It was all about money and power — and nothing to do with the environment
“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” — Barack Obama, 3 June 2008
In the late nineties, members of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were tasked with assessing the scientific validity of the Kyoto Protocol.
The Protocol was an international emissions reduction treaty which required signatories to cut overall greenhouse gas emissions.
The IPCC 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, because they would fund new forestry initiatives.
But one critical detail was never disclosed in the report.
That is: members of the IPCC, such as Pedro Moura-Costa (above) and Gareth Philips, had major conflicts-of-interest. They owned, created and/or worked for businesses — such as Ecosecurities and SGS Forestry — that would directly profit from the report’s conclusions.
In fact, the IPCC panel members’ companies were positioned to earn millions of dollars from the report. But the mainstream media did not report these conflicts and instead piled on the “global warming” and “carbon offset” bandwagons.
Solar energy portal Ecotopia reported that members of the IPCC “…had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees… [and] should have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such ‘offset’ projects.”
The IPCC panel consisted of:
* Richard Tipper of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management (ECCM), a consulting company deriving revenue from carbon-absorption forestry projects. According to Ecotopia, “ECCM works closely with Future Forests… Tipper helped form ECCM some months after being appointed to the LULUCF panel.”
* Mark Trexler, a founder of Trexler & Associates, a pioneering firm “poised to make millions of dollars by promoting and monitoring carbon sequestration and other ‘climate mitigation’ projects.”
* Pedro Moura-Costa, an executive of Ecosecurities Ltd., a consulting firm specializing in the “generation of Emission Reduction Credits” from carbon-offseting activities. Ecosecurities has offices in the US, the UK, Brazil, Australia and The Netherlands.
* Gareth Philips of SGS Forestry, a division of the Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS) of Geneva, the world’s largest inspection, auditing and testing company. SGS Forestry derives revenue from its carbon forestry projects. SGS certifies Costa Rica’s carbon offsets and “hopes to expand its work.”
* Sandra Brown of Winrock International, an Arkansas-based organization which accepts contracts from “public and private” sources. Winrock “provides forest carbon monitoring technical services to U.S. government agencies and a wide range of private sector and non-governmental organizations. ”
* Peter Hill of Monsanto Corporation, which has a “large stake in genetically modified organisms, including, potentially, organisms modified to take up or store carbon more efficiently.”
The World Rainforest Movement investigated these bizarre financial ties and concluded that the IPCC report “must now be shelved due to their clear conflict of interest and a new report instigated which will be free of the taint of intellectual corruption.”
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 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 had 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.
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?
The carbon offset market quickly exploded. And, just as quickly, it became the subject of rampant allegations of fraud.
In 2009 the market was estimated to be $100 billion; it was so rife with questionable trading that the United Nations suspended the world’s largest auditor of ‘clean-energy’ projects.
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 daily fish-wrap 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.
Executive Summary: they’re all making it up as they go along.
Whether you believe the world is warming or cooling, there is no arguing Democrats want more expensive energy for American citizens.
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… to create economic disincentives for emitting CO2.
Because of the falsity of its premise, cap-and-trade is intended to do one thing: allow Democrats to control industrial policy.
Whether it’s through unelected bureaucrats at the EPA, carbon “sequestration”, or John Kerry’s climate agenda, the economic toll on Americans is and will continue to be devastating. GDP losses of $2.1 trillion and consumer electricity price increases of up to 42% are estimated in less than two decades’ time.
Democrats want to control your life. Your health. Your private property. And they don’t care what kind of scam they use to justify it.
By Doug Ross