At Mother Jones Mark Schapiro has a welcome piece of reporting – on the crime and fraud starting to flourish along the underside of cap and trade schemes for limiting CO2 emissions. Interpol is on the job, con games promising to shrink carbon footprints for a fee are proliferating, and courts around the world wide are braced for a wave of litigation and criminal cases.
No surprise really. It’s long been clear that, quite aside from near-lunatic denial that humans could possibly change the climate, along with suspicions scientists are just in it for the grant money, a strong rock of truth motivates such aggressive ignorance. One does not have to be a free market zealot or outright libertarian to recognize that government supervision of capitalism is often inefficient, and to further imagine that any international scheme to organize the world’s economies, internalizing the costs of dumping carbon feely into the air, will have a hard time not collapsing in corruption, cronyism, and red tape.
If a solution looks odious, then it is tempting to believe that the problem is just not there. It’s like “What!??” Swim through those sharks to shore? I cannot believe this boat is actually sinking. You made that up about a reef to sell me swim fins and then when the sharks get me to turn this boat into a socialist state!!!”
Anyway, Mother Jones and this article take a clear-eyed look at what kinds of chicanery and wickedness are spawned by cap and trade regardless of how important its aims may be. (And I still want to slap a huge tax on carbon, then send the money right back in equal monthly checks to every US adult. That’ll make average guys and gals whole while providing them massive motive to cut back and make money on the deal. That’d never pass but would be a budgetary zero-sum game changer. Solar panels, windmills, hybrid cars, and carbon-sequestering coal plants would sell like hotcakes).
Of course, there’s always a chance the UN and other international networks could keep carbon cap and trade fairly clean. The Montreal Protocol did a good job taking CFCs out of the economy. The Law of the Sea almost-treaty seems to have helped to clarify ocean sovereignty and economic coordination. CITES, the thing that regulates trade in ivory and bans sale of tiger bones and rhino horns, is a good thing. But cap and trade? That’s a monster challenge. Really, if some farmer in Zaire plants a mess of carbon-sucking trees and promises to plow them under and plant some more when they’re grown, what’s to stop the sale of those credits to more than one party? And that’s assuming the trees got planted for that reason – and that they were planted at all.
This is not the first article along these lines I’ve seen, but Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which had hand in this report, deserve a salute.
Other Cap and Trade Fraud and Gaming Stories:
- NY Times (Green Column) James Kanter: In Europe, Companies Work the Angles on the Carbon Trade ;
- …. I couldn’t find any more recent ones. But there are lots of blogs and opinion columns shouting that cap and trade is just a part of the global warming ‘fraud’.
Related Enviro Fraud News:
- Reuters – Brian Ellsworth: Brazil eyes microchips in trees for forest management ; One is unsure this system cannot be gamed too, but from the scene and thus with color and vigor, Reuters reports a program to be sure so-called sustainably-harvested logs are legit.
– Charlie Petit
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