Kate Holloway, a carbonzero principal, is a failed Green Party candidate, then failed Liberal party (provincial) in Toronto:
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/Augu…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Holloway

Good observation Stephen

IThe most likely scenario would be a straight-across exchange .
It would then look good for the Liberals and provide good advertising for Carbonzero. No exchange of cash for carbon credits for a cash strapped LPC but would provide the necesary optics.
One should keep in mind that a carbon credit firm could only prosper from a Liberal incumbency and I imagine the rewards would be mutual .
I have a problem with the carbon credit industry in that unregulated,it leaves to many loopholes for too many $$ abuses. In fact I personally feel purchasing carbon credits to be a scam; like buying indulgences…a game for the elite.

“Kate Holloway, a carbonzero principal, is a failed Green Party candidate, then failed Liberal party (provincial) in Toronto:”

Ah ha. The plot thickens. A little unofficial patronage goingo on?

I don't know about you, but that paint job looks SOOO 1984 to me… here's hoping it's a sign of things to come!

What, an Orwellian Liberal government? No thanks!

As a former Fundraising Chair and Chief Agent of The federal Green Party, geez, I wonder, what would I know about the Elections Act?

Thanks for the exposure though! Looks like you put a lot of work into this post.

Who puts “zero” on their campaign plane?! Sheesh.

As many have said, carbon credits are like a fat guy paying a thin guy to lose weight.

I’m not comfortable with this carbon neutrality business. Whether the Liberals pay money to a company or not, their aircraft is still spewing carbon and other pollutants. So, there is to benefit to the environment. I also do not quite understand the money trail – the Liberals pay money to Carbon Zero and then what? Who receives the money? It all looks like one of those schemes, the name of which I cannot remember. Could it be Ponzi? Where a shell company buys another shell company and so on.

So Kate, care to elaborate on the contra arrangement or financial contribution arrangement with the Liberals to diffuse this a little bit?

That is a whole lot of advertising, not to mention offsets for such a pig of aplane, that are in play. Given they have to be declared as an election expense and the Liberals are huting for donations, could we get an explanation? Please?

But, who gets the money paid for credits? And, you can buy all the credits you want but it doesn’t alleviate the problem of carbon being introduced to the atmosphere. Somebody is making a financial gain while the environment is still being harmed.

Another Liberal “sponsorship”?

This buying carbon credits is unbelievably stupid, the most inane ever. Pollute to high heaven and get money for doing it. That's what Chretien agreed to when he signed on to Kyoto. His only concern was to send millions of our dollars to China to allow them to continue to build coal fired plants and pollute even more. He had no intentions or any bloody clue about implementing any other part of Kyoto. His bum boy Dion did squat about the environment for a decade as environment minister.
How have we gotten this stupid in this Country to sit by and allow this to go on?

Looks like the Liberal$ unquenchable thirst for big money corporate donations has once again bubbled up to the surface.

This has to be the most fatuously hypocritical thread yet on this blog.

1. How can a party that refuses to implement an absolute cap on emissions and a formal legally sanctioned trading scheme for them, and is repeatedly criticized for this from every knowledgeable quarter, in a position to whine about a lack of standards for carbon offsets? It’s a situation wholly of the making of the Conservative Party of Canada and if you don’t like it, tell your own MPs to actually put the formal registration mechanism in place for mandatory offsets so voluntary ones have some standards to live by.

2. How many times has the carbonzero logo on the plane actually appeared in the media? I haven’t seen it once. By contrast, I’ve seen it literally hundreds of times on the QEII Home Lottery ads and their print literature. You guys are giving this logo more exposure than it would ever get otherwise with your whining. So are you then going to submit your blog traffic reports to Elections Canada and complain about free publicity carbonzero got?

It’s pretty typical to get a discount or preferred credits in exchange for publicizing which broker you got them from. The value of this is not great, and it would be easy to establish commercially if Conservatives hadn’t repeatedly and deliberately sabotaged a formal carbon registry. Glass house, guys. Move on.

