Another UN Scandal: Carbon offset market bogus from day one!

Executive Summary: the UN has facilitated a "fraudulent" market worth tens of billions of dollars that was justified by a critical report; this report was authored by the very project developers and "auditors" who would profit from the report's publication. This appears to be a major UN scandal that could surpass the Oil-for-Food Program in terms of total economic impact.

This weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the multibillion-dollar experiment created to control global warming is faltering as officials questions the program's efficacy.

[Companies] ...can pay for the right to pollute by buying "carbon credits," essentially permission slips to spew carbon dioxide. Sale of the credits is supposed to help fund clean-air projects in China and other developing countries that would otherwise be too costly to build...

...U.N. regulators are... concerned that some independent auditors of these projects, who are responsible for vetting their environmental legitimacy, have been letting project developers push through ventures of questionable environmental value.

...Developing-world projects like [wind farms and palm-oil plants] are part of the burgeoning global carbon trade [which] last year was worth 40.4 billion euros...

The carbon market was created by the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 global treaty underlying environmental rules...

A dozen or so project developers, most based in Europe, dominate the business. Among the largest is EcoSecurities...

Three auditors dominate the business... Det Norske Veritas, Tüv Süd AG, ...and SGS Group...

Let's hit the pause button right there. Those company names sound familiar.

Let's rewind to the year 2000. The World Rainforest Movement published a bulletin ("Sinks that stink") decrying the emerging carbon trade as suffering "the taint of intellectual corruption". In effect, the WRM and other evironmentalists assert that the entire carbon market is a "scam", "fantasy", "fiction", "nonsense", "fraudulent" and worse.

But why? WRM states:

...some of the most polluting countries are trying to find ways out of their commitments, using potential loopholes in the Protocol which may allow them to plant millions of hectares of trees in Southern countries as a substitute for cutting emissions at [the] source...

in order to assess the scientific validity of this approach, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) appointed a panel to put together a Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry. The report, released in May, has disappointed many activists by giving a "scientific" stamp of approval to a carbon market which would generate profits for a small number of mostly Northern companies and consultants...

...one of the reason's for the report's failure is, sadly, surely quite simple: some of the authors (and the companies they work for) will benefit financially from having drawn the conclusions they drew... [just] a few examples:

Pedro Moura-Costa, another important author of Chapter 5, is a UK-based executive of Ecosecurities..

Gareth Philips..., another Lead Author of Chapter 5, works for Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS) Forestry of Geneva...

The bulletin concludes:

These and many other authors and editors of the IPCC Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees. They should therefore have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such "offset" projects...

That's where I've heard of EcoSecurities and SGS before.

In short, the very authors of the original UN climate report that justified the carbon market were themselves poised to profit from that market. And, now, the UN does business directly with firms like Ecosecurities and SGS, enriching the authors of the original report!

Furthermore, the project developers and the "auditors" co-wrote the chapter justifying the carbon offset market! In what other field -- aside from the UN, that is -- would companies and their "auditors" both be permitted to conspire in such a fraudulent manner?

If any of us thought the corruption in the UN ended with the "Oil-for-Food" scandal, it appears we were all sadly mistaken. The UN has no right doing business with any of these firms. By continuing to do so, they are reinforcing America's image of the organization: that it is utterly useless and thoroughly infested with corrupt officials.

Related: The World Rainforest Movement, which buys into anthropogenic global warming (note: I do not) runs a website completely devoted to monitoring the carbon offset trade: SinksWatch.org.

Update: Linked by Pajamas Media. Thanks!