Carbon Trading Halted After EU Exchange Is Hacked 228
chicksdaddy writes "The European Commission (EC) suspended trading in carbon credits on Wednesday after unknown hackers compromised the accounts of Czech traders and siphoned off around $38 million, Threatpost reports. EU countries including Estonia, Austria, The Czech Republic, Poland and France began closing their carbon trading registries yesterday after learning that carbon allowances had been siphoned from the account of the Czech based register. A notice posted on the Web site of the Czech based registry said that it was 'not accessible for technical reasons' on Thursday and the EC issued an order to cease spot trading until January 26 so that it can sort out what appears to be chronic security lapses within the system."
Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN with? (Score:4, Insightful)
I always assumed this whole silly emissions trading business was just one big scam already.
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Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm surprised people/companies were actually seriously putting any type of serious money into this crap.
Are there some countries that are actually mandating carbon credits, etc? I mean, if not by law, why would anyone take part in this scam, unless they were on the money making side?
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider that people buy and sell goods and services in WoW for actual money.
Also, these kinds of markets is the "cure-all" of classical economist orthodoxy.
And as long as there is a chance to make a profit on it, someone will put money into it.
In the end, it is no different from the recent CDOs and such. It is all numbers being traded via computers...
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, if not by law, why would anyone take part in this scam, unless they were on the money making side?
Guilt? Good public relations? There are plenty of reasons. Penn and Teller did a decent episode on it - they exposed some of the "carbon credit" companies for the scams that they are, and they also sent out a woman to randomly approach people doing their shopping, "assess" their purchases for carbon emissions (by randomly throwing out numbers) and then ask them to pay for the environmental damage. Most people seemed glad to fork over the cash.
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WOW!! REally? Ok..I'm gonna have to go look for these video
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yes
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Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:4, Insightful)
What is it with all the global warming deniers?
What's a "global warming denier"? Is that like holocaust deniers? Is this some group of anti-Semitic racists? Or is denying that genocidal events in history ever happened now no worse than denying a vague prediction of events in some future probability?
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:4, Informative)
Denying Climate Change is exactly like denying that you have cancer when your oncologist tells you that you do. It's easier on yourself to consider this reaction as scepticism, although you know that if you were really sceptical you would seek a second opinion rather than simply going home and ignoring the symptoms.
Understanding this reaction as denial helps the rest of us to see that these people are not insane, not necessarily dumb, and not necessarily evil - it is just taking them a little longer to work through the cognitive coping process. Also the term is a useful counter to the labelling of this reaction as scepticism - a term used deliberately to imply that it is the role of those who accept climate change to convince those who do not (a obviously absurd notion, when stated explicitly, which is why that rarely happens).
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It is easier to force/guilt/... China and India into carbon trading if the Western world is already doing it. In my view Cap-and-trade is faulty, because it allows a default level of free pollution. If EVERYONE was fairly and equally taxed for their CO2 (and other greenhouse gas or pollutant) emissions and then the revenue from these taxes would be spent exclusively on cleaning up that pollution (most likely by purchasing carbon credits from carbon-negative businesses), then it would be fair. The pointis th
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That movie was hilarious. Oh, wait, you weren't talking about "Men in Tights"? Never mind.
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Yes it is a scam. The very idea of "paying for the right to pollute" is simply bad and wrong. What they should be paying for is the cost of cleaning up and compensating everyone who has been damaged by their pollution. (Yes, I am aware of standard arguments such as "resulting in higher unemployment" and "passing the cost onto you, the customer" and all that crap. That's why markets where supply and demand do not apply require regulation. Such markets include utilities, medical/healthcare and any other
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Yes it is a scam. The very idea of "paying for the right to pollute" is simply bad and wrong.
what do think an EPA permit is? It is actually a permit to emit pollution to the current standards. It is not a permit that stops you from polluting.
