Four caged in UK after cyber-heist swipes €7m in EU carbon credits Four men were jailed in the UK this week following the theft of millions of pounds in carbon-emission credits. The gang was convicted for their part in an operation that stole half a million credits – valued at €7m (£5m) at the time – from the Czech Republic’s carbon-emission registry back in January 2011. European carbon- …
The only real heist is the one perpetrated against the-rest-of-us who are expected to fund this whole racket in 'carbon credits' through higher prices and higher taxes.
The very idea is akin to the Papal Indulgences that were traded in the middle-ages: someone in power invents a sin, while at the same time selling doctrinally-approved permits-to-sin and pocketing the cash.
What we have with 'carbon credits' is, so to speak, a "Sin of Emission".
Emitting pollutants isn't cost free, but the cost is not borne by the emitter*. By taxing emissions, the cost is borne by the emitter, not by society as a whole.
If you buy your electricity from a supplier who produces it from burning coal, then your prices will be higher.
On the other hand, if you were to buy them from a carbon-neutral producer, the taxes would not apply. This way, the cost to society (unless you deny that anthropogenic climate change exists, in which case you are a moron), is borne by those causing it.
If the price + tax of your electricity is more than price - subsidy of 'greener' electricity (wind, solar, wave, nuclear, etc.) then people will buy the cheaper electricity, and we won't all be so screwed, so soon.
The alternative is to have to pay billions from the public purse to mitigate the effects of climate change post-facto, which will be MUCH more expensive, for everybody. The odds are that this will happen anyway, because people are short-sighted, especially politicians who cannot see past the next election.
*This is known as an externality. For example, if you draw your drinking water from a river, and I dump raw sewerage into it upstream, I don't bear the costs of making that water safe to drink. It is, to my eyes, cost free, and any cost to me is an 'externality'. From your perspective, and that of everyone downstream, the cost is very much there, and probably many times greater than it would have been for me to dispose of my sewerage properly.
"The only real heist is the one perpetrated against the-rest-of-us"
Including the allowance of purchasing voluntary carbon credits with private pension pot funds for a huge markup.
Not only that, but if you were unlucky enough to be conned into buying them (they're practically worthless - just try and sell them!) there are also boiler room scams out there ready to pounce on anyone who is desperate to sell them to try and claw back some of their money.
Doing some research on it I was amazed at the scale of the rip-offs and there are people out there who are close to retirement that lost *everything*.
They are seriously hazardous to your pension health and is a national scandal that rivals the banks playing roulette with poison risk bundles.
"And how much did we pay to bring the case to court and then again the costs of keeping these criminals locked up ?"
I hope you were paying attention, and saw that they were UK residents and were prosecuted under UK laws?
At a guess, a complex cross border fraud trial, and crown court case, probably around a million quid (fully consistent with SFO data on average cost of a fraud trial, of £839k two years ago.
There's 16 and a half man years of porridge, although in line with the ridiculous Home Office guidelines the scum will be out after serving half of that. At £31k per prisoner per year (Home Office data), that's a further £260k odd.
Point of order.
Please can all "journalists" stop using the word "caged" (so I'm not jsut getting a John here). We haven't caged anyone for over two hundred years when the Victorian prisons were built with stone walls and solid steel doors.
And besides, it just makes you sound like a hack from The Sun, not a respected technical author.
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