New Zealand’s trading scheme for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying “entirely fake” or even “criminal” promises from other countries, according to a report published Monday by the philanthropic Morgan Foundation.
New Zealand’s government paid for CO2 offsets that were criminal scams and didn’t reduce the emissions they’d promised. This means the entire country’s global warming policy was “based on an outright scam,” which ended up sending the cash to international criminals, according to retired New Zealand physicist Dr. George Preddey. New Zealand’s government purchased 86 million tons of fradulent CO2 offset from an international criminal scam in Ukraine.
The Foundation’s report states that New Zealand “put around $200 million in the hands of foreign criminals simply to avoid our ethical obligation to reduce emissions. There has been no environmental benefit when that money could have been used to reduce emissions here.” The report concludes simply by saying “we are, without a doubt, cheats.”
The plan caused New Zealand’s CO2 emissions to increase by 111 percent between 1990 and 2012, which was one of the largest per capita increases of any developed country. To put New Zealand’s increase in some perspective, the U.S. decreased CO2 emissions by 28 percent over the same time period largely due to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. New Zealand’s failure is made all the worse since the country promised to reduce its net emissions by 50 percent before 2050.
CO2 trading schemes have a long history of scams and corruption. Attempts by the European Union to create a cap-and-trade system actually caused CO2 emissions to increase as well. The previous scheme cost $287 billion from 1990 to 2011 and had “almost zero impact” on the amount of CO2 emissions from the European Union, according to a study by UBS Investment Research.
In 2014, prosecutors in Italy investigated a $1.4 billion carbon trading scam that funded terrorist groups operating in the Middle East.
Even environmentalists, such as the Executive Director of Greenpeace Annie Leonard, have called cap-and-trade a “multi-trillion dollar carbon racket” that creates “real incentives to cheat” and is a “dangerous distraction.” Even environmentalists who agree with the idea of cap-and-trade admit that actual examples of it fail because they “fall short of creating real price pressures due to its closeness to baseline emissions.”
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