Great news!

Traders in air are being arrested on the charge of fraud. Not (yet?) for their big hoax about man-made global warming, but for dishonesty anyway.

The carbon trading system being pushed here has spawned crime and fraud across the pond. Cap-and-trade is not about saving the planet. It’s about money and power, and absolute power corrupting absolutely.

All across Europe authorities have been conducting raids, rounding up individuals involved in a new version of Climate-gate. This time the data aren’t corrupted. Europe’s Emissions Trading System is. The system is so sick, it’s turned out to be a scam built upon a scam.

Twenty-five people have been arrested in raids by British and German authorities as part of a pan-European crackdown on carbon credit VAT [value added tax] tax fraud.

U.K. officials announced raids on 81 offices and homes, nabbing 13 people in England and eight in Scotland. The operation involved 450 investigators from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs office.

German authorities raided 230 locations, including the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and the offices of RWE, one of the largest energy firms in Europe. The German operation involved 1,000 investigators targeting 50 companies and 150 suspects.

The amount of money involved in carbon trading is huge and the temptations vast. While our Congress demagogues about banks and their “complex financial instruments,” they are simple compared to cap-and-trade, which as we have noted involves essentially the buying and selling of air. Throw in an oppressive value-added tax and you have a recipe for corruption and fraud.

Last December, Europol, the European criminal intelligence agency, announced that Emissions Trading System fraud had resulted in about 5 billion euros in lost revenues as Europe’s carbon traders schemed to avoid paying Europe’s VAT and pocket the difference. In announcing the raids, the agency said that as much as 90% of Europe’s carbon trades were the result of fraudulent activity.

“Carbon markets are highly susceptible to fraud, given their complexity and the fact that it’s not always clear what is being traded,” says Oscar Reyes of Carbon Trade Watch.

Climate change has been found to be a fraud. Now the system to fight it has been. Yet it’s that system the administration and others want to establish here through cap-and-trade legislation such as Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer.

As we also have noted, the mechanism for such phantom carbon trading here has already been established in the form of the Chicago Climate Exchange. The Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start CCX when Barack Obama sat on its board.

CCX founder Richard Sandor estimates the climate trading market could be “a $10 trillion dollar market.” It is an invitation to fraud that would make Europe’s ETS scandal seem like petty theft.

In 2000, according to Joyce Foundation records, $347,600 was allocated to Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where Sandor was a research professor, “to design a Midwestern pilot program for the voluntary trading of carbon dioxide and other emissions that cause climate change.”

Now President Obama would make such carbon trading mandatory, limit total emissions and make carbon as valuable a commodity as booze during Prohibition.

The Joyce Foundation’s two grants totaled just over $1 million. CCX has proved very lucrative for Sandor, whose 8 million shares in the exchange has grown to more than $260 million even before a national cap-and-trade system like Europe’s is established.

Al Gore … is co-founder of Generation Investment Management LLP, the fifth largest shareholder in CCX.

The largest shareholder is, uh, Goldman Sachs. …

What has happened in Europe is going to happen here and may already have begun. We, too, can save the earth for fun and profit.

In the dark ages, when Papacy held control of men’s consciences and few dared to think, one method which she practiced to supply herself with money was the sale of indulgences. The indulgence was a permission to sin and yet be free from its consequences. … Succeeding Popes and councils … argued that if they had a right to remit sins for service to the church, they had also the right to remit them for money for the church … and concluded that if they had a right to remit past sins for money, they had the same right to remit, or excuse, or grant indulgence for sins of the future. … It was the sale of these future indulgences for money which … gave rise to the Reformation movement, called Protestant, because of their protests and objections to this and other evils recognized in Papacy.

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We do not believe that CO2 is a pollutant; that the earth is warming to any degree that should trouble us; that the planet is warmed by human activity; that a despotic world authority is needed to regulate human activity on the pretext of saving the planet from warming; that the wealth of the First World should be redistributed to the Third World; or that anybody’s wealth should be redistributed to Al Gore.

