Environmental crimes

Two recent news reports have highlighted the monumental fraud that seems to permeate so much of the 'green' or 'eco-friendly' sphere.

First, from England comes the news that a power-generating wind turbine that a primary school financed three years ago for some £52,730 [about US $82,000], and which spectacularly self-destructed the following year, was in fact a fraudulent scam from start to finish.

An eco-friendly school has been left £55,000 out of pocket after its wind turbine broke - with governors admitting that it was based on "completely unproven technology".

The company that installed the turbine has gone bust leaving the school with a pile of scrap.

The Gorran School in Cornwall revealed its 15 metre turbine in 2008 which was designed to provide it with free electricity - and sell any surplus power to the National Grid.

The system was seen as a green blueprint for clean, sustainable energy for schools nationwide and received grants from various bodies including the EDF power firm.

But soon after being installed the wind turbine became faulty and after a few months seized up - showering the school's playing field with debris.

Since then the school has been locked in a battle with suppliers Proven Energy which has now gone into administration leaving the school with little hope of any money being returned - and a pile of scrap in their field.

Sue Hawken, chair of the school governors, said:"It has been an absolute nightmare from start to finish. "We've put a claim in but realistically I don't expect to get a single penny from this company.

"Unbeknown to us, the 15 kilowatt turbine that Proven Energy installed was completely unproven technology that never really worked."

There's more at the link.

Financial fraud and fake technology are bad enough . . . but what happens when 'green' initiatives lead to mass murder?

The reported killing of 23 Honduran farmers in a dispute with the owners of UN-accredited palm oil plantations in Honduras is forcing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) executive board to reconsider its stakeholder consultation processes.

. . .

Several members of the CDM board have been "personally distressed" by the events in Bajo Aguán, northern Honduras, according to the board's chairman, Martin Hession, who said they had "caused us great difficulties."

"Plainly, the events that have been described are deplorable," he told EurActiv. "There is no excuse for them."

But because they took place after the CDM's stakeholder consultations had been held, and fell outside the board's primary remit to investigate emissions reductions and environmental impacts, it had been powerless to block project registrations.

Another board member told EurActiv that Aguán was a "hot potato," which struck at the heart of the emissions trading scheme's integrity. "We all regret the situation extremely," he said.

At issue are the reported murders of 23 local farmers who tried to recover land, which they say was illegally sold to big palm oil plantations, such as Grupo Dinant, in a country scarred by widespread human rights abuses.

In July, a report by an International Fact Finding Mission was presented to the European Parliament's Human Rights Sub-committee, alleging that 23 peasants, one journalist and his partner, had all been murdered in the Bajo Aguán region, between January 2010 and March 2011.

The deaths were facilitated by the "direct involvement of private security guards from some of the local companies who are complicit with police and military officials," the report said.

In some cases it cited "feigned accidents" in which peasants were run over by security guards working for two named palm oil businessmen. In other cases, the farmers were simply shot, or "disappeared".

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will be holding a hearing into the report on 24 October, and a delegation of MEPs will be visiting the region between 31 October and 4 November.

But because of a three-year gap between the stakeholder consultation process and the biogas project approvals, the CDM board recently ruled that the project had met the criteria of its mandate.

"We are not investigators of crimes," a board member told EurActiv. "We had to take judgements within our rules – however regretful that may be – and there was not much scope for us to refuse the project. All the consultation procedures precisely had been obeyed."

Again, more at the link.

So, farmers are (allegedly) illegally deprived of their land in a scheme to make money off carbon credits; they protest the illegal confiscation; they're slaughtered by those who did it - and the CDM knowingly washes its hands of the crime, and pays the perpetrators anyway? What kind of morality is that? It reminds me of nothing so much as Cain and Abel . . . "Am I my brother's keeper?"

I'm more and more convinced that most so-called 'eco-friendly' technology, schemes and agreements are as ethically bankrupt, morally corrupt and financially ruinous as claims for and about them are pseudo-scientific. Here in the USA, you can add 'lethally dangerous' to that list, thanks to President Obama's new fuel efficiency standards.

Forgive us for being the skunk at the White House party, but nobody there said anything about the most important consequence of President Obama’s widely lauded decision to increase the national Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standard. Namely, that thousands more Americans will die or be grievously injured in auto accidents, thanks to the mandate that new vehicles average no less than 35.5 mpg by 2016. It’s a simple law of physics – weight is the enemy of fuel economy, so designing more fuel-efficient vehicles requires making them lighter. And people die or are injured more seriously when those lighter vehicles collide with the millions of heavier vehicles that will remain on the road for years to come.

Don’t simply take our word for it. Here are the facts, as reported by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in a study published in 2007: “A 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concluded that CAFE’s downsizing effect contributed to between 1,300 and 2,600 deaths in a single representative year, and to 10 times that many serious injuries. A 1989 Brookings-Harvard study estimated that CAFE caused a 14 to 27 percent increase in occupant fatalities, for an annual toll of 2,200 to 3,900 deaths. A 1999 USA Today analysis concluded that, over its lifetime, CAFE had resulted in 46,000 additional fatalities.” The grisly toll that will inevitably follow this latest CAFÉ increase will be a bloody testament to the maxim that government regulation always has unintended consequences.

Environmental extremists who have been pushing for higher CAFÉ standards for decades typically reject worries about increased deaths and injuries by claiming new technologies will make possible improved fuel efficiency without making vehicles less safe. Aside from the intrinsically speculative nature of that claim, however, no technology can repeal the laws of gravity, which dictate that smaller, lighter, less powerful vehicles always get better gas mileage. As long as government mandates higher fuel economy standards by a date certain, automakers will have to make smaller, lighter vehicles.

More at the link, and more information in a subsequent article here.

Welcome to your environmentally friendly overlords. It doesn't matter that you die - what's important is that you die in the service of environmentalism! What's that? You don't want to die just yet? How selfish of you!





Peter