One of Colombia’s foremost journalists, Hollman Morris, has been denied a visa by the U.S. State Department to pursue a year as a Nieman fellow at Harvard University.

The visa denial comes after several years of highly critical reporting on the ties of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's administration to right-wing paramilitary squads. He and his brother, Juan Pablo, a producer, created a television show, Contravia, which airs on Bogota’s independent television channel. CIR interviewed them last year by Skype from their studio in Bogota about their reporting, in which over the course of several years they revealed the largely untold story of massacres and human rights abuses by the paramilitaries. Partly as a result of Morris’ reporting, one-third of the members of Colombia’s Congress has been under investigation for having financial ties to the paramilitary units.

In February, Morris discovered he was under surveillance by Colombia’s intelligence service, the DAS—a revelation that spurred an independent prosecutor’s ongoing investigation. The unearthed DAS documents have been collected and published by the Center for International Policy. At least a dozen DAS agents are now awaiting trial for the illegal surveillance, according to the Associated Press.

In March last year, attorneys with the Committee for a Free Press in Colombia publicly complained to the Inter American Press Association of the Organization of American States about the government’s harassment of Morris and other journalists. The OAS followed with a statement highly critical of the government’s threats against Morris and other journalists.

Morris has been widely recognized for his work—including by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. CIR helped him obtain an invitation to the Global Investigative Journalism Network conference in Geneva last April, but he was prevented from traveling to Switzerland at that time due to the eruption of the Icelandic volcano.

The outgoing Uribe administration has accused Morris of being part of the “intellectual bloc” of the left-wing FARC guerrillas, who have been on the other side of the Colombian civil war for much of the past two decades. President George W. Bush placed the FARC on the U.S. terrorist list, which empowers the government to deny those on the list travel to the United States as well as other privileges. The Uribe administration’s charges against Morris are based on having found email correspondence between Morris and a FARC commander suggesting that Morris played an intermediary role in trying to negotiate the release of former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Bettencourt. The government also accuses him of being inexplicably present at a FARC redoubt where the guerrillas turned four hostages over to the Colombian military. Morris denies all the charges. He told CIR that he was present at the hostage release on a journalistic assignment for the Latin American History Channel.

Just over a week after Morris was informed of the visa denial, he was honored at the Universidead Javieriena, one of Colombia’s leading universities for his journalistic courage in the face of death threats and government harassment.

Watch the CIR interview with the Morris brothers:

As the fast-motion oil catastrophe unfolds in the Gulf, check out some great reporting from a new media consortium, The Climate Desk . The desk is an innovative cooperative approach to in-depth reporting into climate change and energy. Participants range across all media, including Mother Jones, The Atlantic, Wired, Slate, Grist, WNET’s news show Need to Know, and CIR. They sent a team down to the Gulf which is producing some insightful revelations, analysis and news. Here is some of the latest:

Conflict of Interest for Judge Who Decided Against Offshore Moratorium?

License to Drill: New Leases in the Gulf of Mexico

How Will Distributing Money from the $20 Billion Claims Fund Work?

Why Won’t BP Measure the Oil Spill?

Why Did BP Take the Risks That it Did?

Should I Boycott BP?

Uncharted Waters: The Spill and Human Health

How do you put a dollar value on something like a coral reef?

Uncharted Waters: The Spill and Human Health

Flying below the American radar, a tax scandal has been rocking the global carbon markets. Ironically, it is emanating from Copenhagen, the city that six months ago hosted the world's largest climate summit. But back in 2007, long before COP 15 arrived, the Danes began working behind the scenes to host a growing cadre of carbon brokerage firms, which have become central to trading the world's fastest growing commodity.

To make it easier for these financial firms to set up shop in the Danish capital, the Ministry of Finance decided to skip background checks on companies being vetted to trade on the country's national carbon exchange. According to a string of reports in the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, all the government asked companies to provide was an email address. This laissez-faire attitude succeeded in channeling close to a third of all EU carbon trades through Denmark, and has since backfired badly.