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But that's like focusing on fire suppression over fire avoidance. What you ultimately want is a system that optimizes the cost/benefit analysis (where cost and benefit can go far beyond calculating how much material was destroyed in a fire, and how much it cost to put out). There's a reason there are fire codes for buildings in fire areas: if you can prevent a house from catching on fire rather than putting it out, it is very likely that the overall cost to society is lower.
The same idea is behind carbon tr
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Actually the solar panels do pay back their investment just fine. Takes about 8-10 years. Stop with the FUD already.
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Because it was a government program, because it seems like a political cop out rather than dealing with the problem, because it focused on making money change hands between buisiness people rather than directly reducing carbon emissions, and / or because you're one of those people who trust oil and gas lobbyists rather than scientists?
I mean, I always assume that if I have doubts on something, I should explain myself. I guess the mods today like baseless skepticism though, so I'll pander to that:
For every
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Apparently you and I have completely different mechanisms for drawing conclusions.
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Apparently you and I have completely different mechanisms for drawing conclusions.
Let me guess, one of you starts from basic propositions and works logically towards conclusions, the other one draws conclusions from his gut reaction and reasons backwards to find propositions that support the foregone conclusion. Yeah. That's it.
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:4, Funny)
Congratulations! You've won $38MM in carbon credits!
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:4, Funny)
Excellent! Tacos al carbon for everybody!
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:4, Funny)
Congratulations! You've won $38MM in carbon credits!
Sorry, guess he didn't after all. The Czech bounced.
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You should read more about the subject, and then you'd realise it isn't.
What, pray tell, should we be reading?
In theory, carbon trading is a good idea. But the way it is actually implemented in Europe, and the way it is likely to be implement in the USA, are scams. The credits should be auctioned, not handed out to politically connected corporations. The credits should be scarce enough so they actually mean something.
But it would be much simpler and effective to just have a carbon tax, paid at the point of extraction or import.
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"Good morning, Mrs. ShanghiaBill, congratulations on your new baby. What's his name? By the way, we caclulate that he will produce X tons of CO2 during his lifetime, so since you are the 'point of extraction' for him, we are taxing you $45,000 to cover his CO2 emissions. And another $340,543 to cover his uric acid production that is going to pollute the local water system. Net 30, 5% penalty for
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Urea is a key component in clean diesel engines. If we're going to this level, I'm pretty sure that the output of urea is going to cover his CO2 production.
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Urea is a key component in clean diesel engines.
brb, pissing on my truck engine.
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire cap and trade scheme is wrong. Companies should not be permitted to purchase "credits" from companies that are in compliance.
Those companies that are in compliance are following the law, not doing anything special.
Those companies who continue to exceed carbon emission standards should be fined progressively to the point that they achieve zero profit until they rectify the problem.
You either follow the law or you don't.
Cap and Trade is a farce. Perhaps I can purchase some "Non-meth dealer credits" and then sell meth without consequence.
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:5, Informative)
Companies should not be permitted to purchase "credits" from companies that are in compliance.
"Compliance" is whether or not you are producing more carbon dioxide than allowed by the number of credits you hold. If a company pollutes more, but purchases the appropriate amount of credits, then they are in compliance, are following the law, etc. Sounds to me like you don't understand the point of cap and trade. They are an economically sound way to reduce overall pollution amounts, in other words, they address directly what pollution regulation tries to do indirectly. That is, cap net pollution from the entire system rather than capping individually pollution from each source.
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Twisting grammar to fit the scheme doesn't make it any more sound.
There is a standard to be met. You meet it or pay the consequences. Anything else is lawyerly gibberish.
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Now, there are issues with the way it's being handled at present, but if you're saying that there's something fundamentally wrong in letting companies buy
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Twisting grammar to fit the scheme doesn't make it any more sound.
No grammar or semantics were twisted in the making of my post. You were claiming things that weren't true. I merely corrected your mistakes.
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Now make the same argument about gasoline:
Companies should not be permitted to purchase gasoline from other companies that have it. Those companies that use less than their government alloted ration are in compliance. Those companies who use more gasoline are fined. You either follow the law or you don't. Commerce is a farce. If we allow commerce to happen, next people will be using it to buy and sell illicit drugs.
