Climategate: How To Follow the Money

It appears that most of the Copenhagen participants saw the money they spent as an investment. Here's how they get paid.

December 23, 2009 - by Charlie Martin

There’s big money in climate.

That became strikingly obvious in Copenhagen. The conference itself cost in the neighborhood of $30 million, but that was only the visible tip of the melting iceberg. Add to that the celebrities, the demonstrators, the congressional delegations, and the corporate displays, and you can bet something closer to $60 million was really spent on the conference — along with, of course, a carbon footprint the size of Morocco’s. The one significant outcome of the Copenhagen conference was an agreement to continue the international market in carbon offset trading that would otherwise have expired in 2012 and to prevent a crash in the carbon credits market.

It appears that most of the participants saw the money spent as an investment.

To see why, we need to look at the way Kyoto has turned into cash for many of the biggest names in the climate change world, and to do that we need to understand how the whole carbon trading scheme works.

Read: Pajamas Media

Cash for carbon: the new Oil for Food...