There is every reason to suspect that fraud is a major force in climate politics. We are talking about intrusive, state-enforced measures that aim above all to make energy more expensive and thereby to suppress demand. Consumers must pay taxes and fund subsidies to the tune of untold billions of Euros, in the absence of any concrete achievable goals or even the expectation that doing so will change anything. If we are not being ripped off here, it is only because our betters are too stupid to figure out how to manage it.
Imagine a different universe – one where anthropogenic global warming is real, but where the goal of policy is not to reduce emissions but to address their immediate consequences. (For the sake of argument, we will say that in this universe there is a direct line of causation between emissions and things like sea level rise and increased flooding.) While carbon taxes might still exist in this universe, their purpose would be to ameliorate direct, observable problems, and two things would be different. First, politicians would be motivated not to maximise the alleged environmental consequences of emissions, but to define them as strictly and minimally as possible, lest they assume responsibility for too much of the weather. Second, fraud would be much harder to conceal, because you would be paying for real things and for real, observable results. You would not just be suppressing demand for the hell of it.
Alas, that is not the world we live in. Increasingly our governments prefer to address only insoluble, intractable problems, in maximally interventionist fashion. Restraint and rationality may be good for taxpayers, but these virtues place clear limits on the funding, career opportunities and powers of the technocracy, and so our elites prefer vices instead. We have an irrational politics conducted for the personal benefit of insiders. And, I suspect, we have a lot of corruption and fraud – some of it open and fully legal, some of it rather more hidden and nefarious.
All of that is prologue to this amazing story, about rampant fraud with respect to so-called “Upstream Emissions Reductions,” or UER, in Germany.
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Author: eugyppius
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