In the name of Climate Change, the new mysticism, Al Gore and his conspirators are selling indulgences. You pay them so you can carry on with living, manufacturing, traveling and so on, all the normal activities which they say is threatening Planet Earth. Ostensibly you are buying a certain amount of some Third Worlder’s CO2 ration, as determined by Al Gore and his conspirators, because you are exceeding your own ration, as determined by them. Some of what you pay will go to a Third Worlder, they say. Most of what you pay will go to Al Gore and his conspirators.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House.

Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore‘s appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation’s philanthropic leaders.

“Time’s running out (on climate change),” Gore told them. “We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together.”

Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the climate scam alive as evidence of outright climate fraud grows, just as they were critical in the beginning when the Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, essentially, air. More specifically perhaps, hot air.

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) advertises itself as “North America’s only cap-and-trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.” Barack Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002 when the CCX startup grants were issued. As president, pushing cap-and-trade is one of his highest priorities. Now isn’t that special? …

The CCX provides the mechanism in trading the very pollution permits and carbon offsets the administration’s cap-and-trade proposals would impose by government mandate.

Thanks to Fox News’ Glenn Beck, we have learned a lot about CCX, not the least of which is that its founder, Richard Sandor, says he knew Obama well back in the day when the Joyce Foundation awarded money to the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, where Sandor was a research professor.

Sandor estimates that climate trading could be “a $10 trillion dollar market.” It could very well be, if cap-and-trade measures like Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer are signed into law, making energy prices skyrocket, and as companies buy and sell permits to emit those six “greenhouse” gases.

So lucrative does this market appear, it attracted the attention of London-based Generation Investment Management, which purchased a stake in CCX and is now the fifth-largest shareholder.

As we noted last year, Gore is co-founder of Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offsets of dubious value that let rich polluters continue to pollute with a clear conscience.

Other founders include former Goldman Sachs partner David Blood, as well as Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris, also of Goldman Sachs. In 2006, CCX received a big boost when another investor bought a 10% stake on the prospect of making a great deal of money for itself. That investor was Goldman Sachs, now under the gun for selling financial instruments it knew were doomed to fail.

The actual mechanism for trading on the exchange was purchased and patented by none other than Franklin Raines, who was CEO of Fannie Mae at the time.

Raines profited handsomely to the tune of some $90 million by buying and bundling bad mortgages that led to the collapse of the American economy. …

The climate trading scheme being stitched together here will do more damage than Goldman Sachs, AIG and Fannie Mae combined. But it will bring power and money to its architects.

From Canada Free Press, by David A Nace:

In 2004, Al Gore, former Vice President and author of Inconvenient Truth, started Generational Investment Management (GIM) to provide funding to businesses associated with alternative energy. GIM also happens to own 10% of the Chicago Climate Exchange, which will issue the carbon credits that Cap and Tax legislation is based upon.

In 2007, Al Gore became a partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiman, Perkins, Claufield and Byers (KPCB). This firm is heavily invested in renewable energy and electrical grid improvements. The market for their products is almost completely dependent on government programs in the form of subsidies, tax breaks or regulation. Al Gore’s contribution to KPCB is to promote government intervention into the energy markets.

It is not surprising that venture capital firms and investment firms that will have a stake in the trading of carbon credits, have made extensive campaign contributions to those legislators proposing Cap and Trade legislation. Clearly, the American public looses in the form of higher energy costs and lost jobs however, a few politically well connected individuals will have much to gain as the result of further government regulation of energy consumption.

From the corner of the National Review Online, by John Derbyshire:

Al Gore on Conan O’Brien’s show the other day: [Don’t miss following this link to watch the short video – JB]

Conan: Now, what about … you talk in the book about geothermal energy …

Al: Yeah, yeah.

Conan: and that is, as I understand it, using the heat that’s generated from the core of the earth …

Al: Yeah.

Conan: … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?

