“Carbon Crooks,” the compelling 2013 documentary on fraud in carbon markets and the failure of carbon trading to address climate change, is now available to U.S. viewers via Link TV.

“If you want to do crime and you want to be fast and untraceable, carbon is one of the perfect candidates.” – Marius-Christian Frunza, author of “Fraud and Carbon Markets”.

Carbon markets, created under the Kyoto Protocal as a “cap-and-trade” system in which emitters of carbon must buy “carbon credits” from others with schemes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, have been a gift to criminal elements, who have found carbon exchanges easy to exploit given the market is as intangible as the commodity it trades in. [See: Criminals see value of intangible carbon market – Interpol]

“Carbon Crooks” by award-winning Danish film-maker, Tom Heinemann, looks at the various ways carbon trading has failed, including carbon market fraud. Professor Kevin Anderson of Manchester University, speaking on camera at the time, estimated billions of pounds, possibly “even hundreds of billions” of pounds worth of carbon credits had been traded that had “nothing to do directly with climate change”. According to Anderson, carbon trading indirectly “makes things worse”; even, in his opinion: “worse than doing nothing.”

At one point in Heinemann’s documentary, two men are passing by a housing estate north of Copenhagen. One of them, Danish journalist and author Bo Elkjaer, tells the other:

“[Who is Mirza Ghalib?] He’s India’s national poet. India’s H.C. Andersen and also his contemporary. He died in 1869. But is registered as a carbon trader at this address.”

Along with fraud, “Carbon Crooks” looks at projects that were supposed to reduce carbon emissions that have blatantly not delivered on that promise and concludes it is “dangerous to continue with policies that don’t contribute.”

“Carbon Crooks” is now available via Link TV to U.S. viewers here. To find out broadcast area details and the satellite and cable channels Link TV is available through, see here.

To watch a trailer for “Carbon Crooks,” see here.

For a full transcript of the documentary, see here.

To buy a dvd of the documentary, see here.

Further Reading

See Probe International’s Carbon Credit Watch archive here