The trick is to make the scam just complex enough that normal people can't follow which cup the little ball is under, all the while maintaining a delightful patter akin to the magician's misdirection move - "Hey, look over there."
From MarketWatch, October 3/5:
A program to distribute environmentally friendly stoves in developing countries turned into a scheme to steal carbon credits and bilk investors, prosecutors say
Ken Newcombe had spent years building a program to distribute more environmentally friendly cookstoves for free to rural communities in Africa and Southeast Asia.
The benefit for his company, C-Quest Capital, would be the carbon credits it would receive in exchange for reducing the amount of fuel people burned in order to cook food — credits the company could then sell for a profit to big oil companies like BP BP and Shell SHEL .
But when Newcombe tried to ramp up the program, federal prosecutors said in an indictment made public Wednesday, he quickly realized that the stoves wouldn’t deliver the emissions savings he had promised investors. Rather than admit his mistake, he and his partners cooked the books instead, prosecutors said.
“This is a disaster for us,” Newcombe allegedly told his partners when they informed him in late 2021 that the emissions figures were coming in at about half of what they had projected.
Newcombe, who was C-Quest’s chief executive; Jason Steele, the company’s chief operating officer; and Tridip Goswami, who ran the firm’s emissions accounting program, then agreed to fudge the numbers to make them appear closer to the targets they had promised, prosecutors said.
That allowed them to obtain carbon credits worth tens of millions of dollars that they didn’t deserve, prosecutors said. On the basis of the fraudulently gained credits, prosecutors said, C-Quest was able to secure $250 million in funding from an outside investor.
“The alleged actions of the defendants and their co-conspirators risked undermining the integrity of [the global market for carbon credits], which is an important part of the fight against climate change,” said Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York....
....MUCH MORE
Yes. About that "risked undermining the integrity of [the global market for carbon credits]"... Here are links to a few hundred posts warning of the danger of confusing fantasy for reality:
"Dutch reforestation company responsible for massive forest fire in Spain"
Huh.
Irony can be pretty ironic.
More Carbon Credit Shenanigans: The Massachusetts Audubon Society
As the prostitute said: "I got it, I sell it, I still got it."
Or something.
"A Top U.S. Seller of Carbon Offsets Starts Investigating Its Own Projects"
"These Trees Are Not What They Seem: How the Nature Conservancy, the world’s biggest environmental group, became a dealer of meaningless carbon offsets"
"Norway, Sweden, and Finland Evicting Ugandan Farmers For Carbon Credits"
One of the worst approaches to carbon capital there is.
The folks who, fifteen years ago, were likening carbon credits to the old skool Catholic church selling indulgences to absolve rich parishioners of their sins were not that far off. The credits basically allow you to continue doing what you were doing or, as US climate czar John Kerry said when jetting off to Iceland in his private plane to receive a climate change leadership award:
“If you offset your carbon, it’s the only choice for somebody like me
who is traveling the world to win this battle”
"Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’"
Well duh.
You have the pseudo-environmentalists conning the oh-so-fashion-forward corporations with their faux solutions and it's no wonder that fifteen years ago people were already comparing the transaction to the sale of indulgences by the medieval Catholic Church. (see links below)
Or Dorothy's Ruby Slippers: "Click your heels three times" and believe. Or:
And don't get me started on the Chinese refrigerant racket:
For some reason I can't get HFC-23 out of my head. It's a refrigerant chemical that China used to rake in billions from the Kyoto treaty signatories (read German hausfraus).
HFC-23 is 12,000 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2.
They would build plants to make the stuff (as a byproduct of HFC-22) and then offer to shut them down for Kyoto cash. Based on the estimated lifetime production of the plants. Best guess is they netted $6 billion after construction costs.
After a while (years) the carbon credit people caught on and then we saw China's reaction:
And the truly delightful "The Bored Whore of Kyoto" which begins:
Nothing drove home Russia's place in the growing pollution-trading business better than what one carbon finance guy told me at a conference last month sponsored by Gazprom and the World Bank. We were on drink number three or four at the reception when he dropped the green pretense and came clean. "I don't know if climate change is caused by burning coal or sun flares or what," said the Moscow-based carbon cowboy. "And I don't really give a shit. Russia is the most energy inefficient country around, and carbon is the most volatile market ever. There's a lot of opportunity to make money."
