A house of cards collapses 167

The tumult and the shouting about global warming dies. Captains and kings of the great scam quietly depart. The Chicago Climate Exchange is giving up carbon trading, as Investor’s Business Daily is happy to report:

Climate Fraud: As the case for global warming and cap-and-trade has collapsed, so too has the market that was to exploit this manufactured crisis for fun and profit. The climate-change bubble has burst.

The collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) … [has]  implications for the future of the American economy and the business climate [that] are staggering: It is an acknowledgment that both the case for climate trade and cap-and-tax legislation has also collapsed.

On Oct. 21 the exchange announced it was ending carbon trading … Launched as a “voluntary” method of trading “carbon credits,” CCX rested on the hope that cap-and-tax legislation would make such trading mandatory — and profitable. …

The hope of the scammers was that Obama would succeed in forcing through such legislation. He certainly wanted to. He was involved in the hustling from the start:

Barack Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002, when it issued CCX start-up grants. Presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett also once sat on the Joyce board. As president, cap-and-trade is one of Obama’s highest priorities.

The exchange’s founder, Richard Sandor … [had] estimated that climate trading could be “a $10 trillion market,” … But now, in the wake of Climate-gate and other scandals, as well as recent election results, that’s an unlikely event.

Can we be so ungenerous as to exult over the scammers’ staggering losses? Yes we can.

The biggest losers are CCX’s two biggest investors, Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and Goldman Sachs …

CCX’s collapse was inevitable as both the enthusiasm for cap-and-trade — and the world itself — cooled. After the e-mail exchanges from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia reveled the extent to which global climate data were being manipulated to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, hopes for profiting off the scam with another scam evaporated. …

Carbon trading at CCX all but dried up as prices plunged from over $7 a ton in 2008 to just 10 cents as of August [2010]. …

CCX’s carbon-trading demise is reassuring evidence that eventually all houses of cards will collapse.