Carbon credit fraud: that didn’t take long, did it ?

Five billion Euros  in 18 months: that’s the talley for carbon credit fraud released in December by Europol, the European Police Office. The confluence of business interests, government interests and environmentalists is certainly odd enough to suggest caution, yet the zealots of “the cause” have managed to harness the voices of government officialdom, the press and popular opoinion to create a new fictitious industrial model: the “green economy”. Not wanting to miss out on the opportunity to make money for nothing, some business interests have lined up to feed from the trough.

Of course there is no such thing as a “green economy” other than agriculture. Just like there never was a viable “service economy” that was supposedly everyone’s future a decade ago.  In the real world wealth is created by making tangible things, also known as manufacturing. Manufacturing is the source of virtually all of the wealth created in the 20th century.

When  markets trade in fictitious commodities with no real economic value we get fraud. This is a surprise ?  Not to me. It happened in the dot-com bubble, it happened in the sub-prime loan debacle, it is certain to happen in the carbon credit debacle to come. 

David McNab

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