Cap&Trade: A new moneystream for Oligarchs

If controlling pollution were the real goal, wouldn't the authorities first crack down on extreme polluters like these oil spillers? The amount of volatile and deadly gasses evaporating into the atmosphere from the BP geyser has probably increased greenhouse gasses more than consumers might ever make by running their air conditioners in a heat wave. And the nation's biggest consumer of petroleum is the Military, but will Cap & Trade apply to the Pentagon?

Then, there is our old non-friend Goldman Sachs again behind the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX).

Here are some articles to sort through about the Carbon Trading shenanigans, containing information that we never get from Gore or Obama when they speechify.

A warning on carbon trading (with some interesting charts):

[excerpt]CARBON CREDITS OR TOXIC DEBTS?
Carbon credits have become such a profitable commodity that market speculators – hedge funds, banks and pension funds – have enthusiastically bought into them. Traders buy and sell credits issued by both the UN and EU schemes. For trading purposes, one allowance or Certified Emission Reduction
(CER) is equivalent to one ton of CO2 emissions.

These credits can be sold privately or on the international market. Louis Redshaw, head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital predicts that ‘carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market – and it could become the world’s biggest market overall.’

But that was before the recession. A global fall-off in manufacturing means that companies are producing far less carbon. In recent months, companies in this position have dumped their credits on the market. This has not only provided heavily polluting firms with funds to plug gaps in their balance sheets but has also pushed down prices. Carbon has now dropped to such a level it’s cheaper to burn polluting fossil fuels and buy up credits than find ways of reducing emissions.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1188937/The-great-carbon...

[end excerpt]
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And what better way to get most Americans to turn away in disgust from the data on carbon trading not being a failsafe solution? Have that stinker Glenn Beck break the story! Brilliant.

http://www.examiner.com/x-14143-Orange-County-Conservative-Examiner~y201...

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/9629

[excerpt]

Good news to know that the truth will always out—even when you’re Barack Obama.

“Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now Pushing Through Congress” is a FOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”

The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.

Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.

“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR. “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”

(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is that every time someone picks up another Senate rock, another serpent comes slithering out).

“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.

“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding. When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers—including Maurice strong—sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value. On Oct. 20, 1996—a Sunday—the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.

“On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a share. By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class action suit against the company and its directors. Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with Maurice strong in another insider trading case, involving a Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was also a lead shareholder. The AZL case closely mirrored Molten Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong’s role in scamming the value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before selling it off.

In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, who was found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.

These are the leaders in the Man-made Global Warming Movement, who three years later were to be funded by the man who was to become President of the United States of America.

If we follow the time line on where Obama was during the funding of the Chicago Climate Exchange, he was still a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School teaching constitutional law, with his law license becoming inactive a year later in 2002.

It may be interesting to note that the Chicago Climate Exchange in spite of its hype, is a veritable rat’s nest of cronyism. The largest shareholder in the Exchange is Goldman Sachs. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is its honorary chairman, The Joyce Foundation, which funded the Exchange also funded money for John Ayers’ Chicago School Initiatives. John is the brother of William Ayers.

What a flap when it was discovered that the senator from Chicago had nursed on Saul Alinsky’s milk, had his political career launched at a coffee party held by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, and sat for 20 years, uncomplaining in front of the “God-dam-America pulpit of resentment-challenged Jeremiah Wright.

Folk were naturally outraged that the empty suit who would go on to become TOTUS was spawned from such anti-American activism.

But the media should have been hollering, “Stop Thief!” instead.

The same Chicago Climate Exchange promoting public rip-off was funded by Obama before he was POTUS.

Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-generating hoax, Obama is working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress.

Obama was never the character he created for himself in the fairy-tale version in “Dreams of My Father”. He’s the agent of Change and Hope for cohorts making money down at the Chicago Climate Exchange.
...
[end excerpt]

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And these Oligarchs (Garks for short) are good at this game. In this Financial Times article, they describe how ICE deals in Petroleum but is expanding into emissions trading. In passing, the writer mentions that the goal of emissions trading is to reduce emissions. A person can't help doing a 'double take'! With all these Exchanges forming, it looks like they are hunkering down for a long profitable haul.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b15e15d0-542f-11df-b75d-00144feab49a.html

[excerpt]

ICE snaps up Climate Exchange for £395m
By Jeremy Grant in London and Hal Weitzman in Phoenix

Published: April 30 2010 09:51 | Last updated: May 1 2010 03:38

Climate Exchange (CLE), the UK-listed operator of US and European carbon emissions trading platforms, was on Friday set to be snapped up by IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) after its board recommended a cash offer from the US exchange operator valuing the group at £395m ($604m).

The deal marks a bold move by Atlanta-based ICE, into emissions trading after a string of acquisitions that have built the business into one of the world’s largest energy and commodity trading business.