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You should read more about the subject, and then you'd realise it isn't.
Indeed. It's more about economic self-mutilation. There are three warning signs: 1) Advocates for carbon trading are upset because carbon emission behavior not changed (market's goal is to ensure carbon emission costs are accounted for by carbon emitters, not to change behavior); 2) Carbon markets are poorly designed in Europe due to hard caps and the flaws have been known since early on (hard caps mean there is a sudden change from a very elastic supply of carbon credits to a very inelastic supply, instead
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1) The point of it is to change behavior, had the market not been flooded with credits there would have been behavior change, just on a net basis not for every company.
3) You're full of it if you're suggesting that there isn't any economic justification for it. The justification for it is that the companies that can hit lower targets the most efficiently get a little something for their trouble, encouraging research and for companies to hit more stringent targets. The alternativ
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The point of it is to change behavior,
No need for citation here when you grant the point.
3) You're full of it if you're suggesting that there isn't any economic justification for it. The justification for it is that the companies that can hit lower targets the most efficiently get a little something for their trouble, encouraging research and for companies to hit more stringent targets. The alternative is setting tough limits on everybody whether or not it's realistic.
Again, I note that no economic justification has been given for carbon dioxide emission reduction. Another alternative is no restrictions on carbon dioxide emission limits.
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You should read more about the subject, and then you'd realise it isn't.
Please go to this site [cheatneutral.com] and let me know how your spouse feels about it.
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We did just that with SOx emissions and it worked. Mind you they also reduced the total allowable each year. Also the only people who could sell credits were those who were reducing their own emissions compared to past years.
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The difference is that SOx is an actual poison and CO2 is the natural product of all animal life on the planet and is needed by the plant life. (With the exception of those few sulfur eaters down at the bottom of the ocean near the hydrothermal vents.) Other than that small difference, there is no difference at all between SOx and COx emissions.
I wonder if the guys who stole the credits are thinking they can sell them on the black market to europeans who
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Yes, because CO2 in the atmosphere has absolutely not drawback whatsoever, regardless of its concentration. Newsflash: everything and nothing is poisonous, once you disregard quantities and way of administration. That's what matters. Any regulation of any activity or product takes into account quantity and distribution.
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The difference in toxicity is a well known fact. The difference in function of the two gases is a well-known fact.
Then stop arguing like they are identical.
And that's why regulating CO2 the same way you do SO2 is stupid.
And that's why they're subjected to different regulations.
In any case, the regulation of CO2 has nothing to do with quantity and distribution, it has everything to do with how much money can be made and how much power can be shifted where the regulators want it to wind up.
pics or GTFO. You're ascribing motivation to people you don't know. I'd like some proof, thank you.
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:5, Informative)
You mean paying another group to reduce pollution so you can pollute isn't a scam? It's a shell game whose goal isn't to improve things just to maintain the status quo. It's a pointless exercise. Offer companies tax credits to reduce emissions and fine them for exceeding but letting them pay to pollute is a joke.
I have a headache and I'm quite tired, so feel free to correct me if any of my understanding of the subject is wrong here.
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As I understand it, the basic concept is thus (shown via a hypothetical example):
1) The nation of Countrystan decides that there will be no more than 1,000 tons of carbon exhausted per year, by law, from certain industries.
2) Each business within the industry is allocated a certain number of "carbon credits" that effectively cap how much bad stuff they can spew into the air.
3) Since the total number of credits is a fixed number, any business that doesn't want to be hit with major fines will try to stay under their credits.
4) Businesses that are way below their credits can sell other businesses their credits. Businesses that may exceed their cap can purchase credits from other businesses, but the total number of credits (and thus the total amount of pollution) out there doesn't increase in any way.