3. If the LPC actually paid *no* cash for the credits, how exactly would the public housing CDM/efficiency project in Quebec that provides the underlying offset get done? Do you think carbonzero is pumping tens of thousands of its own money into these projects? Even if they were, that can’t be an illegal donation, since according to you and the Conservative Party the offsets are not mandatory anyway. If someone wants to do something nice for a public housing project and the LPC wants to show their logo as a thank-you that pays them back with value that otherwise wouldn’t be used (the publicity from the logo), there are very clear rules for that with Elections Canada.

But unless that is what you think is happening, there’s literally no sense to your raising this as an issue except to highlight the difficulty of establishing an objective value for the logo on the plane or for the credits themselves. If the latter is the Conservatives’ own fault and the former is just an ordinary business problem, where is your case against either the LPC or carbonzero? Like, what do you think you are gaining by raising this?

4. So a principal of the company ran for the federal Greens (I don’t think the Greens that ran in 2004 consider themselves to have “failed”, they certainly put that party on the map and have changed Canadian politics) and increased the provincial Liberal vote against an NDP incumbent by about five per cent despite a massive surge in the Green vote provincially. And, you don’t mention, the company vended carbon credits to the NDP in that election without any controversy. LPC is a separate legal entity than the provincial Liberals. So what you have here is evidence that someone might be an anyone-but-Conservative talent you fear and hate, but nothing else.

Attacking the integrity of carbonzero’s credits constitutes an attack on the Ontario provincial NDP’s integrity and every other customer. Attacking the ethics of her interpretation of Elections Canada’s rules constitutes an attack on the federal Greens’ integrity when she was Fundraising Chair (a post won with over 90% of the vote) and as Chief Agent (with 2/3 of the vote, more than Elizabeth May). If you want to keep your enemies divided, attacking a person with this kind of history is really not the way to do it, guys. You’re creating good reasons to unite the ABC.

5. As for ” carbon credits are like a fat guy paying a thin guy to lose weight:”, this assumes that everyone has their own private atmosphere and that it never interacts or exchanges greenhouse gases with anyone else’s. This may be actually stated in the official ideology of the Conservative Republican Reform Alliance Party or whatever but it isn’t what scientists say (as if you care). Scientifically speaking, molecules in the atmosphere distribute so evenly and immediately that a molecule of greenhouse gas taken out anywhere cancels one added anywhere. A carbon market in theory is a more perfect market model than anything else including food or fuel commodities which require much human maintained infrastructure and regulation to move around. If you think carbon markets can’t work in principle even with mature auditing and contracts and regulations, you’re actually anti-market: You can’t possibly believe that soybean or wheat or oil or gold or currency markets could work either as they are so much more reliant on things humans manipulate to their advantage.

And if you’re a right-winger who doesn’t believe in markets and doesn’t believe in intellectual integrity or even logical consistency, the correct word for you is fascist. Not that I’m calling you that, but do look the word up…

6. If you really feel strongly about any of this, Stephen, I’d encourage you to debate any or all of the above topics with Kate herself in some public forum with a neutral moderator. I’d lay a few thousand bucks to bet you will emerge as a national laughingstock and even your own personal friends will pretend they don’t know you after?

You really don’t know who you’re up against, dude. I advise you to stop picking at people much smarter, wiser and better informed than you. The last guy that took a serious shot at Kate lost the leadership of a federal party.

If that realy is Kate, she should be prepared to disclose the business relationship. How much she paid for the advertizing? How much Dion is paying her company for the carbon credits? The flying CO2 pig of the Liberals will only be displaying the Carbonzero ad at air port terminals. It is an obscure little decal that most people would not recognize as an enviromental company. So what is the ad really worth? Enquirering minds would like to know. I wonder if they are buying credits for the full carbon footprint or only on the difference between their bucket of bolts and a more modern plane?

