Isramart : Veritable gold rush for some as carbon trading looms

Isramart news:
Well it's not surprising that members of the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are eager to get the rich countries of the world to sign on to plan to pour billions if not trillions of dollars into a fund to help fight the effects of global warming on poorer, developing nations around the world.

The European Union's "carbon credit" scheme, one set up to reduce carbon emissions in Europe and one of many schemes being tossed around in Copenhagen, could prove to be a cash cow for IPCC chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

Pachauri, who has ties to Tata, a Mumbai-based Indian multinational conglomerate with business interests in a number of European steel making companies, stands to profit hundreds of millions of dollars by cashing in carbon credits it got from the EU just by closing Corus Redcar, a steel plant in England. More than 1,700 people will lose their jobs.

"Dr. Pachauri was, of course, the lead author on the IPCC's second report which paved the way to Kyoto — which in turn ushered in the first carbon trading schemes," writes James Delingpole in the Telegraph of London.

The European Union's experiment to reduce carbon emissions has been a complete failure from its inception in 2005. Instead of reducing emissions, the EU's Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) actually allows European businesses to avoid emission reductions at home by offsetting, meaning paying for cuts to be made overseas instead. Cap-and-trade carbon markets have done nothing to reduce emissions.

Throwing more tax dollars at a "problem" that may not even be a "problem" hasn't worked in Europe and won't work here or anywhere else.

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish economist who Al Gore refuses to debate, has never disputed the fact that developing nations require financial assistance to rid themselves of poverty, hunger and disease but taxing carbon, he says, is not the way to go. Lomborg has predicted $9 a litre gasoline if countries follow the European plan of buying and selling carbon credits.

Signatories of the Kyoto Accord have failed to live up to their commitments to reduce carbon emissions and, in fact, have increased carbon emissions, but global temperatures have remained stable with a .07 +/- .07 degree C from 1999 to 2008, not the .20 C rise expected by the IPCC.

Lomborg says that for every dollar spent on reducing carbon emissions you only get $0.02 of benefit. That is money well spent?

The pot of gold that is created through these emissions trading schemes should be aimed at solving specific problems that exist around the globe and not lining the pockets of unelected UN bureaucrats who stand to gain the most.