June 02, 2007

Lies, damned lies and carbon credits

FT
Europe furious at US climate call
A spokesman for Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor and current G8 president, said Germany’s stance that climate talks should take place within the United Nations was “non-negotiable”.
Guardian
Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved
The [Clean Development Mechanism] is one of two global markets which have been set up in the wake of the Kyoto climate summit in 1997. Both finally started work in January 2005. Although both were launched with the claim that they would reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, evidence collected by the Guardian suggests that thus far, both markets have earned fortunes for speculators and for some of the companies which produce most greenhouse gases and yet, through a combination of teething troubles and multiple forms of malpractice and possibly fraud, they have delivered little or no benefit for the environment.

While the [Clean Development Mechanism] is run under the umbrella of the UN, the second market is overseen by the European commission.
The Guardian investigation is rich with comic detail of the brazen scams. God knows how much the envirocrats are skimming off the top. It all comes from you and me, folks, so smile while you're being shafted by these smug, moralising, gormless, elitist, manipulative, anti-scientific, parasitic, 3-pool heating, Stalinist twerps.

Kudos to The Grauniad for giving scoffers like me the material to berate their soulmates.

You read it here second

A funny blog is The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs ("Dude, I invented the friggin iPod. Have you heard of it?"). At the recent, wonderful reminiscence orgy of Jobs and Bill Gates, Gates opened with the line "First I want to clarify, I'm not Fake Steve Jobs" and raised the blog's profile a couple of notches to 50,000 visitors the next day.

So who is Fake Steve if he's not Bill Gates? The answer may be here and I'm more than half convinced despite the denial.