Saved - the trillion-pound trade in carbon
The city of Copenhagen 'is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport'. So said John Sauven of Greenpeace UK after the climate summit broke up. And he is right.
This is the biggest heist in history. As they poured carbon over snow-covered Denmark from their gas-guzzling jets, world leaders were congratulating themselves on securing a deal which will make their backers and financiers a trillion pounds a year. These riches will come from buying and selling permits, the so-called 'carbon credits' which allow industry and electricity generators in developed countries to emit carbon dioxide.
Forget 'Big Oil' - this is 'Big Carbon' making the most of a 'business opportunity' that was created by the first climate treaty at Kyoto in 1997.
The frenzied negotiations we have just seen were never about 'saving the planet'. They were always about money. At stake was this new 'climate change industry' which last year ripped off £129billion from the global economy and is heading for that trillion-pound bonanza by 2020 - but only if the key parts of the Kyoto treaty could be renewed.
With the treaty due to expire by 2012, unless it was replaced, the money tree would fail. Hence, all the power and vested interests of big business were brought into play, stoking up the panic over climate change to create an atmosphere where the parties could keep the money flowing.
Carbon Trading is barely 13 years old yet the scale of the industry is astonishing. Overall control lies with an obscure committee created by Kyoto, The Clean Development Mechanism Executive. It issues firms with the 'golden tickets' known as Certified Emission Reductions (CERs).
At Kyoto, Western governments set targets to cut emissions. In order to achieve this, they set 'caps' on the amount of CO2 a company can produce.
However, if they go over these limits, they may buy permits from firms who have not used up their quotas.
The developing world is not subject to the same caps as the West so they can generate CERs which are then traded by banks.
The actual emissions don't change, it's merely a matter of how much you have to pay for them. For example, in 2006, the NHS spent £6million on carbon permits to keep patients warm.
This was the real business in Copenhagen last week. The game was given away by the head of carbon markets for Merrill Lynch, Abyd Karmali - who is also president of the Carbon Markets and Investors Association.
As campaigners worried about the prospect of the talks failing, Karmali was happily explaining that the envoys would probably decide to extend the 'Kyoto Protocol' even if they could not reach an agreement on emission cuts. And it is those words which revealed what was really going on.
The carbon permits come mainly from rich industrialists in the Third World and state enterprises in China, created out of mythical savings in carbon emissions.
This is precisely what is happening in the west-India state of Gujarat, where the giant Tata conglomerate - which is closing down the Corus steel works in Redcar - is building a giant new coal-fired power plant.
It is four times the size of the proposed Kingsnorth power station in Kent, to which the Greens so violently objected.
Tata's new plant, which is the same design as Kingsnorth, will increase India's carbon emissions by 643million tons over its lifetime, and produce in a year CO2 equivalent to an eighth of the entire UK electricity industry.
Yet because it is more efficient than conventional plants, it is deemed to reduce the average carbon emissions of India's electricity generation system per unit of electricity supplied.
By this convoluted reasoning, not only does it qualify for cheap, green development loans from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, it will be given over £500million in free carbon credits by the UN to be sold, via brokers and financiers who all take their cuts. They will be bought by the likes of British electricity generators.
That is but one example of the insane system created by the Kyoto treaty, which was renewed in Copenhagen last week.
