Don’t Ask Me About My Business

“I first heard about carbon trading at a conference more than 10 years ago. I got up and said ‘If I was the financial adviser to the Mafia, I would advise them to get into carbon trading.’ Nothing that has happened since then changes my opinion - rather the reverse..."

The words are those of Auckland energy consultant, Bryan Leyland, who is Chairman of the Economic Panel of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition [as reported by: ‘Carbon Trading Open Invitation To Fraud’, Scoop, November 22].

You can just imagine the scene, can’t you (‘The Godfather Part IV’)?

Bryan ‘Energy’ Leyland, the new Tom Hagen: “Well, I say yes. There’s more money potential in global carbon trading than anything else we’re looking at. Now, if we don’t get into it somebody else will. Maybe the Tattaglia Family, maybe all of them, and with the money they earn they’ll be able to buy more police and political power. Right now we have the gambling and we have the unions and those are the best things to have. But carbon trading is a thing of the future. If we don’t get into it now we risk everything we have. Not now but ten years from now.”

Back in the real world, Leyland summarizes trenchantly the potential dangers of carbon trading, again as reported in the Scoop story:

“So, to my knowledge, carbon trading is the only commodity trading where it is impossible to establish with reasonable accuracy how much is being bought and sold, where the commodity that is traded is invisible and can perform no useful purpose for the purchaser, and where both parties benefit if the quantities traded have been exaggerated.

It is, therefore, an open invitation to fraud and that is exactly what is happening all over the world."

Fascinatingly, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), at its annual conference in London today and tomorrow, will use a new ‘Climate Change Report’ to claim that the price of carbon must rise from about 24 euros per tonne to somewhere between 60 euros and 90 euros. The mafia would be raising a Sicilian toast!

Richard Lambert, the Director-General of the CBI is reported by The Times as saying:

“The Government must ... keep the pressure on our international partners to commit to agreements that deliver a robust world price for carbon.”

Oh dear! I’m beginning to feel a bit like Kay Adams, Michael Corleone’s second wife:

“Michael Corleone: ‘Don't ask me about my business, Kay.’”

And with good reason. All along I have argued that carbon trading will actually increase carbon dioxide emissions while lining the pockets of the traders. It is an ‘open sesame’ for abuse and corruption. As Mr. Leyland comments:

“The amount of greenhouse gas emissions from an industrial plant can be measured to an accuracy of, at best, +/-10%. If you are purchasing carbon credits from, for instance, a forest, the accuracy of measurement is probably something between +/-100%. If it is a tropical forest, it could be minus 150% because there is reasonable evidence that some tropical forests are net emitters of greenhouse gases."

And, as Tom Hagen would surely have said: “There’s more money potential in global carbon trading than anything else we’re looking at.”

This could prove to be the classic example of Obese Capitalism eating up its Greens.

And the impact on climate? You might as well have Prohibition.

“I’ll drink to that!”