UN climate change body suffers mammoth European carbon fraud [Russia, Ukraine]

FoxNews ^ | 2015 September 08 | George Russell

[CutePuppy]

The United Nations body that oversees greenhouse gas reductions is reeling from another cap-and-trade scandal that may have put 600 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere — roughly speaking, the annual CO2 output of Canada or Britain — while the emissions were ostensibly suppressed, according to an independent study.

In the process, the fraudsters, largely in Russia and Ukraine, were likely able to transfer credits for more than 400 million tons of their apparently bogus greenhouse savings by April 2015 into Europe's commercial carbon trading system — the largest in the world — thereby undermining that continent's ambitious carbon reduction achievements.

Perhaps significantly, the vast bulk of the assumed fraud took place in countries that are — or were, in the case of Ukraine — notorious for their kleptocratic leadership under the regimes of Vladimir Putin and ousted Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled his country in 2014. In Russia, much of the contract work for carbon project approval was carried out by state-owned Sberbank, which has been sanctioned by the U.S. and the European Union as part of the Western response to the Ukraine crisis.

The bulk of the fraud occurred under the battered Kyoto Protocol for greenhouse gas emissions ..... < snip >

..... Among other things, the emerging deal is based on what the U.N. calls "intended nationally determined contributions," or INDCs, that leave individual countries wide latitude for "estimating and accounting for anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and, as appropriate, removals," as well as how the countries themselves consider their INDCs to be "fair and ambitious." ..... < snip >

..... The most recent scandal — there have been others — involves the United Nations Convention for Combating Climate Change (UNFCCC), the body that oversees the Kyoto Protocol .....

[Bucky14]

Hey, you don’t look anything like the wallet inspector!