The paper reported that one firm after another was little more than a front company for transacting complicated financial scams. In fact, more than 80 percent of the carbon trading firms registered on the Danish exchange closed down after the media probe began, according to a statement (pdf) by the country's Environment Minister, Lykke Friis.

The fraud is known as a "tax carousel." Danish-registered companies buy carbon credits from brokers in other European countries. This intra-European trading of credits to meet EU emissions standards (and the trades made by speculators betting on the price of these credits) are not taxed. But when the buyer and seller are trading in the same country, in this case Denmark, a value added tax, or VAT, is imposed.

In Denmark, VAT is a hefty 25 percent on each transaction -- one of the highest rates in Europe. But rather than turn the tax monies over to the Danish treasury, the traders packed up and disappeared. Three-quarters of the carbon traders registered in Denmark during the past year have either been dismantled by their owners or were shut down by the authorities.

According to a Reuters report, EuroPol estimates the scheme has so far cost treasuries in Denmark and other European countries some 5 billion euros (about US$7 billion) in lost revenues, while throwing into question the veracity of thousands of carbon trades.

Bo Elkjaer, the Danish reporter who broke the story, explained over email that his further investigations suggest the scandal is by no means confined to Denmark. Many of the same firms are suspected of running similar schemes in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and the UK. EuroPol reports that after the governments of France, the UK, the Netherlands and Spain changed their tax codes to close the loophole, the volume of carbon trading in those countries collapsed by 90 percent.

Meanwhile, the media blitz has raised questions about the EU's new commissioner for climate action, Connie Hedegaard, who was Denmark's climate minister when many of the fraudulent deals were set in motion. Hedegaard said publicly that she knew nothing about the fraud before Mr. Elkjaer and his newspaper began reporting on the case last December.

In May, the Guardian reported that it had obtained a document from inside the Danish ministry drawing attention to the tax fraud problem, which Ms. Hedegaard had initialed back in August 2009. Since then, she has admitted she was aware of the problem but says that at the time she signed the report, she saw it as a tax issue and, therefore, not her responsibility.

EuroPol is in the middle of a full scale investigation into the scam, and hundreds of arrests have been made across Europe.

Elkjaer says the scandal highlights the vulnerability of a system based on trading an intangible asset. "It's just a computer certificate, moved from account to account in endless loops," he said. "A trade can be performed from a single laptop anywhere in the world. All it needs is an internet connection."

The treacherous nature of measuring the veracity of carbon offsets was highlighted once again late last month when the United Nations suspended the firm TuvSud, responsible for nearly one quarter of the carbon offsets on the market today. The German company is one of twenty-six companies the UN has permitted to act as what it calls 'validators' of the offset system, charged with affirming that promises to reduce emissions in a developing country project--wind power, solar energy, methane reduction, etc--actually deliver the promised reductions. On March 26, the UN removed the company's ability to continue validating those projects--creating overnight uncertainty in the markets over the veracity of the projects it had been hired to validate. Such offsets based in developing countries are expected to account for at least a third of Europe's anticipated emission reductions by 2012, according to recent estimates by the European Environment Agency.

At the time of its suspension, TuvSud was the second biggest validator in the world, responsible for more than 1,200 projects over the past eight years. The UN's Executive Board cited the company's willingness to approve projects despite concerns over their actual emission reduction potential--a quality known as additionality--and the lack of technical experience of personnel assigned to the task. Some of the company's approved projects have been highly controversial, such as the Xioxai dam in China--which has led to the eviction of 7,500 people from their homes, according to the International Rivers Network. Credits from that project have been used by major European companies such as the giant German utility RWE.

The action comes on the heels of two other suspensions of validation firms for similar reasons, and which together represented more than half of the carbon offset market, as I wrote about recently in Harper's. Those two validators, the Norwegian company DNV and the Swiss company SGS, have since been reinstated. But the latest suspension means that two-thirds of the offset projects now available to industries operating under the emission reduction requirements of the Kyoto Protocol were, according to a database compiled by the UN Environment Program, validated by firms who's methodologies, skill levels and measurements have been called into question by the United Nations, which is charged with overseeing the offset market.