Take part in our election poll at http://www.nbtv.ca

YOU: “How can a party that refuses to implement an absolute cap on emissions”

ME: If you're talking about the Conservative party, you're wrong. 20% absolute reduction of 2006 levels by 2020 is law thanks to the CPC. First government to do this.

YOU: “and a formal legally sanctioned trading scheme for them,”

ME: Also from the Conservative plan, called == Turning the Corner ==

“Setting up a carbon emissions trading market, including a carbon offset system, to provide incentives for Canadians to reduce their greenhouse gas emission.”

YOU: “and is repeatedly criticized for this from every knowledgeable quarter, in a position to whine about a lack of standards for carbon offsets?”

ME: nobody's whining. I'm asking what the deal is between the Liberals and carbonzero.

YOU: “How many times has the carbonzero logo on the plane actually appeared in the media? I haven't seen it once. By contrast, I've seen it literally hundreds of times on the QEII Home Lottery ads and their print literature.”

ME: Interesting, but what's the value of this? If it's $1 or $100,000 I want to know.

YOU: ” You guys are giving this logo more exposure than it would ever get otherwise with your whining. So are you then going to submit your blog traffic reports to Elections Canada and complain about free publicity carbonzero got?”

ME: No. Why would assume such a thing?

YOU: “It's pretty typical to get a discount or preferred credits in exchange for publicizing which broker you got them from.”

ME: You make this assumption that this is what happened here. Also, special deals can not be given for favoured clients (this is special consideration isn't it?)

YOU: “If the LPC actually paid *no* cash for the credits, how exactly would the public housing CDM/efficiency project in Quebec that provides the underlying offset get done?”

ME: I'm not talking about the credits, I'm talking about the advertising for the company.

YOU: “If someone wants to do something nice for a public housing project and the LPC wants to show their logo as a thank-you that pays them back with value that otherwise wouldn't be used (the publicity from the logo), there are very clear rules for that with Elections Canada.”

ME: care to cite statute in your blustering?

YOU: “And, you don't mention, the company vended carbon credits to the NDP in that election without any controversy.”

ME: forgive me for omitting other non-relevant details you care about.

YOU: “So what you have here is evidence that someone might be an anyone-but-Conservative talent you fear and hate, but nothing else.”

ME: now you're putting words in my mouth

YOU: “As for ” carbon credits are like a fat guy paying a thin guy to lose weight:”, this assumes that everyone has their own private atmosphere and that it never interacts or exchanges greenhouse gases with anyone else's. This may be actually stated in the official ideology of the Conservative Republican Reform Alliance Party or whatever but it isn't what scientists say (as if you care).”

ME: First of all, that wasn't my comment. Second, I am a scientist. If you care.

YOU: Scientifically speaking, molecules in the atmosphere distribute so evenly and immediately that a molecule of greenhouse gas taken out anywhere cancels one added anywhere.

ME: unless you are taking a molecule and sequestering it deep underground or are putting it in outer space, you cannot cancel out the carbon. And that is where carbon credits are BS. Carbon from fossil fuels are emitted into the atmosphere but you cannot offset or cancel them by planting trees as the carbon equilibrium between atmosphere and biosphere is maintained. There is still the same net amount of carbon in the atmosphere/biosphere. And since the biosphere doesn't exist in a vacuum (it would die) you cannot offset anything by adding more carbon exchanging plants. It's like peeing in a pool and offsetting that by recirculating the water twice as fast. If you want to nullify the effect of the carbon that we're putting in the atmosphere, take carbon in whatever form and remove it from the carbon cycle.

YOU: “A carbon market in theory is a more perfect market model than anything else including food or fuel commodities which require much human maintained infrastructure and regulation to move around. If you think carbon markets can't work in principle even with mature auditing and contracts and regulations, you're actually anti-market: You can't possibly believe that soybean or wheat or oil or gold or currency markets could work either as they are so much more reliant on things humans manipulate to their advantage.

