The EU emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), will make a few people very rich, the short haul passengers will have to pay an extra £2 per flight and long haul passengers £8 – on top of the existing air passenger duty. The burden of ETS will grow year on year so that in a decade’s time a family of four flying to Florida will have to fork out £452 in levies. ETS Traders in the city of London are creaming off a fat share of a £300billion-a-year global trade in carbon credits.
Unsurprisingly it was the city which first dreamed up the concept of carbon trading and lobbied hard for it.
Rather than seeing the lobbying for what it was: a sly scheme to line the pockets of a vested interest, Gordon Brown embraced it. he cited the creation of jobs in the city as one of the very reasons for introducing carbon credits.
It isn’t just city traders who spied the opportunity to make a killing. carbon trading has spawned a criminal racket. In 2009 Europol warned that 90 per cent of the trade in carbon credits involved “carousel” fraud, where VAT is claimed back on goods on which it was never paid in the first place. Last year, part of the carbon credit market was closed for three weeks after gangs stole e30million worth of credits.
If we need to give businesses an incentive to cut their carbon emissions there is a simple way to do it: place an extra tax on fossil fuel and use the money to give grants to companies to install greener technology.
But there would be no money in that for the city. With the ETS we are all being made to pay a very heavy price for what is just a get-rich-quick scheme for bankers and criminals.
By Ross Clark, Sunday Express & Flyvertosset
Gravity always wins!