- This giant crime--a market designed by Goldman Sachs often hiding in island bank accounts--could have been stopped but for the corrupted 2007 Supreme Court 5-4 decision on the status of CO2. It is obvious now the judges could not possibly have had correct information. Weak, greedy politicians are complicit. The decision is now a sham and has allowed the greatest crime against humanity, so-called man made catastrophic global climate change- to continue.
- The City of London, nexus of carbon thugs, gets special mention. This article seems to accept the idea of so-called man-made global warming but makes the case that the whole climate industry is a criminal operation.
The discussions at the climate change conference in Copenhagen last year focused on "developed" and "developing" nations, and the new market for carbon offsets. Industrialized governments created these carbon permits
and allocated them to the largest multinationals with the largest carbon footprints.
- The latter architects of the system, Goldman Sachs, with foreign subsidiaries criss-crossing the globe
- not only designed the huge carbon market, but also hold
- a 10% share in Al Gore's Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) - the pilot carbon trading program in the United States.
One well-publicized engine of the new carbon trade is the Clean Development Mechanism, which enables polluters to circumvent caps by financing projects in the developing world that emit little or no carbon. Yet, according to studies by Stanford University's Energy and Sustainable Development Program,
- "between a third and two-thirds" of CDM projects do not represent real reductions.
- So, as the G-20 spends its time creating a carbon trade market that does little to reduce carbon emissions, multinationals continue to expand their extractive enterprises,
- to flow into offshore locations that are themselves threatened by the rising waters associated with global warming. ...
- in the lead-up to last December's Copenhagen climate summit.
The sad irony is that, despite producing little in the way of carbon emissions,
- both island nations may have contributed to their own demise.
- More than 50% of AOSIS members are secrecy jurisdictions, misleadingly labeled as offshore centers and tax havens.
- These economies - characterized by opaque legal and financial services ensuring little or no disclosure, high levels of client confidentiality and
- few requirements for substantial economic activity -
Such island hubs act as key facilitators of the network by providing offshore financial services, remotely controlled from onshore head offices such as
- the City of London.
- The money that could otherwise go toward reducing the carbon footprint of multinationals and funding sustainable development in developing countries is
- Islands of money
- They could also go toward the adaption and mitigation funds needed by developing and emerging nations, which the UN puts at $4 billion to $86 billion annually.
Most island economies are politically and economically dependent on major economies like the United Kingdom and the United States.
- They compete to be the offshore repository of choice by offering opaque financial and legal services and low or zero tax rates.
The source of funds
Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producer and the fifth-largest exporter to the United States. Since the 1960s, the country's political and military elite has stolen more than $400 billion in oil revenues from Nigeria's citizenry and deposited it in secrecy jurisdictions such as Switzerland. Meanwhile, despite the extravagant promises of multinationals like Chevron operating in the country, Nigeria's people have become progressively poorer.
- The extractive industries have generated considerable opposition, human rights violations, and violence. The mass ecological degradation is pegged at $5 billion per annum.
- Although Africa occupies a small carbon footprint, the continent's autocratic regimes in Angola, Nigeria, the Congo, and Gabon are located at the base of the commodity chain and depend primarily on the capital-intensive extractive industries that supply the world's largest carbon-intensive engines with a significant share of fuel.
- from Asia Times "Climate Change's Secret Weapon," by Khadija Sharife, 2/26/10, (Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus) via commenter on WUWT