5) Due to 4, there are economic incentives to reduce carbon output. Heavy polluters would likely need to buy extra credits, thereby incurring a cost that would offset any financial benefits of lackadaisical pollution control. Light (or non) polluters would (rather than a cost) receive a gain in revenue by selling their allotted credits to businesses that can't keep pace. Therefore, businesses stand to lose money if they pollute and gain money if they cut back on pollution, thereby providing the best kind of incentive (economic) for businesses to get their pollution under control.
6) Eventually, more businesses would have a surplus of credits that no one needs to buy. At this point, I imagine the total number of credits in circulation could be reduced.
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So, this is how I roughly understand the whole carbon credits thing is supposed to work. Am I right here? And does the real-world application work like this model, or is it rife with corruption, bureaucracy, and an inability to accomplish its stated goals like every other government project? Have their been any studies on the effectiveness of such a system?
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And this is how I know that the folks who came up with this scheme failed high school economics. The mere fact that you can make money selling credits does not inherently provide any incentive to reduce pollution. It only provides incentive to do so if the amount you make by selling those credits exceeds the amount it would cost you to update your equipment to produce less emissions.
Here's the catch: if it would cost you less to update yo
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the idea of cap and trade is that we need to drasticly cut emissions. The problem is it is hard to come up with a fair way for requiring all of the major polluters to cut emissions. The hope with "cap and trade" it that the free market can be used to fine-tune the original political decisions. If one major emitter finds it is prohibitively expensive to cut emissions because they are actually increasing production, they can buy credits on the carbon market. The hope is that industries with little growth may be able to accelerate equipment upgrades with funds from those industries growing faster than equipment upgrades help.
Of course, until every major government implements strong carbon caps, the carbon market is a shell game. Currently here in Canada they are still talking about "intensity-based targets"; that is to say: carbon releases are allowed to increase as long as there is economic growth. There is also the issue of using hard-to-measure things as "carbon sinks" such as forests. If a framer has a small forest they are being paid credits for; are the expected to pay back all that money if the forest burns down, releasing a lot of carbon?
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assuming that it's equally easy for all companies to cut down on carbon emission, and that the total carbon credit can't be altered. Assume that the number of credits is inadequate to allow all companies to do all the carbon emission they want. Somebody's going to have to cut down in this case, which is the desired outcome.
Now, suppose that there's one company that finds it cheap and one that finds it expensive. The cheap one will cut down and sell its carbon credits to the expensive company. The economy is therefore reducing carbon emissions to the set limit in the most economical way possible. As time goes on, the number of carbon credits can be reduced.
There's lots of complications, but overall it's an economically valid approach.
Re:Wait, carbon trading wasn't a scam to BEGIN wit (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the catch: if it would cost you less to update your equipment to produce less emissions, it would also probably cost your buyer less to upgrade their equipment than it would cost to buy the credit, so they will not buy the credit.
This is only true if production is occuring in the same way. For example it may be cheaper for a steel mill to support expansion by investing (purchasing credits) making a plastic manufacturer more efficient.
Thus, the only possible long-term effect of cap and trade is that companies who would have upgraded anyway will do so, but will now be able to sell their credits, allowing other companies to produce more pollution than they would have been able to produce under a strict system of caps.
Currently industries can expand without regards to environmental impact since there is little cost impact. Creating a cap sets a limit to how much pollution can be released. The only way for an industry to expand is to become more efficient, or to offset its output elsewhere in the economy. The overall result is net pollution remains the same or is reduced.
It's not sustainable to have uncontrolled growth ignoring the negative environmental effects. Not that cap & trade is perfect, but it does provide market flexibility that traditional government controls don't have.
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Given that there's no actual regulation, you can do whatever the hell you want. Next time someone you know goes on a vacation, tell them you'll stay at home if they pay you to offset their carbon emissions :) Given the current setup, the whole thing is completely meaningless, and plenty of companies have been raking in money without actually doing anything.
The question I have is (Score:2, Funny)
It wasn't me (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't take Czechs.
Gah, phew, that one stunk! Somebody open a window!
Whoever modded you 'Troll' is obviously missing his/her punny bone...
How do you even liquidate (Score:3, Interesting)
How does one liquidate siphoned carbon credits? Do they hold a black market value?
