EUROPE'S KYOTO BLUNDER: SQUANDERING BILLIONS ON PUTIN'S CRONIES

By its own admission, Russia's electricity monopoly is the world's largest corporate producer of greenhouse gases, accounting - by itself - for nearly as much carbon dioxide as is emitted by Britain. From smokestacks across Russia's 11 time zones, the company, Unified Energy Systems, spews out 2 percent of all human-generated carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere. What will the utility get for being the world's largest greenhouse gas polluter? It is hoping for $1 billion.

It is one of the paradoxes ["paradoxes"? "idiocies" would be a franker term] of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change that companies in Russia and other Eastern European countries, which are among the world's largest producers of greenhouse gases, are poised to earn hundreds of millions of dollars through trading their rights to release carbon dioxide into the air.

The Kyoto treaty, negotiated in 1997 and adopted by 36 industrial nations, established a mechanism aimed at finding the cheapest way to curb emissions of gases that contribute to global warming. The idea was that countries that produced more than their treaty-imposed limits could reach their goals by buying rights from producers in other countries where controlling output is easier and less expensive.

It is not clear how successful that approach will turn out to be. But because Russia's companies operate such outdated and inefficient equipment, they can easily and cheaply upgrade. As a result, the Kyoto process has already emerged as a potential source of earnings for the country's big energy and manufacturing companies, according to company executives and analysts. They have hired consultants, inventoried pollution sources to earn credits, and opened carbon-trading divisions. Unified Energy and Gazprom, Russia's natural gas monopoly, which together release more than 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Russia, both have such trading units. "We're intensely interested in the carbon-trading market," [Something for nothing!] Andrey V. Gorkov, the head of the carbon-trading division at Unified Energy, said earlier this month in Montreal, where he was attending the United Nations climate conference. Member countries formally approved emissions-trading rules at the meeting.

The protocol requires the 36 industrial nations - with varying targets - to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases below their 1990 levels, in the five years from 2008 to 2012. For the European Union, the target is to reduce emissions to 8 percent below 1990 levels. In an indication of how robust the demand for emissions credits may be, this year the European Union is 6 percent above its 1990 levels. The United States, which generates a fifth of greenhouse gases but has not joined the Kyoto Protocol, is 19 percent above its theoretical limits.

Russia, in contrast, suffered an economic collapse in the 1990's, and is 43 percent below its 1990 baseline in the Kyoto agreement. In fact, Russia does not expect to reach 1990's emissions levels until around 2020 - attesting to the severity of the economic setback from which it is still recovering. At the same time, Russian industry is generally wasteful with energy, so that a few cheap upgrades go a long way to reducing emissions. Thus, with both outdated equipment and a surplus of carbon emissions, Russian companies have become attractive to European, Canadian and Japanese companies that need emissions credits.

The pace is increasing at Mr. Gorkov's cluttered office in Unified Energy headquarters, a drab concrete building on the outskirts of Moscow. Analysts give credit to the company's forward-looking chief executive, Anatoly B. Chubais, for recognizing the potential for profits under Kyoto. Mr. Chubais, a former deputy prime minister, had helped negotiate the pact while in government.

Mr. Gorkov's 16 employees at the division, which is called the Energy Carbon Fund, scan the Internet for companies or countries in need of carbon dioxide emissions credits. They also study their own company to identify areas where they can reduce pollution. The company signed its first deal in June, with the environmental protection agency of Denmark. Denmark will pay an undisclosed sum for Unified Energy to replace coal-fired boilers at the Amurskaya power plant in Khabarovsk, near China in eastern Siberia, so that units will burn more efficient natural gas. It will also pay to upgrade an existing natural gas plant in the Orenburg region, in southern Russia near Kazakhstan, with a more efficient model. The conversion to gas at the Amurskaya plant will cut carbon dioxide emissions by a million tons a year, according to Unified Energy. The upgrading of the natural gas generator at the Mednogorskaya power plant in Orenburg will save 210,000 tons.

Under the deal, the Danish government will receive 1.2 million carbon credits (one carbon credit being equal to reducing one ton of carbon dioxide), to be applied toward meeting its emissions goal in 2012.

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RUSSIA'S TICKING TIME BOMB: DEMOGRAPHIC CRISIS

Exactly the opposite "bomb" to the one the Greenies envisaged

The Russian economy is set to lose over $390 billion in the next two decades if the government, business and society do not take immediate action to reverse the demographic catastrophe already looming, a business lobby group said in a report Wednesday. Businesses are already struggling with a shortage in the work force as the country's falling birth rate and climbing mortality rate make the Russian population one of the world's most rapidly shrinking, Delovaya Rossia, a lobby group for small and medium-sized businesses, said. "Finding workers is getting more and more difficult for business," Boris Titov, chairman of Delovaya Rossia, said at a round table on demographic problems.

The Russian population has dropped by 10.4 million people over the last 14 years to 143.4 million, and the country is set to lose another 21.4 million by 2025. The economically active population will shrink by 3.6 million in the next five years alone if the demographic crisis is not tackled, the report said. The increasing economic and social marginalization of the male population and the widening gap in life expectancy between men and women risks turning Russia into a female-dominated country, the report said.

The lobby group slammed the government for its lack of a demographic policy, warning that the state could lose $390.8 billion in gross domestic product by 2025. Demographic policy "is not even part of the priority programs proclaimed by the state," Titov said.

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More guesswork: "Climate change could thaw the top 11 feet of permafrost in most areas of the Northern Hemisphere by 2100, altering ecosystems across Alaska, Canada and Russia, according to a federal study [and pigs might fly]. Using supercomputers in the United States and Japan, the study calculated how frozen soil would interact with air temperatures, snow, sea ice changes and other processes. The most extreme scenario involved the melting of the top 11 feet of permafrost, or earth that remains frozen year-round. 'If that much near-surface permafrost thaws, it could release considerable amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and that could amplify global warming,' said lead author David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. 'We could be underestimating the rate of global temperature increase.'"

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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