Norway’s DNV (Det Norse Veritas, “The Norwegian Truth”) was the largest auditor of the infamous CDM’s (Clean Development Mechanisms) until it was suspended last December when it was caught selling carbon credits for projects it hadn’t checked.
At the time it was so large it had approved fully half of all CDM credits on the market.
Its excess workload was transferred to number two auditor, SGS, and shock, this week, SGS has been caught and suspended because it couldn’t prove it’s staff had properly vetted projects either.
Indeed it couldn’t show that they were even trained to do that vetting. (Did SGS not see this coming?)
When the West offered money to buy the rights to air-with-slightly-less-carbon-dioxide-than-it-could-have-had, China and India put up their hands and said “Yes please” 900 times. And why wouldn’t they? CDMs are worth about 20% of all emissions trades, which amounted to $126 billion in 2008. Up until the global financial crisis it was doubling annually, like all good ponzi schemes do.
This supposedly “free market” has none of the normal limits which make it hard for companies to get away with cheating … namely a connection to real material goods: usually if you don’t have it, you can’t sell it. But with carbon credits, customers can buy fake products and never know the difference — even after it’s “delivered”. That’s what you get when you deal in atmospheric nullities.
It might be called a “carbon market”, but remember that no one actually trades carbon, they trade rights to emit air with less carbon, and it’s not even as physical as air with less carbon than it used to have (something we can measure). No, it’s worse than that: it’s air with less carbon than it might have had.
So it’s an underwhelming surprise that the top two auditors have both been caught selling “Credits for emitting air that might-have-had-more-carbon-in-it, which might-have-been-checked by people who might-have-been-qualified to check these things”. Selling bridges in Boston has more respectability.
IOW: CO2 TRADING... IT'S MERELY A HUGE SCAM. ONE WHICH BENEFITS TRADERS THE MOST.
GOVERNMENT DIG IT BECAUSE IT'S A POTENTIALLY HUGE NEW REVENUE STREAM THEY CAN SPEND ON PET PROJECTS, CRONIES AND CAMPAIGN SUPPORTERS.
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