Al: It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …

The geothermal gradient is usually quoted as 25–50 degrees Celsius per mile of depth in normal terrain (not, e.g., in the crater of Kilauea). Two kilometers down, therefore, (that’s a mile and a quarter if you’re not as science-y as Al) you’ll have an average gain of 30–60 degrees — exploitable for things like home heating, though not hot enough to make a nice pot of tea. The temperature at the earth’s core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius … The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on bigtime, things get up over 10 million degrees.

If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was “several million degrees,” we’d be a star.

The Story of Algore, from Modern Cautionary Tales:

Once upon a time there was a tyrant named Algore. He was a rich man, but he felt he could never be rich enough, so he took more and more from the people he ruled over until they were very poor and miserable. He made them hand over whatever they possessed willingly, by telling them that if they didn’t, the seas would boil up and flood the land and drown them all. They believed him because he told them that Science proved he was right, and all the people had a great reverence for Science. Secretly, Algore bribed as many scientists as he could to say that what he said was scientific fact. The few scientists who refused to lie for him were frightened into silence by the tyrant’s teams of Mockers and Vilifiers. So the people were convinced that the only way they could survive was to do as Algore said.

They stopped heating their houses in winter, and many perished from the cold. They stopped eating what they liked and tried to keep alive on a diet of raw roots, and many died of hunger. They became parched because Algore allowed them very little water, and many died of thirst. Algore allowed them very little light in the long nights of winter and the short nights of summer, and many died of sheer sadness and boredom.

Almost every family had once possessed a motor car, but Algore got his scientists to say that motor cars were hastening the boiling of the seas. They had had money to pay for flights in airplanes, but the scientists told them that flying hastened the boiling of the seas. So they gave up driving and flying and only went to places they could walk to, and many died of exhaustion.

Some of them tried secretly to use coal to warm themselves and cook hearty meals, and oil to fuel cars and airplanes. But they were always caught and punished. Many such ‘selfish saboteurs’ were executed for the ‘worst of crimes’ – hastening the boiling of the seas.

‘Where can we get some power from, to light our houses, to cook our food?’ some brave voices from among the dwindling population dared to ask the tyrant.

‘From the windmills I have given you,’ Algore deigned to reply.

The people stood gazing up at the humming windmills, waiting for a breeze to turn them so that a tiny bit of power might be made, to give them a tiny bit of light and warmth. Breezes arose, the windmills stirred, but there was never enough power to save them from hunger and cold.

They fell on their knees and begged Algore to save them.

‘Very well,’ said Algore loftily. ‘I will let you use a little oil, a little coal. You may warm your houses, cook your food, drive your cars, even fly in airplanes, if you will pay me for granting you permission each time you do it.’

In that way, Algore took every last thing from the people, down to the last coin the hardest worker had worked for.

Algore was now very rich indeed. He grew very fat and smooth. Day and night he chuckled in his warm, brightly lit palace over how clever he had been to cheat the people out of everything they had worked for. He boasted to the scientists he had bought, and to his henchmen of Mockers and Vilifiers (and their henchwives), and to silly foreign admirers who gave him prizes for being the Prophet of the Boiling Seas, about how powerful he was.

He had come to believe the story he had made up. He thought he had only to say something and it would be true. So one day he said to the cold, hungry, miserable remnant of the people that he had thought of a new way to give them light and heat, without waiting for a wind to turn the windmills.

‘We will siphon up the heat from the molten centre of the earth,’ he announced. ‘Down there the temperature is millions of degrees, measured in either Celsius or Fahrenheit.’

But even among the remnant of the people there were some who knew this wasn’t true, and for the first time they began to doubt that Algore knew anything about Science at all. Even his tame scientists could not bring themselves to say that the centre of the earth was millions of degrees hot, and some of them hung their heads and covered their mouths in shame. ‘We let him go too far,’ they said.

But it was too late for regrets. Most of the people he had ruled over had perished, the land was dried up, the fields were gone to dust, the houses had crumbled, the cities were empty, and the cold sea lapped on the shore as it always had and always will.