Yesterday morning I posted the original article. In the evening, a farmer from the Bruderheim area approached me at the town-council meeting budget presentation and asked me if I would be able to help him out with some information on the context of someone having come by to his place to offer him money for using zero-till for his land. The deal he was offered is to be used in the creation of carbon credits.

As that offer had been made to his son, he could not tell me whom that offer came from or for how much it was or what its terms were.

I promised to give him more information on all of what he had told me, after I got home. The following is what I sent to him.

The blog entry, at “The fortunes of cap-and-trade” [5] http://lce.folc.ca/2010/05/05/the-fortunes-of-cap-and-trade, is easier to print out directly from the Internet, at the blog.

The blog entry covers two major aspects, the circumstances and politics of the Chicago Climate Exchange (a.k.a. CCX) and the three different realities of climate change.

My personal view on it all is that the whole thing is a scam. Some of the details of the scam, from the viewpoints of the three different realities I mentioned, are being explained by Professor Robert Carter, a renowned paleoclimatologist (a climate scientist who studies climate trends extending into the past, far beyond the beginning of history). Check the links for that in the blog entry.

The circumstances of the evolution and ins and outs of the carbon-credit scam are explained in the first part of the blog entry. Follow the link for the article at The Cypress Times. At the end of that article are five video clips of about ten minutes each, of a program by Glenn Beck at Fox TV that you must watch.

All of that may seem to be a fair bit of work, but without that you will not understand the background for the business deal you and Gerald were offered.

You asked me whether I would be able to provide you with a summary of all of that. Well, that is about as close as I can come with that, but there is a bit more that puts your deal into a more detailed context.

Without knowing some details, such as the name of the company that offered you the deal that you can’t refuse, I won’t be able to tell you much of anything you want to know, but I can point you to an example that, on a much larger scale than the case of your farm, shows you how the carbon-credit trading scam is made to work with deals like the one you are interested in. Here it is:

Telegraph.co.uk

WWF [World Wildlife Fund] hopes to find $60 billion growing on trees

The carbon credits scheme would make WWF and its partners much richer, but with no lowering of overall CO2 emissions, writes Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 4:53PM GMT 20 Mar 2010

Full Story
[6] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7488629/WWF-hopes-to-find-60-billion-growing-on-trees.html

The following is a quote from that article. It relates to something that you may have to worry about if you feel that in the end someone will look after your interests in the deal you may wish to become involved in.

—quote—
…lost in the scramble to save something from the wreckage was the small print that guaranteed the rights of indigenous peoples in rainforests, whose way of life – to the concern of groups such as Survival International and the Forest Peoples Programme – has already been severely damaged by REDD-inspired schemes elsewhere, such as in Kenya and Papua New Guinea.
—end quote—

These are some parts of a very complicated story. The creation of a scam involving trillions of dollars a year can’t be made to work at all without making it complicated. The information I provided and pointed you to, so far, is about as simple as I can make it without spending perhaps fifty hours or more on trying to make it much simpler. As it is, it took me four hours to put it together.

Still, it is obvious that some people, especially the little people that have a primary local interest, are getting hurt on account of the scam. Be very careful that it won’t be you that’s getting hurt.

There is no doubt in my mind that people like Goldman-Sachs, Maurice Strong (see information on the mysterious Maurice Strong, at [7] http://www.fathersforlife.org/search.htm?q=Maurice+Strong&sa=Search&cx=016299930597011521148%3Aqdeaj0pjtiy&cof=FORID%3A11&siteurl=fathersforlife.org%252F#933), Al Gore, Barack Obama and the others directly affiliated with and controlling the Chicago Climate Exchange will make many hundreds of billions of dollars each year on the scam. Al Gore, who already has a palace whose operation has twenty times the carbon foot-print of the average US home, just bought another palace, an ocean-view villa in California, for $9 million (look at [8] http://www.benzinga.com/264162/al-gore-s-new-9-million-ocean-view-villa-in-ca ).

For us normal mortals is means nothing other than that during the next ten years or so fuel and food prices will double, triple, and perhaps worse.