Re:How do you even liquidate (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How do you even liquidate (Score:4, Informative)
What a beautiful scam, declare a gas absolutely essential to life on the earth a poisonous taxable thing.
A few points:
* CO2 is, in fact, poisonous (well, toxic).
* CO2 emissions restrictions have nothing to do with whether CO2 is poisonous, since obviously it's not poisonous at atmospheric concentrations.
* "Essential to life" and "poisonous" (toxic) are not mutually exclusive. Besides carbon dioxide, there's oxygen and quite a few metals, to say nothing of fancier things like fat-soluble vitamins.
* "Essential to life" and "problematic in sufficiently large quantities" aren't mutually exclusive, either. Water comes to mind.
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* CO2 is, in fact, poisonous (well, toxic).
Fact: Oxygen is, in fact, poisonous.
Fact: Water is, in fact, poisonous.
Fact: Every god damn substance on earth is, in fact, poisonous.
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Good thing you read down to bullet points 3 and 4. :P
Oxygen is toxic. To my knowledge, water is not really toxic, although too much water can certainly be a problem.
To be fair, whether something is a poison depends on what definition you're using. If Paracelsus says everything is a poison, it can't be too far off the mark.
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My comment defining it as poisonous has to do with its recent definition as a pollutant to be regulated.
That would make sense, if only pollutants and poisons were the same thing.
It's a very minor greenhouse gas at the minute concentrations found in the atmosphere, of no import compared to the effects of the number one greenhouse gas on planet earth, which is of course water vapor.
CO2 is about 10% of the total greenhouse effect, very roughly. Human-produced CO2 is about a quarter of it, also roughly. The greenhouse effect is responsible for about 33 C of Earth's temperature. So human-produced CO2 is, roughly, 1 C of temperature, which is a fairly substantial perturbation.
That something is a small part of the whole does not mean that its ability to perturb the system is also small.
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I realize that it's popular amongst libertarians to cry bloody murder whenever the government does something, but give me a break. Unless you can propose a way of your carbon emissions not affecting everybody else, you kind of have to j
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There is a scam, and it's that the pro-market solutions camp has managed to convince governments we can trade our way out of this mess. You're absolutely right that there are huge amounts of money being made off of false solutions. However, there is absolutely no doubt about one thing: they are false solutions to a real problem.
As for the rest of your drivel, you either have no understanding of the science, are being paid to astro-turf, or (as I suspect is actually the case for most people that spout off yo
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The even bigger scam is the middleman who gets all the commissions.
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I KNEW I should have stayed a finance major. I thought the money would be in programming...damn.
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Awww, the widdle carbon twaders faw down go boom (Score:2, Funny)
A sense of schadenfreude without the usual guilt is giving a bounce to my steps. Cap-and-traders got their noses bloodied, tra-la-la-la-la!
i'm confused (Score:2)
how do they deliver $38 million worth of coal ash to the hackers? i hope the hackers live near a rail line so they can take delivery of what they siphoned off
Isn't this kind of thing impossible to steal (Score:3)
1. They stole the 'carbon credits', not electronic cash.
2. You can't legally sell them anywhere except via the exchange.
3. The exchange tracks all legal sales.
4. Therefore, can't the government require the exchange to show all legal sales and invalidate the unapproved sales?
Isn't that the entire value of using the exchange? To track the sales of said credits?
Assuming that they have already used the exchange to sell the the fraudlenty exchanged credits, is it not a relatively easy matter to find the account that sold the stolen carbon credits and force them to buy them back?
This assumes of course that it was actually carbon credits that were stolen instead of cash stolen from un-authorized trades (in which case, the article needs to be re-written, removing the sensational crap)
Re:Isn't this kind of thing impossible to steal (Score:4, Informative)
They may have sold the credits already. The WSJ piece [wsj.com] I submitted about this story has more details:
"It started when an anonymous caller on Tuesday morning told Czech State Police that explosives had been placed at the offices of OTE AS, a private company that manages the Czech Republic's national registry. The police evacuated the registry for five hours.