ME: Perhaps the only markets ever created and maintained by the government with any success have been markets for tax lawyers and food service workers in Parliamentary cafeterias. Markets are created to fulfill a need. The government is creating an artificial need by working against the tragedy of the commons. I could create a market for bear spray by releasing a grizzly in your house but I don't think you'd thank me for it. This also wouldn't be sustainable.

YOU: “And if you're a right-winger who doesn't believe in markets and doesn't believe in intellectual integrity or even logical consistency, the correct word for you is fascist. Not that I'm calling you that, but do look the word up…”

ME: wow, and I can't believe I actually spent time considering a response for you up until now.

YOU: “If you really feel strongly about any of this, Stephen, I'd encourage you to debate any or all of the above topics with Kate herself in some public forum with a neutral moderator. I'd lay a few thousand bucks to bet you will emerge as a national laughingstock and even your own personal friends will pretend they don't know you after?”

ME: As with the markets which make things more efficient, let's cut out the middleman. Why don't you just send the money to me? I've got some thin air I'd like to sell you.

YOU: “You really don't know who you're up against, dude. I advise you to stop picking at people much smarter, wiser and better informed than you. The last guy that took a serious shot at Kate lost the leadership of a federal party.”

ME: Wow, I'm up against the Carbonati.

I don't see what the big deal is. So what!

They bought offsets and are showing Canadians they are taking responsibility for the carbon emission and trying to right a wrong.

I try to be green and I buy power for my house from Bullfrog Power.
They send me free stickers. It shows my neighbours that I am trying at least to be green.

So if someone wants to take their hard earned money and buy offsets and wants to put a bumper sticker on their car or plane to send a message to the world, go ahead.

For the Liberals and other parties who bought offset, I think it gives credibility to their green shift and the similar programs of the green party etc.

Cheers!

Exactly…It is just a shell game that allows people to continue with what they were doing (spewing CO2) and feel good about themselves.

Well I hope your scientific arguments are better than your economic, legal or logistics arguments. I do see some promise in you, as like any lawyer you attempt to narrow the argument where inconvenient and then broaden it out in the same directions you restricted it, when convenient again. Pardon my cheap shots here but answering this kind of thing constitutes entertainment and I’m a funny guy by habit.

1. The Conservative party has failed to “implement” any absolute reduction. The Liberal government, in signing Kyoto, made a commitment to an absolute reduction over the period 2008-2012, via a binding document in international law. By contrast the Conservatives merely made a similar promise, later, to reduce emissions by a lesser amount. One that had no binding effect in international law and would not bind future governments. As you are fond of pointing out, promising and setting targets is not implementing. So Harper’s government is the first to do nothing other than promote questionable carbon capture technology at an astonishingly expensive $100/tonne, which would break oil companies if actually implemented. But it won’t be implemented, there will be many “technical problems” or delays.

Credible commentators consider it a stalling tactic and their condemnation of your plan is universal.

2. The requirements to participate in global carbon markets and get audited or certified for meeting those requrements are strict and require the federal government, no one else, to set up a registry. There is accordingly no “formal legally sanctioned trading scheme for them,” as I stated. Regardless of what the Conservative “plan” says, they were obligated under Kyoto to set up such a registry effective on January 1, 2008. Not doing so disables even audited voluntary trading. I have listened myself on a conference call where this was being discussed last spring, and the government was simply stalling to prevent it, there’s no other possible description. So again a promise on paper and obstruction in fact and again backed up by many credible commentators who were at the actual conferences & meetings.

3. By “asking what the deal is between the Liberals and carbonzero” (your words) you are exploiting the “lack of standards for carbon offsets” (my words). If it were an auditable legal global market, there would be global auditing standards to defer to. Because there aren’t, you try to exploit that situation and present the deal as somehow crooked. If I burn the rulebook and start questioning people whether they are following the rules, it’s a fairly transparent stalling and doubt strategy, not an actual ethical question.

