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Emissions trading rorted, fraud, but hardly anyone cares if CO2 is reduced, just the appearance of it

Toss any idea that some people actually care about reducing CO2. Apparently the only thing that matters is the appearance of reducing it.

EU carbon markets are being horribly rorted, and almost no one is checking. (Only the silly, honest UK, and even then only about 1% of sites are  audited.)

All up, something like “£14 billion has been lost to fraud”. The system was corrupted at every level — in Denmark at one stage,  4 out of 5 carbon trading accounts were fraudulent. The Ukraine and Russian governments gave away too many carbon credits, which flooded the market (and the price fell from £20 to £4). Credits were also given for things that would have happened anyway and shouldn’t have got them. (How can anyone base a market on “intentions”?) In the end, even though credits were cheap, a lot of companies didn’t bother buying credits, because no one was checking to see if they met their supposed requirements. And then there was the huge VAT Tax fraud across borders.

Where are most Greens, most NGO’s and activists, where is the outrage?

The fakery around the CO2 scare is legion. It is supposedly the evil pollution set to destroy life on Earth but even most climate extremists don’t care if it is actually being reduced. The whole story of the carbon markets is one of neglect — the point of the markets is evidently NOT to reduce CO2.

Emission impossible as EU fails to police main anti-pollution scheme

“The truth about the ETS is that it has completely failed. It has cost business money and done nothing to reduce CO2. It is based on a fundamentally flawed premise and as the latest report shows, all attempts to fix it are doomed.”
—  Raoul Ruparel, deputy director of the Open Europe thinktank

The EU’s main scheme for reducing CO2 emissions is almost never enforced, according to an official report by Brussels’ own spending watchdog.

Only one EU country inspected – Britain – makes on-the-spot visits to factories to check whether they are staying within their carbon limits under the scheme, the EU Court of Auditors found. Even the UK only checks 1 per cent of sites, down from 5 per cent before.

The auditors also said that attempts to stamp out endemic fraud in the EU’s flagship Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), from which billions of pounds of “carbon credits” have been stolen by criminals, are “not adequate” and continue to leave “significant security weaknesses.”

The verdicts will be deeply embarrassing on the eve of the United Nations climate summit in Paris, where European leaders will claim the ETS as their flagship achievement to tackle climate change.

Read the whole sordid story at The Telegraph.

No matter what the question is, fake markets are never the answer.

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