Perhaps you and your son will be able to collect a little cash on it by doing your part in creating money out of thin air. However, there is no such thing as a free lunch. I wonder what it is that you will have to commit yourself to and for how long that will be. What will your costs be?

As far as a commitment goes that you will stick to zero-till operations, how long will that be made to last? Will even having to do it for ten years be a problem for you, for your son or for your son’s kids?

Let’s speculate a bit. I don’t think that forty years ago there was anyone at all who figured that zero-till would ever be around, let alone it becoming a viable farming practice. Will zero-till still be viable forty years from now?

How about if there will be circumstances, such as the necessity of grass-hopper control, that will make zero-till no longer a viable option? You may eventually be forced to apply increasingly potent insecticides — until someone decides that all insecticides must be banned (as DDT was banned, even though millions of people — mostly kids — then began dying of malaria each year).

Whatever the reasons may be for you wanting to go out of zero-till, will your contract permit you to get out of it without you suffering serious and insurmountable consequences? Wanting to make a profit will not be a viable excuse when even the lives of millions of people don’t matter as humanity has to buckle under increasingly totalitarian policy changes.

Whatever the case may be, none of it will have the least measurable effect in changing global climate trends.

Last, but perhaps not least, will there be any consequences for you when the carbon-credit trading scam collapses?

For every ton of carbon burned, about 3.7 tons of CO2 will be created. The carbon-credit traders hoped to sell carbon credits for about $30 a ton of CO2. A ton of coal costs about $30. It will be made to cost another $111 for just burning it. In other words, the base price of energy will more than quadruple. That extra charge will be paid for by end-consumers of all consumer goods and by taxpayers.

The current price of CO2 credits is at about ten cents a ton. No one in their right mind can sustain carbon-credit trading at that price. It is unlikely that all of the people can be fooled forever on this. The reality of the market has set in, or else the price per ton of CO2 would not be as low as it is (see [9] http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/ ). After all, thin air is worth nothing. It is the height of insanity and the death of our economy to charge for it.

Regards,

Walter

I glanced through the the first few articles returned from [10] an Internet search for “Farmers cash offers carbon-credit Alberta”.

In general, it seems that everyone writing about the scheme is in favour of it. That includes the farmers mentioned in the articles. Of course, for anyone promoting the new deal it would not be advantageous to mention any detractors.

I would have to see what the offer is and what it entails. Next, if I were you, I would wonder why I should want to sell my ability to produce carbon credits to the first buyer that comes along. That’s not what you would do if you were to sell your farm, right? I would wait for, or invite, more offers and sell to the highest offer and the surest source of the cash offered, the offer that leaves me with the lowest possible risk of having to guarantee performances on my part that I may have trouble meeting.

Keep in mind not only who wrote a given article but also who published it. That way you can estimate to some extent what the agenda is that is being sold to the reader and who wants to profit from it.

Discuss the issue with a few individuals who actually sold the carbon credits their farms are able to generate and qualify for.

Don’t sign away your rights or obligations until you have the money in your hands and can put it into your wallet or bank account.

Let’s hope that you will be able to bear the final increased costs (including the appropriate taxes and associated profit margins) that you will have to pay for fuel, fertilizer, herbicides, insecticides, feed, utilities and consumer goods you will have to pay to reap your windfall. Of course, even if you don’t buy into the scam, you will still have to pay those cost increases for the windfalls reaped by all the others that will profit from the scam.

The final costs to the end-consumers, all of us, will be worse than what deregulation of the utilities cost us. That did not help you, and neither will the carbon-credit scam.

–Walter

See also:

Review
Global warming and malaria: knowing the horse before hitching the cart

Paul Reiter

Insects and Infectious Disease Unit, Institut Pasteur, 25-28 rue du Dr Roux, 75724 Paris, France

Malaria Journal 2008, 7(Suppl 1):S3doi:10.1186/1475-2875-7-S1-S3

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: [11] http://www.malariajournal.com/content/7/S1/S3

Published: 11 December 2008

© 2008 Reiter; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ([12] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.