4. The value of a logo appearing anywhere, on an airplane or football field or TV ad, has a value that the advertising business has ways to estimate. You’ll have to ask them, not me or anyone here, what such an ad is worth. I was simply expressing that I’ve seen the carbonzero logo much more often elsewhere and I much doubt they paid or received anything like your “$100,000″ maximum estimate for those ads.

My question about your blog traffic was rhetorical but it does illustrate that there are no logical limits to the line of questioning you are engaged in, given the lack of an auditable federally supported market to Kyoto standards. And it could be possible to harass the Liberals by increasing your blog traffic to this page and then filing annoying reports to Elections Canada claiming they received value for what you did. The Conservatives by contrast do not even accept Elections Canada rulings, e.g. in “in and out”.

5. By saying “it’s pretty typical to get a discount or preferred credits in exchange for publicizing which broker you got them from,” I did not assume nor claim that carbonzero did this. I have no idea how the credits were selected. Some confidential information I have suggests that the Liberals didn’t get any special treatment and didn’t get the exact kind of credits they would have preferred for political reasons. Though if they did, it would still be well within the normal parameters of an offset business transaction. I defer on those questions to the company itself because anything I heard was hearsay – not evidence.

6. When you say you are “not talking about the credits” does that mean you are not arguing that carbon credits are invalid or infeasible in principle? Some of your cohorts are, obviously, in this thread. I don’t intend to post in this thread more than once more so I would prefer to answer the denialists all at once.

However, later in your response, you do open up the question of the validity of carbon markets as such, so you have to take the blame, not me, for any such confusion.

7. I have been as specific as you in citing statues, that is, I have not been providing arguments in formal precedent form for some court or Elections Canada to consider. So no, I don’t care to cite statute, you’re in agreement with me that there are rules regarding exchange of advertising benefit, and there’s no need to get into a legal argument about interpretation now. I am not being paid to educate you in law.

8. The fact that “the company vended carbon credits to the NDP in that election without any controversy” suggests they are not, in fact, a Liberal front group. As does Holloway’s history including Green Party financial posts. These details are relevant to any argument you might make regarding a conspiracy as they suggest that whatever is going on, the Liberals, NDP and Greens are probably all behaving the same. That is, reasonably and in constrast to the behaviour of the no-offset no-audits Conservatives.

By attempting to characterize this fact as not relevant you attempt to portray your imagined conspiracy as a fact, beyond question. And, politically, you give your opponents common cause on at least one front.

9. My words: “So what you have here is evidence that someone might be an anyone-but-Conservative talent you fear and hate, but nothing else.” Your words: ” now you’re putting words in my mouth.” No, I didn’t put a single word in your mouth. I proposed a motive, exactly as I will when called to the stand in any Elections Canada, libel or other action that may result from your insinuations. I told you what you might feel, which obviously is not something I can measure or be factually tested – no claim about some other person’s feelings can be a factual claim, perhaps not even by themselves. Not to become your psychiatrist, but if you deny you feel this, then the appropriate response is not to accuse me of misquoting you, but rather to say “I don’t feel any fear or hate” and perhaps “how dare you suggest I do” – then add “are you threatening me?”, pull your shirt over your head and begin looking for “T.P. for your bunghole”. This qualifies you for Harper’s campaign bunker along with Ezra Levant and Craig Chandler.

Likewise, if I insinuated that your love of “strong leadership” expressed homosexual feelings of longing for Stephen Harper, you could be insulted and respond with “No I don’t”, but unless I made up a quote from you, it’s not putting words in your mouth. I wouldn’t deign to put anything in your mouth. It’s just not my kind of place.

10. I seriously doubt that anyone with the command of logic and precision of language you demonstrate in this conversation could ever do more than “cargo cult science” in the words of Richard Feynmann. I had initially wrote that “I accept that you didn’t make that comment regarding feasibility of carbon markets and my apologies if I am “conflating and confusing” many people with a poor grasp of logic, commonly called a “mob”.”. However, then you did raise questions about such feasibility, so I withdraw that acceptance and apology. Sigh. Please try to agree on a fixed scope of argument so we don’t have to invite a judge in.

