"Six western US states have withdrawn from an emissions-trading group that had planned to set up the world's second-largest carbon market. New Mexico, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Montana and Utah are ''no longer participating'' in the Western Climate Initiative, or WCI, Patrick Cummins, the group's Colorado-based project manager, said by telephone today. Western states will
- instead pursue non-trading climate policies
- through a new national coalition, he said.
Together with California and four Canadian provinces, including Quebec and British Columbia, the WCI was formed in 2007 with the aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions from its member states to 15 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. The group's intention was to pursue that goal with a cap-and-trade system, following similar methods adopted in Europe in 2005 and New Zealand in 2008.
Arizona's Department of Environmental Quality yesterday announced its formal withdrawal from the partnership. ''Arizona believes there are more effective, responsible ways to realise the environmental and health benefits the WCI program seeks to achieve while avoiding the economic costs to industries that are subject to cap and trade,'' ADEQ director Henry Darwin said in a statement.
''The others have sort of transitioned away from the policies being worked on here, so their participation kind of fell off because they are not pursuing those policies,'' Mr Cummins said.
The six former WCI member states are now part of a new group called North America 2050 that will ''facilitate state and provincial efforts to design, promote and implement cost-effective policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create economic opportunities,'' the group said."
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4/26/10, "Global warming: La CO2a Nostra," Thomas Fuller, Examiner.com
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12/1/10, "EU Carbon permits missing from registry due to (computer) virus," Reuters, Nina Chestney
"One million European carbon permits (valued at $19.54 million US) have gone missing from the Romanian subsidiary of cement company Holcim's (HOLN.VX) emissions registry account due to a computer virus,
- the EU Commission said on Wednesday."...
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12/10/09, "$7.4 billion lost from carbon trading fraud in Europe." NY Times Green blog
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12/28/10, "Europol Arrests More Than 100 In Carbon Trading Fraud," P. Gosselin, NoTricksZone
"Here’s more proof that trading of CO2 emission certificates is fraught with fraud and attracts seedy criminal organizations – all costing the consumers and taxpayers billions.
- Worse yet, it has spread out of control and appears that the authorities can’t keep up."...
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10/8/10, "Murder on the Carbon Express: Interpol Takes on Emissions Fraud," Mother Jones, by Mark Schapiro
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Photo, "Inconvenient Farmers" killed by private climate militias to move along their "carbon trading" projects in Honduras:
Honduran farmers alleged killed by private climate militias, EurActiv
10/3/11, "Carbon credits tarnished by human rights 'disgrace'," EurActiv, Arthur Neslen
"The reported killing of 23 Honduran farmers in a dispute with the owners of UN-accredited palm oil plantations in Honduras is forcing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) executive board
- to reconsider its stakeholder consultation processes.
In Brussels, the Green MEP Bas Eickhout called the alleged human rights abuses "a disgrace", and told EurActiv he would be pushing the European Commission to bar carbon credits from the plantations from being traded under the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).
Several members of the CDM board have been "personally distressed" by the events in Bajo Aguán, northern Honduras, according to the board's chairman, Martin Hession....Another board member told EurActiv that Aguán was a "hot potato," which struck at the heart of the emissions trading scheme's integrity. "We all regret the situation extremely," he said.
Human rights abuses
At issue are the reported murders of 23 local farmers who tried to recover land, which they say was illegally sold to big palm oil plantations, such as Grupo Dinant,
- in a country scarred by widespread human rights abuses.
In July, a report by an International Fact Finding Mission was presented to the European Parliament's Human Rights Sub-committee, alleging that 23 peasants, one journalist and his partner, had all been murdered in the Bajo Aguán region, between January 2010 and March 2011.
The deaths were facilitated by the "direct involvement of private security guards from some of the local companies who are complicit with police and military officials," the report said.
In some cases it cited "feigned accidents" in which peasants were run over by security guards working for two named palm oil businessmen. In other cases, the farmers were
- simply shot, or "disappeared".
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will be holding a hearing into the report on 24 October, and a delegation of MEPs will be visiting the region between 31 October and 4 November.
But because of a three-year gap between the stakeholder consultation process and the biogas project approvals, the CDM board recently ruled that the project had met the criteria of its mandate.
"We are not investigators of crimes," a board member told EurActiv. "We had to take judgements within our rules – however regretful that may be – and there was not much scope for us to refuse the project. All the consultation procedures precisely had been obeyed.""...
- (I think this means killer 'businessmen,' police, military, politicos still get paid. ed.)
Other human rights workers in the region claim linkages between Honduran state forces and the landowner's militias they protect, which are said to have
- connections to local narco-traffickers.
EU urged to act
Green MEPs have been moved to demand that Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard act now against carbon credits from the Honduran palm oil plantations.
"As a big buyer [of carbon credits], as an EU, we can say that these kind of human rights allegations are so fundamental that we will not allow them to be bought," the Green MEP Bas Eickhout told EurActiv.
"We should throw these Honduran projects out of the system," he added, "as we did with the HFC 23s."
Martin Hession said that he felt "extreme sympathy" for Eickhout's suggestion but was concerned that the EU might not have optimal resources to effectively investigate
- rights violations."...
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10/3/11, "Honduran Deaths Trigger EU Carbon Credit Clash," New American, R. Terrell
"The Honduran farmers plight is frighteningly similar to the situation in Uganda, where government authorities evicted more than 20,000 people and destroyed their homes so another UN-accredited corporation, New Forests Company, could plant trees on their property. Planting those trees would allow New Forests to earn extra ERCs from the UN, which it can turn around and sell on the international market. Such greed is also the motive behind the violence in Honduras, prompting some EP members to call for rescinding Honduran carbon credits. The European Union is more tight-lipped about Uganda, possibly because New Forests Company is backed by the World Bank and the EU. Neither of them have a financial stake in Honduran palm oil."...
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12/8/10, "March to keep World Bank out of climate finance," Climate Justice Now
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1/24/2010, "Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified," UK Daily Mail, David Rose
"The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included
- purely to put political pressure on world leaders.
Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.
‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’"...
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