Cap-and-Trade Carbon Credit Extortion Scam In Full Swing
by ilene - December 15th, 2009 7:43 am
Wow. But not surprising. Mish is right about the craziness (at best) of this racket. – Ilene
Cap-and-Trade Carbon Credit Extortion Scam In Full Swing
Courtesy of Mish
The cap-and-trade extortion racket promoted by the EU and UN has now blown sky high. Please consider Businesses hold world hostage over carbon credits.
WND research reveals the European Union’s cap-and-trade exchange is vulnerable to a sophisticated form of corporate extortion in which EU bureaucrats in Brussels are manipulated into paying hundreds of millions of dollars in carbon permit bribes to keep companies from moving jobs to Third World nations.
In fact, it appears the scam is already under way.
The crux of the scheme is this: European steelmakers have threatened to leave the EU for India, eliminating the jobs of thousands of workers in the process, unless the EU grants the steelmakers free carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Eurofer, a European trade group, is at the center of the scheme. The web of the plot, however, weaves in not only several companies, but also the United Nations’ climate change chief:
- Among its members, Eurofer represents two EU steelmakers, Corus Redcar and ArcelorMittal, each of which has ties to India as well as to Rajendra K. Pachauri, the Indian industrial engineer who has been chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, since 2002.
- Eurofer appears to have coordinated a threat to the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading System that its steelmakers would move their operations from the EU to India unless the EU cap-and-trade exchange issued them – at no cost – carbon emissions permits worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Once the bureaucrats in Brussels acquiesced, Corus Redcar and ArcelorMittal maneuvered to cash in windfall profits from the EU carbon permits given them at no cost.
- Additionally, Corus Redcar has now announced a decision to close operations in Great Britain nonetheless and relocate its steelmaking activities to India in order to gain additional U.N. carbon credits.
Ironically, EU and U.N. officials who might have thought requiring cap-and-trade permits would operate as "protection racket" in which EU companies need to buy carbon credits to continue operations, have now found themselves on the losing end of the reverse scheme.
In the final analysis, the winners are the European Union corporations willing to play hardball with the European Union