EDITOR’S CHOICE
FT Trading Room - Apr-12.Climate Exchange moves into the black - Mar-13..ICE’s last strike on a London business was in 2001, when it bought the International Petroleum Exchange, home to world trading in Brent crude oil.

The deal makes sense for both the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) – the US unit of Climate Exchange – and ICE, which have become increasingly close in recent years. ICE last year took a 4.8 per cent stake in CLE, whose chairman, Richard Sandor, sits on ICE’s board. ICE has also been providing clearing and execution services for CCX.

Chris Allen, analyst at Ticonderoga Securities, said: “Given that the future of emissions trading is dependent on new laws to reduce emissions trading, which look a few years away, this is clearly a long-term bet for ICE.

“Although it is hard to define the potential size of the emissions market longer term, we believe that it clearly represents a long-term growth opportunity and is a market that should provide long-term synergies with ICE’s core energy platform,” he said....

Climate Exchange has three main businesses: European Climate Ex-change, which trades certificates for mandatory European Emissions Trading Scheme; Chicago Climate Exchange, which operates the world’s first voluntary cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions reductions; and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange, a regulated exchange in the US for environmental futures contracts.

CCX was founded in 2001 by Richard Sandor, a former economist at the Chicago Board of Trade credited with pioneering the cap-and-trade business in the US and later abroad.

Jeff Sprecher, ICE chief executive and founder, said: “The combination of Climate Exchange’s emissions markets and ICE’s futures and OTC energy markets is an important and logical strategic combination.”
[end excerpt]

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Here are some more information wells to dip down into and sort through:

Carbon Monetization: The Insiders
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/CarbonMonetization.htm

Europe's Carbon Mafia and Ours [The stuff about Europe raiding scammers is interesting]
http://www.thecypresstimes.com/article/Columnists/A_Time_For_Choosing/MO...

Carbon Connections [How they benefit the Forestry industry]
http://www.forest2market.com/f2m/us/f2m1/free/forest2mill-archive/story/...

From a lawyer's site--
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e25977e9-66a3-4e4a-8f6d-2a...

[excerpt]

...Why discuss this now?

In fact, there are compelling reasons. First is a concern about criminal activity already taking place. Markets for carbon emission allowances and carbon offsets are up and running, including in the European Union and in the United States through the Chicago Climate Exchange and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, among others. Many carbon transactions are also occurring over-the-counter outside any exchange. Globally, the carbon market is estimated to be worth well over one hundred billion dollars. Individual transactions often involve very large sums, and experience teaches that some level of fraud seems naturally to follow such large transactions. The newness of the markets and novelty of their subject matter make them especially susceptible to fraudulent schemes. While it is true that the voluntary nature of the markets in the U.S. means that legal obligations are contractual rather than based on statutes or regulations, the lack of government regulatory oversight can only increase the opportunity for those looking to make a quick fortune on an easy scam. Carbon market oversight mechanisms contained in pending legislation will be delayed as long as the legislation remains stalled. The experience of the European Union, which established a carbon trading market in 2004 that reportedly has been subjected to fraud, false statements and the involvement of organized crime, confirms the need to be alert to white collar crime. Clients can be victimized, and white collar lawyers should be counseling due care in entering carbon transactions.

Second is a potential gulf between theory and practice. In theory, a cap and trade program, in which carbon emission allowances and carbon credits are traded in a market, allows costs to be shifted to those that can achieve reductions in carbon dioxide emissions most cheaply, and thus is an efficient way to fight global warming. In practice, however, fraud and corruption can undermine the effectiveness of this approach. Again, the experience of the European Union serves as a caution, with many reports of “fraud,” “scams” and “profiteering.” The selection of approaches in the U.S. to combat climate change, and the fashioning of the details of those approaches, should be informed by these potential problems of implementation. Otherwise, policy choices may fall far short of objectives. The white collar bar can supply insights and experience needed to grapple with these very practical but fundamental issues.

Third is the scope of potential future criminal activity. Because it is perceived as the most costeffective alternative, there is still broad support for cap and trade systems relative to alternative systems for reducing greenhouse gases. Adoption of federal legislation or regulations mandating such a system would greatly expand the national and global markets for trading carbon allowances and carbon credits. The financial crisis and continuing recession demonstrate how even longstanding and long-regulated financial markets can be manipulated and are not sufficiently self-regulating to prevent near-catastrophic economic consequences. The nonprofit organization, Friends of the Earth, calls carbon trading “the new subprime.” What sort of investment strategies, financial instruments and counterparties can we expect in the carbon market? What new risk models, derivatives and trading mechanisms will we see? It is critical that legislators and regulators design the carbon market, and fashion adequate and effective oversight at the outset for the new market, to protect the public and our clients in the future.

[end excerpt]
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Australia puts carbon trading scheme on hold--
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/27/australia-carbon-tradi...