Britannia Radio

Financial crisis: Lehman misses out on carbon credit scam

By Christopher Booker
21/09/2008

What is the connection between the bankrupt Lehman Brothers and the likelihood that in four years' time our electricity bills will jump another 25 per cent (on top of the rises likely from soaring coal and gas prices)?
The answer is that, before its collapse, Lehman was pitching to become the leader in the vast trade created by the new worldwide regulatory system to "fight climate change" by curbing emissions of carbon dioxide.
The biggest money-spinners will be the schemes whereby industry will pay for permits to emit CO2 at so much a ton, either directly to governments or by buying them on an international market.

This market, soon to be worth trillions of pounds, was where Lehman hoped to be "the prime brokerage for emissions permits", as it set out in two hefty reports on
"The Business of Climate Change".
Advised by some of the world's leading global warming activists, such as Dr James Hansen and Al Gore (a close friend of the firm's erstwhile managing director Theodore Roosevelt IV), Lehman bought their message wholesale. GIM, the company set up by Gore to sell "carbon offsets" in return for planting trees, was a prized Lehman client.
The particular market that Lehman hoped to dominate is centred on the buying and selling of carbon permits, through the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) set up in 2005, the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the "cap and trade" system proposed for the US by both McCain and Obama.

This may still seem abstract but it will affect all our lives, because ultimately we will all be paying for it, through the colossal costs it will impose on industry, not least electricity.
The EU scheme already adds more than a billion pounds a year to our electricity bills. In four years' time it will become much more obvious when, under phase two of the ETS, permits will be auctioned, at a projected initial figure of £35 per ton of CO2.
On the basis of current wholesale prices, the annual cost of electricity used in the UK alone is around £32 billion. Adding £35 for every ton of CO2 emitted in producing it will mean that our electricity supply companies will have to pay £8 billion for their permits, adding 25 per cent to the total cost. Under EU rules, this must be passed on to all of us in our bills.
The idea is that, to reduce carbon emissions by an eventual 60 per cent, the number of permits auctioned will reduce year by year, leaving an ever larger shortfall which firms will have to account for either by reducing emissions or by buying additional permits - not least from the developing world under the UN's CDM.
Everything about this grandiose scheme betokens the economics of the madhouse.
The new costs it will impose are so colossal that whole industries, including aluminium, steel and Germany's chemical companies, threaten to move their operations outside the EU unless they are given free allocations. It has not even been agreed who - whether national governments or the EU itself - will run the auctions or keep the hundreds of billions of euros a year the scheme will raise.
China, by virtue of having built giant dams to produce electricity, will be a net "carbon creditor", able to sell permits to the EU worth billions more, despite continuing to build a new coal-fired power station every four days.
So will Russia, thanks to it having closed down so much of its polluting industry after the fall of Communism. There is not the slightest indication that the scheme itself will result in any lowering of global CO2 emissions.
What is certain is that it will pile astronomic costs onto everyone in the EU, inevitably impacting most severely on poorer householders that will face bills they cannot afford. The only other certainty - perhaps a consolation - is that those sharing in this bonanza will not include Lehman Brothers, now excluded from cashing in on what threatens to become the maddest scam the world has ever seen.

BBC series stitches up sceptics in counter-attack over climate change

As informed questioning of the global warming orthodoxy rises on all sides, the BBC's three-part series Climate Wars, ending tonight, bears all the marks of a carefully planned counter-attack.
BBC science producers were apoplectic at the attention given last year to Martin Durkin's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, featuring a galaxy of the world's more sceptical climate scientists. This is their riposte.
Last week, against a range of far-flung locations from Greenland to California, the presenter, Dr Iain Stewart, tackled three of the main arguments of Durkin's film.
In each case the technique was the same. After caricaturing the sceptics' point, with soundbite clips that did not allow them to develop their scientific argument, he then asserted that they had somehow been discredited.
For example, doubts had been raised over the reliability of satellite temperature records which do not show the same degree of warming as surface readings. Dr Roy Spencer, who designed Nasa's satellite system for measuring temperatures, was allowed to admit that a flaw had been found in the system.
But his interview ended before he could explain that, when the flaw was discovered in 1998, it was immediately corrected (although it made little difference to the results).
Likewise, there is a growing case for a correlation between global temperatures and solar activity. Dr Stewart accused Durkin's programme of cutting off a graph which illustrated this at a point when the data failed to support the thesis. Then he did exactly the same himself, not extending his own graph to 2008 in a way that would reinforce the thesis.
Most hilarious of all, however, was a long sequence in which Stewart defended the notorious "hockey stick" graph, which purports to show that temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level on record.
The BBC had a huge blow-up of this "iconic" graph carted triumphantly round London, from Big Ben to Buckingham Palace, as if it were proof that the warming alarmists are right.
There was no hint that the "hockey stick" is among the most completely discredited artefacts in the history of science, not least thanks to the devastating critique by Steve McIntyre, which showed that the graph's creators had an algorithm in their programme which could produce a hockey-stick shape whatever data were fed into it.
There was scarcely a frame of this clever exercise which did not distort or obscure some vital fact. Yet the "impartial" BBC is sending out this farrago of convenient untruths to schools, ensuring that the "march of the lie" continues.