EIRNS — The Stockholm Environment Institute(SEI), in a report released Aug. 24, has found that the United Nations-backed `Clean Development Mechanism’ carbon trading scheme has increased what it targeted as pollution. In addition, it has been riddled with pervasive fraud and fraudulent profits. This is more fully exposed in EIR’s forthcoming special report, "The Global Warming Scare Is Population Reduction, Not Science."

The SEI found that the UN plan — part of the Kyoto Accords — was supposed to combat global warming but instead has resulted in the release of more than half a billion additional tons of greenhouse gases. And after studying the issuance of 872 million tradeable "carbon offsets" — allowing the holders to produce more carbon emissions because they had supposedly invested in reducing "carbon pollution" somewhere in the world — SEI found "significant issues" with three-quarters of the offsets, indicating broadscale fraud.

From the standpoint of anti-carbon environmentalists like SEI, the Kyoto and European Union carbon-trading schemes have "seriously undermined global climate action.... 600 million more tons of carbon dioxide have been emitted than if the scheme had not been in place," says the report.

From the standpoint of the biosphere, and particularly its flora of all kinds, a reasonable observer could see this as an unintentional benefit conferred by incompetent senior environmentalist planners and Wall Street and London speculators. More carbon emissions, more vegetative growth.

But unfortunately, all those extra emissions contain more than carbon dioxide. "For some companies [on the buying end of carbon-offsets trading], buying the right to pollute with offsets is often cheaper than refurbishing their own polluting facilities — like coal-fired power plants or chemical plants that can emit greenhouse gases more dangerous than carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxides, for example. Thus honest pollution control legislation, going back to the 1960s and ’70s, has been set back.

And those who sell the offsets get to do so by "funding offsets elsewhere, like cleaning up combustible piles of abandoned coal mine waste. In theory, this will keep the total emissions under goals set by the European Union, but the plan only works if the offsets make a legitimate reduction in emissions." The SEI study found most do not.

Wall Street earns fees from it all. Lucas Ross of Friends of the Earth said Aug. 25, "This is another nail in the coffin for Wall Street’s climate solution."

Paul Gallagher