European steelmakers have threatened to leave the EU for India, eliminating the jobs of thousands of workers in the process, unless the EU grants the steelmakers free carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Eurofer, a European trade group, is at the center of the scheme. The web of the plot, however, weaves in not only several companies, but also the United Nations' climate change chief:

* Among its members, Eurofer represents two EU steelmakers, Corus Redcar and ArcelorMittal, each of which has ties to India as well as to Rajendra K. Pachauri, the Indian industrial engineer who has been chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, since 2002.

* Eurofer appears to have coordinated a threat to the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading System that its steelmakers would move their operations from the EU to India unless the EU cap-and-trade exchange issued them – at no cost – carbon emissions permits worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

* Once the bureaucrats in Brussels acquiesced, Corus Redcar and ArcelorMittal maneuvered to cash in windfall profits from the EU carbon permits given them at no cost.

* Additionally, Corus Redcar has now announced a decision to close operations in Great Britain nonetheless and relocate its steelmaking activities to India in order to gain additional U.N. carbon credits.

Ironically, EU and U.N. officials who might have thought requiring cap-and-trade permits would operate as "protection racket" in which EU companies need to buy carbon credits to continue operations, have now found themselves on the losing end of the reverse scheme.

In the final analysis, the winners are the European Union corporations willing to play hardball with the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading System, and the losers are the EU middle class workers that are held hostage in the scheme.

(Story continues below)

Furthermore, WND research on the EU emissions trading system continues to suggest "follow the money" may explain the enthusiasm the U.N. has shown in pursuing global caps on carbon emissions, despite doubts surfacing in the scientific community about the validity of the underlying global warming hypothesis.

Rajendra K. Pachauri

Last week, WND reported a Mumbai-based Indian multinational conglomerate with ties to IPCC Chair Pachauri stands to make several hundred million dollars in carbon credits simply by closing Corus Redcar, a steel production facility in Britain with the loss of 1,700 jobs.

Another carbon trading scam tying back to Pachauri involves Great Britain's richest man, Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian citizen who resides in London.

Mittal stands to gain a £1 billion windfall, not from the operation of his ArcelorMittal steel company, but from carbon credits given his company – at no cost – by the EU emissions trading scheme.

The London Times has reported that after ArcelorMittal and Eurofer intensively lobbied EU bureaucrats in Brussels, the company was granted far more carbon permits than the company needed in order to operate under EU carbon emission regulations.

According to the Times, the steelmakers represented by Eurofer threatened to move plants to India at a cost of 90,000 European jobs, to take advantage of lower labor costs in India and additional carbon credits that would be issued by the U.N. for relocating to a Third World country.

ArcelorMittal, now free to sell its surplus carbon permits on the market or hoard them for future use, stands to gain around £1 billion by 2012, when the prospect the eventual gain could be even greater.

Currently, EU carbon permits are worth about £12.70, but the EU has stated an intention to drive the price above £30.

"Between 2008 and 2012, ArcelorMittal stands to gain assets worth £1 billion at today's prices for scant effort," Anna Pearson, an expert on the trading system known as ETS, told the Times. "For them the ETS has been turned into a system for generating free subsidies."

EU steelmaker has ties to U.N. climate chief

On Dec. 10, 2007, U.N. climate chief Pachauri accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the IPCC – which shared it with Al Gore – for their work on global warming.

But Pachauri also has a role in the businesses working the system to profit from carbon trading credits.

In 1974, the TATA Group – which operates the Corus Redcar U.K. plant – provided the financial resources to found the Tata Energy Research Institute, or TERI, a policy organization headquartered in New Dehli, India, of which Pachauri has been chairman since the group was formed.

As WND reported last week, Corus Redcar accumulated a reported 7.5 million EU surplus carbon allowances, or EUAs, given the company free by the ETS after the lobbying effort with Brussels bureaucrats.

Continued business ties between TERI and TATA are demonstrated by a press announcement on the TERI website dated Feb. 4, 2009, in which Jairam Ramesh, the Indian minister of state for commerce and industry as well as minister of state for power, announced a joint venture with TERI and TATA power to extract and use carbon dioxide for the propagation of micro-algae.

Strong-arm tactics win carbon permits in cap-and-trade exchange

The European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading System, or EU ETS, began operations in January 2005, billing itself as "the largest multi-country, multi-sector Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading system world-wide."

The ETS acts as a cap-and-trade exchange in which EU bureaucrats set carbon emission limits for various corporations emitting carbon in their operations.

Corporations emitting more carbon than permitted under the EU carbon emissions scheme are required to buy carbon permits on the ETS exchange.

Corporations with excess carbon permits are permitted to sell those permits on the ETS exchange.

The Corporate European Observatory, a public interest research group headquartered in Brussels, documented in a Dec. 7 report entitled "The EU: A Hollow Champion for the Climate" how the financial crisis (and intense lobbying) let "polluting industry off hook."

The report concluded that the ETS is vulnerable to extortion-like tactics exerted by corporate groups, such as the steelmakers represented by Eurofer.

The report also indicates EU corporations seeking concessions on carbon credits have employed strong-arm tactics, including threats to move operations to lower-cost countries with less onerous carbon emission restrictions outside the EU, which would result in substantial numbers of European jobs lost.