During that time, the computer network wasn't monitored, OTE officials said. Hackers stole 475,000 allowances, worth 7 million, from a company called Blackstone Global Ventures, an environmental consultancy that trades carbon credits for industrial companies.
The thieves changed account-ownership information and executed illegal trades, said Nikos Tornikidis, a portfolio manager at Blackstone Global Ventures."
My guess is that they executed the trades and siphoned the proceeds off to a bank account somewhere.
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But some idiot decided that it would be a bigger news story if they lied and claimed they stole the carbon credits.
Cancel the illegal trades, then go through all the normal procedures that you deal with when someone convinces a financial organization to give out cash to people that were not authorized to receive it.
If there's money to be made... (Score:2)
If there's money to be made, assume there will be people who don't want to actually do the work to get the money... and that they'll circumvent rules, regulations, laws, treaties, barriers (physical and digital) to get to that money. Moreover, it's safe to assume that if there's a consistent, reliable flow of money, that these dishonest or disingenuous people will plant themselves or others in the system to make the siphoning easier.
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Theory colliding with reality (Score:3)
While carbon credits may sound like a good idea in theory, I had assumed from the start that they were doomed to fail in practice. How do you verify that a company that sells credits has really reduced their own carbon footprint by the requisite amount? It just seems too easy to game the system.
I hadn't considered the possibility of cyber-criminals simply stealing the credits outright; that makes matters even worse!
Shouldn't these credits be individually traceable, so that the stolen ones can simply be voided and re-issued? If not, then someone really f**ked up the implementation of this system.
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How do you verify that a company that sells credits has really reduced their own carbon footprint by the requisite amount?
Same way you determine whether or not they're within the limits in an emissions-cap system, I suppose. Probably roughly the same way they're within environmental pollution regulations.
I'm not saying it's necessarily easy, but it's a problem shared by all systems for reducing emissions.
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Probably roughly the same way they're within environmental pollution regulations.
I'd be willing to bet that for each instance where someone gets caught flouting environmental pollution regulations, there are at least three more who are getting away with it. Seems to me the temptation to cheat the carbon trading system would be even stronger, since it is essentially "free money".
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Probably.
$7 million, not $38 million (Score:5, Informative)
The European Commission (EC) suspended trading in carbon credits on Wednesday after unknown hackers compromised the accounts of Czech traders and siphoned off around $38 million
According to Wall street journal [wsj.com] (original poster yuna49 [slashdot.org]) the latest theft was $7 million and the $38 million (0.02% of the market) is the total of the permits missing in action.
All we need to know about carbon credits (Score:2)
I haven't done a lick of descent research into them, but they always sounded like a silly, ineffective idea. What a surprise to find out that there's a Wall Street trading angle on the whole thing...
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"Carbon pollution" is about as valid a phrase as "pigeon antennae."
The thing that costs the economy is people fabricating global catastrophes that aren't there, and legislating "solutions" to false problems in order to steal.
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Or in order to promote investment in the green energy companies they're invested in [nytimes.com].
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Yet more proof that pollution has a VALUE and is worth MONEY.
Maybe we should switch our currency to the carbon standard, then.
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They're guilt removers. People can buy carbon credits to offset their overuse of natural resources and pollution of the air (like Al Gore). This makes them a better person overall, and allows them to continue to tell other people they should all be riding bicycles while they fly around in private jets (like Al Gore).
Or something like that.
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Now whether or not carbon credits are an accurate reflection of how much carbon is locked up vs expelled, however, is a whole other issue.
Re:The what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do people always have to bring up Al Gore? He may or may not be a hypocrite. Either way, it matters very little compared to climate change.
If your doctor tells you that you have lung cancer and need surgery, only an idiot would focus on the fact that your doctor smokes and is a hypocrite, and use that as an excuse to keep smoking and not get the scary and painful surgery.
