Carbon Credit Sales Scheme a Con Artist's Dream

Al Gore Turning Carbon into Cold Cash“I guess hard times flush out the chumps.” – from O Brother Where Art Thou 

By Les MacPherson 

If I was a con artist, I’d be moving right about now from the Nigerian letter scam, which is pretty much exhausted, and into the sale of phony carbon credits.

There is no better opportunity right now to fleece the gullible. You could take their money, give them worthless carbon certificates in return and leave them feeling good about it. So good, they’d keep coming back for more.

Unlike most other scams, this one could work indefinitely on the same suckers. Only by starting a new religion could the unscrupulous do as well.

It figures that both carbon credits and religion deal in guilt, fear and redemption. Indeed it was religion that established the pattern for carbon credits. The idea in both cases is to sell forgiveness to sinners.

In medieval Europe, corrupt clergy raised money through the sale of what they called indulgences. These were certificates of forgiveness sold to sinners as an alternative to eternal damnation. The beauty of it was that eternal damnation was promoted by the same people who sold the indulgences. It was the perfect racket until that pesky Martin Luther came along and spoiled everything.

Carbon credits work much the same way, only in this case, the religion is environmentalism. The sin is to live in a big house, say, or to drive a gas-guzzler or to fly around in a big jet airliner. These things require lots of fossil fuel, the burning of which generates carbon dioxide which contributes to global warming, the environmental equivalent of eternal damnation. Never mind that climatologists are now telling us to expect 20 or 30 years of global cooling. It’s like a doomsday sect that has to keep moving the date when the predicted apocalypse fails to materialize. The difference is that most of us laugh at doomsday sects.

The threat of global warming, a lot of people take very seriously, but they still want their hot tubs and their SUVs and their tropical vacations. Carbon credits offer them a way to maintain their self-indulgent lifestyles while remaining environmentally virtuous. Instead of reducing their own carbon emissions, they can pay someone else to do it.

Campaigning politicians, among others, are already signing on. The federal NDP and Liberals have bought carbon credits to offset emissions from their leaders’ campaign jets. Sufficient credits to offset NDP Leader Jack Layton’s campaign tour, for example, reportedly will cost the New Democrats about $60,000. It’s enough to make a grifter salivate.

Liberals can expect to pay even more. Their leader has leased for his campaign tour an older jet that emits 30 per cent more carbon than a more modern aircraft. This doesn’t look good for a party that’s campaigning to compel the rest of us to reduce our own carbon emissions. Through the miracle of carbon credits, their guilt is washed away.

Read the rest of this piece at the Star Phoenix (Canada).

6 Responses to Carbon Credit Sales Scheme a Con Artist's Dream

  1. Rob N. Hood October 7, 2008 at 9:39 am #

    Scientists have uncovered an alarming phenomenon. They have found streams of gas bubbling up from the seabed around the island of Ischia. ‘The waters are like a Jacuzzi – there is so much carbon dioxide fizzing up from the seabed,’ said Dr Jason Hall-Spencer, of Plymouth University. ‘Millions of litres of gas bubble up every day.’

    The gas streams have turned Ischia’s waters into acid, and this has had a major impact on sea life and aquatic plants. Now marine biologists fear that the world’s seas could follow suit.

    ‘Every day the oceans absorb more than 25m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,’ said Hall-Spencer. ‘If it were not for the oceans, levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be far higher than they are today and the impact of climate change would be far worse. However, there is a downside: it is called ocean acidification.’

    Scientists calculate that the seas are absorbing so much carbon dioxide that they are 30 per cent more acidic than they were at the start of the Industrial Revolution. The change is three times greater and has happened 100 times faster than at any other time during the past 20 million years.

    Tomorrow hundreds of scientists will gather in Monaco for the ‘Second International Symposium on the Ocean in a High CO2 World’. One focus of debate is likely to be the Plymouth study. The seas off Ischia – which are affected by carbon dioxide from volcanic activity – offer a first-class opportunity to investigate what might happen in the next few decades.

    Scientists found that in Ischia’s highly acidic water:

    • Biodiversity of plants and fish has dropped by 30 per cent

    • Algae vital for binding coral reefs have been wiped out

    • Invasive ‘alien’ species, such as sea-grasses, are thriving

    • Coral and sea urchins have been destroyed, while mussels and clams are failing to grow shells.

    The conference will also tackle the dangers posed to fish larvae, which are sensitive to high levels of acid, as well as the threat to commercial fish stocks.

    ‘Many developing countries have seafood as their prime source of food,’ said Dr Carol Turley, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory. ‘If they lose that, the result could be famine.’

  2. Dan Earnhardt October 8, 2008 at 10:07 am #

    High concentrations of carbon dioxide, do indeed change things. And higher levels of global carbon dioxide have indeed been shown to have a chronological association with higher global temperatures. But, those higher levels of carbon dioxide have historically lagged the higher global temperature rises, by hundreds of years.

    Therefore, as our global temperatures continue to go down, despite increases in man-made carbon dioxide, we may have to wait several hundred years for the corresponding reduction in global carbon dioxide levels, to mitigate those adverse changes which really are caused by the carbon increase, like acidity levels of local bodies of water.

  3. Peter Pettitt November 12, 2008 at 6:24 am #

    Like most scientists that are flat broke and always on the look out for funding this man made global warming nonsense has to be the most moronic and lacking in balanced scientific proof that has con most people.
    Consider some very basic facts.
    1. For how long and how much has volcanos been pumping carbon dioxide and a ton of other nasties into the atmoshere ?
    2. If our atmosphere is made up of nitrogen, oxogen and yes even carbon
    does it not seem obvious that there must be a natural way that the earth has a self cleaning mechinisms in place to keep things in balance ? one of those is ” Lightning” millions of strikes a day around the world produce ozone gases which offset atmosphere in balances.
    3. People get confused between natural cycle global warming and beliving this clap trap nonsense that man made cardon is heating the earth’s
    atmosphere up. There is at least 400 years of climatology evidence which
    proves that man contibutes next to nothing, anyway could man produce more carbon in the last say 60 years than thousands of years of volcanos, I think not.
    Please research and get informed before the polticians and self agenda seeking ratbag scienstist take us to the cleaners.

  4. tom April 21, 2009 at 8:36 pm #

    mankind has gotten too big for his britches.how dare these scientists think they know it all about this planets functions enough to strap every one on the planet with a phony carbon credit tax.mankinds time on this planet is microscopic compared to the age of the planet.it is outright arrogant of scientists to think we have it all figured out in my tiny short life on this planet.it is all a scam for either power or money.and the ones dreaming all this up think that they are safe from the silent majority.news flash,theyre not!

  5. Flu-Bird May 31, 2009 at 10:52 pm #

    The HITLER DIARIES,PILTDOWN MAN,NEBRASKA MAN,AL CAPONES VUALTS CARBON CREDITS and other scams of history and sceince

  6. Budgeon July 5, 2009 at 4:35 am #

    So who’s going to stand up and be the Martin Luther of the climate change religion? Bring on the carbon reformation now! Free the people from serfdom and throw out the corrupt priests and aristocrats.

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