Better than sub-prime mortgages, carbon credit trading

April 26 (EIRNS)--Carbon credit trading is being viewed by some as the new speculative gold mine and better than speculating on housing, since in carbon credit trading there is little in way of verification of credit to get in your way of making a large haul on trading purely hot air. This is the conclusion of an investigation by the London Financial Times which ran a front page article detailing how there is no verification of carbon credits and when some verification of the carbon credits was done there was little evidence that the credits were issued in relation to any real projects that offset carbon like wind farms or solar cells. The Financial Times notes from their investigation that with the little or no verification in the carbon market it leaves the consumer or dupe with no real way to assess the value of the carbon credit.

The Financial Times profiled a website set up on March 1,2007 called "CarbonVoucher.com". The website was set up to help households to offset carbon emissions through funding projects to protect the Amazon rainforest in South America. The FT found that owner of the website was taking the money for the carbon offsets but did not have a contract to do any work or help build any projects to help protect the rainforest. The owner of the website said that money was coming in so fast and we have not had time to build the rest of the business.

Is this piece in the London Financial Times another case of the British distancing themselves from yet other scam that they started? In the past few years the Financial Times has run stories on the fraud of carbon trading and how carbon trading should be done by the Europeans and now the big push is to get the United States to adopt a carbon cap and trade scheme. Why has the FT burst a hole in the carbon trading scam? Is it that they are pushing a carbon tax?