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If your doctor tells you that you have lung cancer and need surgery, only an idiot would focus on the fact that your doctor smokes and is a hypocrite, and use that as an excuse to keep smoking and not get the scary and painful surgery.
Wrong analogy. The analogy is that the doctor tells you not to smoke (in a condescending and moralizing way) so you don't get lung cancer, and then goes outside and smokes.
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Some have even studied the links between second-hand smoke and cancer.
I invite you to go look it up.
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I already have, have you?
There isn't a single piece of hard evidence that the two are linked. Again, very qualified opinions by doctors who have studied the issue lead to the belief, and it's probably true.
However, second hand smoke is a different story altogether.
This [medicalnewstoday.com] article from Medical News Today says it's a widely accepted notion and goes on to say more research is needed.
This [cancer.org] article from Cancer.org says there is strong evidence that the two are linked, and that more research is needed.
In 2006 the UK
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I don't mean to be too insulting
Always means you are about to be insulting.
No I'm not a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. But thank you for the demeaning comment.
I am a global warming denyist though, but you worded that with what appears to be spefic intent. I understand climate change and that the real argument is how much impact people actually have on the change. I believe we do have an impact, but also that long before man climate changed as well.
My attempt was to show that there is more to the story. Again, George Burns lived to 100, whil
Re:The what? (Score:5, Informative)
Entirely different; that's a carbon offset.
Carbon credits are part of cap-and-trade, in which CO2-producing industrial concerns have their CO2 production limited by law. Entities that are below their limit can essentially sell the difference between their limit and their actual CO2 emissions to other entities (who presumably would otherwise be above their limit).
If CO2 emissions were simply capped by law, industrial concerns would all have to make CO2 emissions reductions regardless of the cost-effectiveness of doing so. Adding the "and trade" component means that it becomes economically advantageous to make reductions wherever it is the most cost-effective. Since CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't care where it comes from, this means that CO2 emissions are reduced more for lower cost than with a cap-only system.
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They're essentially the same thing, though one is for Sheryl Crow while the other is for DuPont.
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The only way in which they are related is that both deal with carbon dioxide emissions.
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Not really.
They both allow for those who overuse to take measures to make up for it. That means they both really allow people to ignore the fact that they're being destructive.
The differences are:
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Right. And in order to comply with the standards, companies will have to spend money on infrastructure (generally a good thing).
And how does the company "make money" by not spewing CO2? By selling the leftover credits to companies who went over the limit.
and punishing companies that don't.
Which is really passing the costs along to customers.
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Believe me, I have plenty that I can criticize Al Gore for, but the notion that people in positions of great power are hypocrites if they don't ride the bus to work is ridiculous. The CEO of a company's time is probably literally worth $1Million/hour. Do we want him spending half is day rubbing shoulders with the public because of the negligible carbon footprint difference from his plane ride?
I thought the criticism of all the auto industry CEOs for not DRIVING to their Congressional hearing was equally w
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There are more economical ways to travel than by private jet that still offer privacy.
Ignoring that, how about his multiple large houses and their enormous electricity bills?
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/05/03/stunning-pictures-al-gores-new-9-million-mansion-media-totally-ignore [newsbusters.org]
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/gorehome.asp [snopes.com]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/17/photos-al-goree-new-8875_n_579286.html#s91230&title=undefined [huffingtonpost.com]
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/05/exclusive-estima [blogspot.com]
Re: (Score:2)
If you lower the total each year it could actually even work.
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Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No, this can't stand.... (Score:2)
The GOVERNMENT created the business model. Enron just happened to be ONE of the companies that participated in that business model. You can hate Enron for all the illegal stuff they did (that's fair) but you hating them because they "thought up the business" or because it's their "business model" is just....well....naive.
I get tired of these "tail wagging the dog" statements like you just made. No private company, even Enron,
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Enron entered a market that was designed to facilitate transactions between energy companies in a way that added value to what was going on. Enron figured out how to extract value from that market rather than add value. What happened to Enron is what happens whenever someone tries to make money by extr
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for posting that.