Wednesday - January 13, 2010

Taxing the very air you breath

Europe’s flagship carbon trading scheme suffered a blow today as the Danish government was forced to rush an emergency law through parliament to clamp down on a virulent form of VAT fraud.

On the eve of the Copenhagen climate talks, which will attract world attention to emissions trading schemes, police and tax investigators across Europe are believed to be investigating hundreds of millions of euros worth of fraud involving carbon quotas originating in Denmark.

Since British, French and Dutch governments took similar action in the summer, much of the “carousel” fraud involving carbon credits moved to Denmark, where registration of carbon quotas for the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is easy and a VAT rate of 25% makes the fraud attractive to international criminals.

Experts said today that Copenhagen had long been an accident waiting to happen in terms of carousel fraud.

Richard Ainsworth, professor of VAT policy at Boston University in the US said: “It is extremely surprising that after the French, British and Dutch had to move against this fraud in the summer that the Danes did not act more quickly, especially with the climate summit about to start.”

The Danish government today said it did not know how much money it had lost to the fraud but the number is likely to run into hundreds of millions – if not billions – of kroner.

The fraud occurs when a trader of carbon credits in one EU country buys some from another country free of VAT, then sells them on, charging the VAT to the buyer. The seller then disappears without handing the VAT to the taxman.

Some criminals re-export the credits, reclaiming VAT as they do so, then re-import them. They can do this repeatedly, reclaiming VAT many times, hence the “carousel” label.

Oh, it is to laugh. The governments are crying because they’ve been bilked out of their tax bite by savvy crooks who exploited holes in the government’s own rules that were written to regulate a total vaporware con job invented by the government. Serves them right.

The whole carbon credits concept is a load of crap. It does exactly nothing to limit CO₂ emissions on a world-wide basis. At the very best all it does is pump money to turd world tyrannies while fattening government coffers along the way. It’s a scam. It’s a con. A shell game. Dump it.

A commenter at WUWT explains how it works:

1. (i) charging people for trading in thin air, then
2. (ii) not actually giving them the air, but selling them virtual air, then
3. (iii) taxing them on this virtual air, and
4. (iv)complaining that those taxes, paid for by the seller, aren’t being collected, while
5. (v) letting them believe that spending this money will help save the planet!

There is no man-made climate change. Climate changes all the time and it always has. We are currently just barely out of a cooling cycle. New research shows that micro-cycles of heating and cooling run in 30 year periods. Real climate change can only be measured in terms of geologic time. 10 or 20 years does not make a trend, only a blip. It’s time to give Chicken Little a gag order.

The earth is not a closed system; it is not a greenhouse. Excess heat goes off into space. So does excess gas, but apparently bull shit sticks around forever.

Carbon dioxide levels can increase or decrease by natural variations and have a nearly imperceptible impact on global temperatures. These variations are at best an effect of temperature change, not a cause. More likely there is no correlation at all.

The human contribution to carbon dioxide is negligible, even when “bovine methane” is part of the human scorecard. Plants create thousands of times more of it than we do.

If you really want to lower the amount of CO₂ then breed more shellfish. Clamshells bind up lots of the stuff.

The whole Value Added Tax, or VAT, is itself a Ponzi scheme. Dump it.



h/t to Watts Up With That

Posted by Drew458     on 01/13/2010 at 09:24 AM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • Crime •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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