As a trader, every day I see government manipulation in the currency markets which FAILS ALMOST EVERY TIME. For example, the Bank of Japan and Swiss National Bank intervene in spot markets often to weaken their respective currency against USD and Euros. But it never works. The moral of the story is: hard market lessons are like a bandaid, you need to get it over with as soon as possible, let the market set the price because in the end it will anyway.

To me this situation is identical. We need to step in now and set some hard rules on how this will work from which there can be no loopholing or escape. We need to set a dollar value on the environment, and make no mistake that value will end up being higher than anyone is willing to currently pay. But wiggle all you want, sooner or later we will be paying the dollar value of the environment, willingly or unwillingly.

The market is human nature, you can't fuck with it. You can try but it never works. The environment is nature, you can't fuck with it. You can try but it never works. All that will happen is the price we strove so hard to avoid paying will be extracted from us down the line by nature in what will probably not be a nice way.

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War is by far the most environmentally damaging thing on the planet.

At any one time a significant proportion of the world is under siege of

some sort and to expect the environment to be a priority when people are

fighting to survive is not realistic.

It also causes a profound moral and intellectual decay in our own society

that people get upset about a cat stuck in a drain but do not care about the

fact that there are war profiteering corporations based in their major cities,

recruiting at universities and tafes.

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To me this situation is identical. We need to step in now and set some hard rules on how this will work from which there can be no loopholing or escape. We need to set a dollar value on the environment, and make no mistake that value will end up being higher than anyone is willing to currently pay. But wiggle all you want, sooner or later we will be paying the dollar value of the environment, willingly or unwillingly.

The market is human nature, you can't fuck with it. You can try but it never works. The environment is nature, you can't fuck with it. You can try but it never works. All that will happen is the price we strove so hard to avoid paying will be extracted from us down the line by nature in what will probably not be a nice way.

 

Interesting reflections Apoth. It seems that for global powers to 'set a dollar value on the environment' a pretty drastic cultural reorientation towards nature and reality is in need. At the moment nature appears to be lived by many as an alien utility, or at least, there seems to be a demarcation between person and earth that is hurting both parties.

I agree with you. Bring on the regulation. The market is not really de-regulated anyway. Humans are fundamentally regulated by such things as culture, language and biology. Neoliberalism and free market capitalism seem to be simply the expression of 'freewill' governed by not so rigid historical legacies - that is, regulated ways of being with us from the past. "Alright liberal democratic citizens, you are free to vote and buy what you will, but first let me inject you with some peculiar ways of looking at the world which will orient your choices". I lean towards Smith's original idea that the invisible hand of the market is great as long as an agreed value system binds the collective together. Surely the system of nature in all her intelligence and beauty is a system worth agreeing with and incorporating into the monkey mind-set?

Having said all that, I feel that the alienated paradigm just alluded to is crumbling, it is just making a mess on its way out.

And why hang-out in Rome when Czech is just up the road.

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Polluter pays doesn't work either, well it doesn't work in favor of nature, some industries are probably happy to pollute and pay and may even take into consideration the costs when aligning profits and stocks, it's too late then for nature as the damage is done. Some others will play the numbers game, risking fines but doing it anyways, thinking it's like growing pot...you might get caught, but the chances are you won't if your careful.

no.. polluter is shut down, imprisoned and forfeits any assets, savings, stocks or shares to the appropriate authority to re-invest in natural alternative power and energy. How on earth is all this polluting being policed anyways, you almost need a full time crew of emission analysts on site at every factory or know polluter around the globe, monitoring daily levels etc...is the reason polluters just go and do it anyways, cause it's just too damn hard to police accurately.

It's like pulling teeth listening to all these experts in Copenhagen argue the toss over and over, it's just so tedious and appalling the way modern man gets together to discus serious issues, there probably isn't any other way but still I cringe when listening to them talk in circles, walk out of rooms like children or have a stupid smirk on their faces when they are answering important serious questions. I think it's all just a big load of fun for them and a few weeks away to do some sight seeing and have an Elephant brew.

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I think Apothecary has it well described.

The current ETS stinks, just about all other carbon trading schemes around the world suffer similar issues, and the clock is ticking.

Even after the arguments I've seen that taxing is too slow to respond to the problem in terms of sending a price signal, I have come more and more to believe that it is actually the best way to rein in human emissions. No horse-trading of credits, no dodgey 'offsets' that don't exist, or are only ephemeral at best, no arguing about who gets to set the price and why no arguing about who gets what freebies. Just make the polluters pay, and if anyone's worried that the carbon burners will avoid the tax, heck, just impose the ecological cost of carbon on the miners and drillers - they can pass the cost on to the users. Fair's fair, and try avoiding that.

Whether it's warming or just Peak Oil/Coal, we have not paid the real price for the fossil energy, bound in carbon, that we use.

If we don't pay the fair price today, we - or our children and their children - will pay in the future, whether through environmental degradation/failure, or through conflict/war resulting from ever increasing competition for water, energy, land, fisheries, and/or other resources.

The Cornucopia paradigm is a myth, and the eternal economic growth model is a fairytale. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell something, and whatever it is, it's probably not ecologically sustainable.

And before anybody says anything, I am officially way below the 'poverty line', and yet I am still prepared to pay for my carbon costs. I have no sympathy at all for tossers driving their SUVs who bleat about what is pocket money for them.

Yeah, I'm pissed off that the knobs couldn't get it together at Copenhagen...

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