11. I said that “molecules in the atmosphere distribute so evenly and immediately that a molecule of greenhouse gas taken out anywhere cancels one added anywhere”. I did not comment on how easily or permanently it could be “taken out”. All markets involve transactions than can unravel or have side effects. I don’t agree that deep sequestration is the only viable strategy as you seem to suggest. Neither do any of the competent experts who have examined carbon markets in depth and found fit to grant conservation and demand management (CDM) strategies that reduce the emissions at source.

Our definition of “cancel” can honestly differ based on time scales or auditable reliability. I mostly agree that “you cannot offset or cancel them by planting trees as the carbon equilibrium between atmosphere and biosphere is maintained. There is still the same net amount of carbon in the atmosphere/biosphere.” However if the net amount of carbon retained in the bio-not-atmo-sphere were to increase reliably and auditably and remain stable for decades, then I would argue offsets can apply. So whole-habitat preservation projects, particularly those that will clearly force nearby urban development into more sustainable patterns, can and should qualify as offsets. Just my own opinion.

But we are not talking about biologically derived credits in the carbonzero case. If you wish to make an argument against biological sequestration, certainly that’s reasonable. But your arguments just don’t apply to the auditable reduction of emissions from human-built infrastructure as in these LPC offsets.

12. It’s always bizarre to hear supply-side believers like Harper and possibly you argue that the only effective way to deal with emissions is at end-of-pipe. Why can’t we rebalance the carbon cycle by just emitting less in the first place? Of course we can, and it’s not only cheaper, it’s the next industrial revolution. Minimizing emissions all along the supply chain is a far more effective strategy by any measure and has many benefits in improving overall efficiency. I think you should look at what major US corporations said about the massive savings they made just by looking at emissions and cutting them. It’s a profitable thing to do for everyone except maybe big oil. It’s probably even good for Alberta.

Bill Clinton is quite eloquent on this subject. Well worth looking up what he says about green economies.

13. Consider your argument that government is “addressing a real need artificially by working against the tragedy of the commons. I could create a market for bear spray by releasing a grizzly in your house…” You seem to be actually arguing that government can’t create a market. In this case though we are dealing with voluntary credits and the need to regulate and answer regulatory questions about the market that we probably would agree should apply under electoral law. So this is regulation not an invention – people trade carbon voluntarily. The mandatory markets merely catch criminals/freeloaders dumping in the atmosphere who are stealing the CO2 absorption capacity others have agreed not to use. And I use the word “criminal” advisedly as Kyoto became international law once Russia ratified it.

I honestly see a logical equivalence between your arguments and those of the anti-carbon-market types who argue that no such market can be effective at carbon reduction. You insist on bizarre constructions involving combustion and CO2 scrubbers as the only valid and verifiable approach to reducing emission and I frankly can’t consider than an honest assessment from someone with a real education.

If you’re arguing that markets do best with no regulation at all, I invite you to look at the subprime mess.

14. Technically, under Godwin’s Law, the argument isn’t over until I call you an actual Nazi, not just make a credible argument involving an “if” that a certain set of ideological assumptions makes a fascist.

I’ve discussed this with Mike, actually.

15. The Carbonati exists but it’s not me. I’m one of those people that actually cut their ecological footprint as close to 1.0 as I can so that I won’t be in search of a new Earth (to be built by Halliburton) when accounting finally works.

Thanks in advance for publishing insulting responses that demonstrate that you just lost an argument. We all do our bit for free speech.

Based on the information you have provided, Stephen, I would say that the Liberals have indeed violated the law.

Does that surprise anyone?

Based on the information you have provided, Stephen, I would say that the Liberals have indeed violated the law.

Does that surprise anyone?