Introduction by Dr. Thomas Quirk
“This takes us to the Middle Ages and the sales of Papal Indulgences where the only benefit to the purchaser was a warm inner feeling. The modern Carbon Indulgence may give the purchaser a warm inner feeling but confers no benefit but a wealth transfer to others. At least with Papal Indulgences some of the funds went to Rome and the architectural glories of St Peter’s as a lasting benefit.”

By Bryan Leyland

I first heard about carbon trading at a conference more than ten years ago. I got up and said “if I was the financial adviser to the Mafia, I would advise them to get into carbon trading.” Nothing that has happened since then changes my opinion - rather the reverse.

Is interesting to compare it with electricity trading. In an electricity market, the amount of electricity bought and sold is measured to an accuracy of +/- 0.2% every 30 minutes. On top of that, when you buy electricity, you get an amount of energy of high value which you can use directly for your benefit.
With carbon trading, it is all different. The amount of greenhouse gas emissions from an industrial plant can be measured to an accuracy of, at best, +/-10%. If you are purchasing carbon credits from, for instance, a forest, the accuracy of measurement is probably something between +/-100%. If it is a tropical forest, it could be minus 150% because there is reasonable evidence that some tropical forests are net emitters of greenhouse gases.  But it gets worse. 

In between the buyer and seller is an “auditor” who, in theory, can make an accurate judgment as to the quantity of greenhouse gases being traded. He is the direct equivalent of the old “Inspector of weights and measures” or the person who tests electricity meters. If the reading of an electricity meter is fiddled, one party wins and the other party loses. But if an auditor fraudulently states that a forest is absorbing say 200 tons of carbon dioxide per annum when a more realistic figure might be 100 tons, both parties win. The forest owner wins because he sells more credits. The purchaser of the credits wins because he is out to buy a piece of paper certifying that he purchased credits. If the volume is fiddled upwards, the chances are that the price per tonne will be reduced and, any way, he probably needs to buy more than are available.

So, to my knowledge, carbon trading is the only commodity trading where it is impossible to establish with reasonable accuracy what is being bought and sold, where the commodity that is traded is invisible and can perform no useful purpose to the purchaser, where both parties benefit if the quantities traded have been exaggerated. It is, therefore, and open invitation to fraud and that is exactly what is happening all over the world. 

The Lieberman-Warner global warming cap-and-trade bill (S2191) would cost “hundreds of billions of dollars” to the electrical and industrial sectors of the economy, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) conceded today. Senator Lieberman made the remarks during today’s Environment & Public Works (EPW) subcommittee markup on the bill.

“It’s hard to imagine that [Lieberman-Warner] will not cost - over time—these two sectors (electric power and industrial), hundreds of billions of dollars to comply with the demands of this bill,” Senator Lieberman said during the business meeting today. Senator Lieberman, along with Senator John Warner (R-VA), is the co-author of “America’s Climate Security Act.”

Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the EPW Committee, has already warned that the Lieberman-Warner bill is “real economic pain, for no climate gain.” “The Lieberman-Warner bill will burden American families with additional energy costs and significantly harm the United States economy,” Senator Inhofe said on October 18. “Senators are going to be asking the American people to pay more for home energy and pay higher prices at the gas pump for no climate benefit,” Senator Inhofe added. Inhofe also noted that former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan is very skeptical of cap-and-trade legislation. Greenspan wrote in his new book, The Age of Turbulence: “There is no effective way to meaningfully reduce emissions without negatively impacting a large part of an economy,” Greenspan wrote. “Net, it is a tax. If the cap is low enough to make a meaningful inroad into CO2 emissions, permits will become expensive and large numbers of companies will experience cost increases that make them less competitive. Jobs will be lost and real incomes of workers constrained.”

Senator Boxer said: “With passage of the Lieberman-Warner bill through the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee we are finally on our way toward preventing the ravages of unfettered global warming.

Read Senators Boxer and Inhofe debate the Lieberman bill.

By Paul Georgia, Frontiers of Freedom

The release of Al Gore’s power point presentation put to film, An Inconvenient Truth, was probably the highpoint of a decades-long campaign to convince people that they are destroying the planet, and to avoid disaster must give up much of what makes life pleasant. As is generally the case with such campaigns, it is difficult to sustain such a high pitch over time without being tuned out, especially when the climate doesn’t cooperate (there’s been no warming since 1998).

Moreover, by overplaying his hand (many of the film’s claims are wildly implausible), Mr. Gore has initiated a backlash. Scientists, heretofore absent from the global warming debate, have begun to criticize Mr. Gore, and by extension, much of the underpinnings of the global warming hypothesis. One such critic is Professor Scott Armstrong, a leading expert on forecasting. Professor Armstrong hasn’t just criticized Mr. Gore; he has put his money where his mouth is by challenging the former VP to a $10,000 bet, based on climate predictions.

Professor Armstrong, along with his colleague Professor Kesten Green with Monash University’s Business and Economic Forecasting Unit in New Zealand, conducted an audit of Chapter 8 of the IPCC’s Working Groups I report, The Physical Science Basis. First, they found no evidence that the IPCC authors were aware of the primary sources of information on forecasting. Moreover, in conducting their audit, they determined that there was only enough information within the IPCC report to make a judgment on 89 of the total 140 forecasting principles as described in Professor Armstrong’s book, Principles of Forecasting. Of these 89 principles, the IPCC violated 72. Read more here.