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The online Spiegel (SPON) here has a highly critical story on the scam of climate protection emission certificates and their trading.

The German renowned weekly writes that it may have sounded like a good idea in earlier times, however: “it often enriched only business dealmakers. A study now shows just how brash the tricks were on international climate projects.”

Emissions certificates are yet another classic example of how politicians, scientists and activists passed themselves on as experts on how to curtail emissions when it fact they had no clue and failed to think through the concept. As a result they created an embarrassing disaster that enriched a few swindlers and ended up creating the opposite of what they aimed for. Earlier critics were simply ignored or dismissed as fossil fuel hacks.” Now we are seeing that the “hacks” were right.

Emissions may have risen an estimated 600 million tonnes

According to Spiegel, the Stockholm Environment Institute commissioned the governments of Austria, Switzerland and Finland to study the effectiveness of the Joint Implementation (JI) climate protection instrument, which was the brainchild of Kyoto Protocol architects. The results of that study are now available, and they are extremely embarrassing to say the least.

Spiegel writes that the study shows “how messed up” the JI projects were:

About three quarters of the certificates led to even higher emissions.” […] Through the JI mechanism, global greenhouse gas emissions may have risen an estimated 600 million tonnes.”

The reason for the increase, Spiegel explains, is because many countries issued emissions certificates without even cutting back on any emissions. They were simply printing paper and selling these sheets of paper for real and big money. Countries that bought the certificates then used them to just emit more greenhouse gases. Naturally some few, select people in the middle ended up making big money.

Spiegel cites a result of the study:

About 73 percent of the emissions rights that the researchers studied resulted from measures that could have been carried out without the trading of certificates. ‘That’s printing money,’ says Vladyslav Zherzherin, a co-author of the study.”

At one point in its article Spiegel even writes of “absurd consequences” of the JI rules involving projects in Russia, for example some companies there increased their production of climate gases “in order to get good payments for curtailing them.”

In the meantime Russia has stated that it will not sign on to a new Kyoto Treaty, and so the money-printing machine there has stopped.

According to Spiegel, as a consequence the authors of the study are now calling for “an effective international monitoring of the transfer of emission permit” as part of a new deal in Paris.

What can we gather from all this? There still remains tonnes of easy money to be made in the climate scam. You just need to be connected to the right people.