Talkshop readers may remember a damning report by UBS about the billions of public money lost in the ETS carbon trading system. It calculated that if the money had been invested in modernising the European power generation fleet, CO2 could have been cut by 40% (and generate a huge number of high quality jobs). EU emissions rose 1.8% last year.
Despite all the recent turmoil over the UK steel industry and meetings in Brussels today, the reality is that the European Union has actually been subsidising the Chinese steel industry for years, in payments hidden amongst its efforts to combat Climate Change.
Using complex methods of carbon credits and carbon offsets, the EU devised rules on climate change ended up paying Chinese steel manufacturers billions to upgrade their steel mills and other energy intensive industry.
According to the analysis company, European Insights, almost €1.5 billion was paid to over 90 steel plants in China with the purpose of modernising them to consume less energy, and making the plants more efficient. Taken with the downturn in Chinese trade and the need for them to reduce world market prices to sell their product, the output of these mills has flooded onto the European market making steel products artificially cheap and endangering thousands of jobs in the UK. One plant alone, Anshan Iron and Steel, received a payment of €150 million to help pay for the installation of up to date equipment and replace the old inefficient Communist era machinery.
The money came from the EU’s self-claimed flagship Climate Directive, the Emission Trading System, and paid for by power and industrial companies in the EU. who are as part of their industry emitters of carbon dioxide. This system forces big carbon emitters in Europe to buy carbon offsets, known as Certified Emission Reductions. They can buy these on the “carbon market” but companies in China, for example, who could show they intended to reduce their own levels of carbon emissions, would qualify.
The system then allowed Chinese steel producers to exploit a loophole that allowed their modernisation to be financed by the sale of these credits, as they received upfront payments of billions of Euros.
European installations that involve high energy consumption also can participate in this carbon trading market, but at a much lesser scale. Effectively around 12,000 European installations, including power stations and steel mills, were forced by the EU into subsidising Chinese industrial growth and development in a trade worth up to a total of €45 billion.
The Think Tank, European Insights, said: “These Chinese upgrades have now, sadly, assisted in record levels of Chinese steel production and are contributing to the low steel price that is endangering jobs in the UK. The system of carbon credit trading is highly complex, and we uncovered 91 individual steel mills in China that received funding of this nature. We estimate that the total paid to them was €1.4 billion.”
The EU approach to Climate Change is another example of the unintended consequences associated with policies made at an EU level. The initiative was well-meaning maybe, but failed totally to anticipate the consequences on world trade and impact on EU member states. Most damaging is that EU is also terribly slow to ameliorate the negative effects of its own policies.
The full report by European Insights can no longer be found here:
http://europeaninsights.org/carbon-credits-and-steel/
And you won’t find it on the wayback machine at Archive.org either
https://web.archive.org/web/20180628113838/http://europeaninsights.org?reqp=1&reqr=
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
From: Carbon welfare – How big polluters plan to profit from EU emissions trading reform
The EU ETS claims to make big polluters
pay, but has actually become a way of enhancing polluter’s
profits, as well as undermining and preventing effective
action to tackle climate change. This report finds that:
ˍ Some of Europe’s most polluting industries have been
lobbying for a giveaway of more than €175 billion
worth of pollution permits between 2021 and 2030,
subsidies that amount to a carbon welfare scheme for
big business, with ordinary citizens picking up the bill
Click to access the_carbon_welfare_report.pdf
– – –
The public probably has little idea all this nonsense is going on.
lobbying for a giveaway of more than €175 billion
Some ‘giveaway’ that would be.
I understand that Tata made a double killing from this scheme by closing Port Talbot thereby avoiding the carbon tax and then getting a wadge of cash to upgrade the india plant. Sadly don’t have chapter and verse on that.
The whole scheme is little more than an austerity creation excercise.
Reads just like schemes I found out about taking place in the 70s and 80s in the US.
Business as usual.
modernising the European power generation fleet
Even with the money, the EU doesn’t have the first clue on how to modernise electricity generation, well
“where did the Money Go”
This Carbon trading system was designed to be a money creation machine by the scam artists of ENRON Corporation.
Back in the late 1960s,early 1970s, there was a tax scam operation that created limited partnerships that yielded $100 of tax credits per $10 of cash invested in gas and oil explorations. The “oil shock” of the late 1970s made a bunch of these “loss” properties valuable, So ENRON Corporation was created. Selling stock in a booming company is a way to print money and they did. ENRON became a stock selling company sucking up billions. As this began to falter they needed a new scam that they could use to “print money” and the concept of “Carbon Trading Credits” was created. They poured money into lobbying for “Cap and Trade” mandates that was needed to force this thing into operation. They got the world body politic to buy into the scam but too late to save themselves. ENRON crashed and went broke and their people scattered to continue the scam across the world. Printing “free” money that is extorted from consumers across the world by government mandates. Saving the environment is not the real point, making money is. “Carbon Credit” creation was a way to create money from nothing. ENRON people likened it to creating oil wells that pumped money that never go dry…pg
Gross austerity creation.
For some strange reason this carbon trading scam sounds like it was fathered by chapter 33 of the UN Agenda 21 play book.
33.10. The implementation of the huge sustainable development programmes of Agenda 21 will require
the provision to developing countries of substantial new and additional financial resources. Grant or
concessional financing should be provided according to sound and equitable criteria and indicators.
The progressive implementation of Agenda 21 should be matched by the provision of such necessary
financial resources. The initial phase will be accelerated by substantial early commitments of
concessional funding.
OBJECTIVES
33.11.
The objectives are as follows:
a. To establish measures concerning financial resources and mechanisms for the
implementation of Agenda 21;
b. To provide new and additional financial resources that are both adequate and predictable;
c. To seek full use and continuing qualitative improvement of funding mechanisms to be
utilized for the implementation of Agenda 21.
As do a lot of the other green scams that take public money and pour it down a black hole.