Cap-and-Trade Carbon Credit Extortion Scam In Full Swing

The cap-and-trade extortion racket promoted by the EU and UN has now blown sky high. Please consider Businesses hold world hostage over carbon credits.

WND research reveals the European Union's cap-and-trade exchange is vulnerable to a sophisticated form of corporate extortion in which EU bureaucrats in Brussels are manipulated into paying hundreds of millions of dollars in carbon permit bribes to keep companies from moving jobs to Third World nations.

In fact, it appears the scam is already under way.

The crux of the scheme is this: European steelmakers have threatened to leave the EU for India, eliminating the jobs of thousands of workers in the process, unless the EU grants the steelmakers free carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Eurofer, a European trade group, is at the center of the scheme. The web of the plot, however, weaves in not only several companies, but also the United Nations' climate change chief:

• Among its members, Eurofer represents two EU steelmakers, Corus Redcar and ArcelorMittal, each of which has ties to India as well as to Rajendra K. Pachauri, the Indian industrial engineer who has been chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, since 2002.
• Eurofer appears to have coordinated a threat to the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading System that its steelmakers would move their operations from the EU to India unless the EU cap-and-trade exchange issued them � at no cost � carbon emissions permits worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
• Once the bureaucrats in Brussels acquiesced, Corus Redcar and ArcelorMittal maneuvered to cash in windfall profits from the EU carbon permits given them at no cost.
• Additionally, Corus Redcar has now announced a decision to close operations in Great Britain nonetheless and relocate its steelmaking activities to India in order to gain additional U.N. carbon credits.

Ironically, EU and U.N. officials who might have thought requiring cap-and-trade permits would operate as "protection racket" in which EU companies need to buy carbon credits to continue operations, have now found themselves on the losing end of the reverse scheme.

In the final analysis, the winners are the European Union corporations willing to play hardball with the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading System, and the losers are the EU middle class workers that are held hostage in the scheme.

Cashing In On The Scam

Inquiring minds are reading how Carbon credits bring Lakshmi Mittal �1bn bonanza.

LAKSHMI MITTAL, Britain�s richest man, stands to benefit from a �1 billion windfall from a European scheme to curb global warming. His company ArcelorMittal, the steel business where he is chairman and chief executive, will make the gain on �carbon credits� given to it under the European emissions trading scheme (ETS).

The scheme grants companies permits to emit CO2 up to a specified �cap�. Beyond this they must buy extra permits. An investigation has revealed that ArcelorMittal has been given far more carbon permits than it needs. It has the largest allocation of any organisation in Europe.

The investigation has also shown that ArcelorMittal and Eurofer, which represents European steel makers at European level, have lobbied intensively in Brussels. This has included threatening to move plants out of Europe at a cost of 90,000 jobs, and asking European commissioners to meet Mittal.

ArcelorMittal is now free to sell its surplus permits on the market or to hoard them for future use. The latter would allow it to avoid cutting greenhouse gas emissions for years, effectively undermining the point of the scheme.

ArcelorMittal, which is based in Luxembourg and has more than 80 steel plants around Europe, has confirmed Pearson�s figures. The ETS covers 10,000 industrial installations, responsible for 40% of the EU�s greenhouse gas emissions.

The world's biggest polluters wanted the carbon cap so they could trade their permits (acquired for free), to other businesses who will have to buy them to expand.

Now some of those polluters are going to move to India anyway after extorting extra permits out of the EU.

Not only is the global warming data bogus and manipulated, the whole cap-and-trade program is now easily seen as nothing more than an extortion scam, a scam that has fittingly blown up in the face of the EU and UN clowns who created it (unless of course that was their intention all along).

Unfortunately, EU workers and taxpayers are the ones who are going to suffer over this, not the clowns who created this ridiculous scheme.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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