The Sunday Times reports:
The legitimacy of the $100 billion (£60 billion) carbon-trading market has been called into question after the world’s largest auditor of clean-energy projects was suspended by United Nations inspectors.
SGS UK had its accreditation suspended last week after it was unable to prove its staff had properly vetted projects that were then approved for the carbon-trading scheme, or even that they were qualified to do so.
As we have noted before, among the many reasons carbon cap and trading is destined to fail is because auditing carbon emissions reductions accurately enough to support a carbon credit “market” is simply impossible. New Zealand Climate Science Coalition chairman Bryan Leyland explains:
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.
In fact this is the exact same reason the economists who originally came up with the idea of cap and trade as a way to combat pollution believe that cap and trade is a terrible fit for carbon:
The first is that carbon emissions are a global problem with myriad sources. Cap-and-trade, he says, is better suited for discrete, local pollution problems. “It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally,” he says. “There are no institutions right now that have that power.”
Reuters reports:
The British tax office arrested seven people in London on Wednesday in a suspected 38 million pounds ($62.6 million) value-added tax fraud in the European market in carbon allowances, it said. … “Those arrested are believed to be part of an organized crime group operating a network of companies trading large volumes of high-value carbon credits,” it said.
The Financial Times adds:
Anand Doobay, a partner at Peters & Peters, a City-based law firm specialising in financial crime, said the ethereal nature of the fast-expanding multi-billion dollar international market in carbon credits had made them an attractive target for graft: “There is an increasing amount of fraud connected with them as a commodity. It’s trading with something that’s intangible, and that isn’t regulated in the way some other commodities are.”
Since carbon credits are a completely intangible unlike every other real commodity on the planet, cap and trade has afforded organized crime a new avenue to defraud taxpayers and other unsuspecting victims. Now where have we heard people predict exactly that would happen?
Carbon Trading Is an Invitation to Fraud
Why Should the U.S. Embrace Failure?
The Fraud at the Core of Cap and Trade