I also found that the United Nations does not have the power to pull those questionable credits off the market--which means that European industries are still using them to meet their emission limits. The credits bearing TuvSud's stamp of approval prior to its suspension, like those of DNV and SGS prior to their suspension, are still available for purchase by industries seeking to use offsets to continue emitting greenhouse gases at home--though they may leave the mistaken impression, due to faulty measurements, of more emission reductions than have actually occurred.

A century ago, if you made the long journey from the United States to the port town of Manaus, gateway to the Amazon, it would most likely have been in search of rubber. This city of around 2 million, set along the Rio Negro, and surrounded in every direction by hundreds of miles of jungle, is where the rubber deals were cut: European and American businessmen gathered in this rough frontier town to buy the raw sap that drips from rubber trees. Many millions of dollars passed through here during the rubber boom of the 19th and early 20th century.

On a reporting trip to Manaus earlier this month, I came across a curious legacy of the town's historical past -- the Teatro d'Amazonas, otherwise known as the Manaus Opera House. Built by the rubber barons in 1896 on an elevated tree shaded plaza, it was meant to feed a yearning for the high arts back home. Construction materials for the theater -- the Carrera marble, the ornate iron-grill work, the heavy cloth curtains -- arrived by sea on a three-month journey from Europe.

Fans of Werner Herzog may recall that the tormented Fitzcarraldo, in the movie of the same name, made a foray to this opera house during his crazed attempt to transport a steamship up-river, hoping to catch a performance of the legendary Enrico Caruso. "Everything in that movie was true," commented Grace, a young Brazilian university student, who was our guide, "except Caruso never sang here."

One hundred years later, European and American prospectors have returned, not to extract the sap from trees, nor to cut them down for their fine timber, but in search of a very 21st-century commodity: carbon. The rapid destruction of the rainforest during the last two decades has made Brazil the world's fourth largest greenhouse gas emitter. The pollution caused by this deforestation makes up 20 percent of the world's total CO2 emissions.

As Jeffrey Horowitz told Carbon Watch recently, "We want to make the forests worth more alive than dead." Horowitz leads a coalition of industry and environmental groups in the U.S. looking at how such partnerships can slow deforestation by putting a value on the remaining forests.

To that end, big energy producers and suppliers like American Electric Power, General Motors, Chevron, Duke Energy, and Pacific Gas & Electric have already put their legislative weight behind the concept of offsetting their emissions at home by investing in forests abroad and agreeing not to cut them down -- a practice known as "avoided deforestation."

Many of these companies are now scouring the Amazon in search of forests to preserve, even though it's unclear what these "offsets" will be worth until the U.S. Congress passes climate change legislation that will set industry emissions limits and what options are available to meet them. The Waxman-Markey bill passed the House last June, but this and other climate measures have been languishing in Congress ever since.

Nevertheless, gearing up to serve all this market potential is a growing cadre of carbon brokers and developers.

During my first trip to the Amazon, I learned that scores of developers (at least two of them American, Veticom and New Carbon Finance) had approached Brazilian landowners about developing carbon-offset programs. Brazil's director of the Amazon Conservation Team, Vasco van Roosmalen, told me that in the first three months of 2010 he had been flooded with calls from a coalition of indigenous groups requesting consultations about how to respond to such queries, and about the status of REDD, the U.N. framework by which all this stored carbon is to be measured, certified and eventually transacted.

Given this new premium on trees, Brazil has been cracking down on illegal loggers and getting serious about enforcing its deforestation laws. Last year, the government announced deforestation rates had fallen by nearly 50 percent from the dramatic losses recorded between 2000 and 2005. Brazil is also by far the most sophisticated nation for both monitoring and enforcement when compared with other heavily forested countries such as Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Congo. This means Brazilian forest credits will likely be far more expensive than those in other countries, creating a bifurcated universe of forest carbon credits of varying levels of credibility.

In December, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack told Carbon Watch that the U.S. had pledged $1 billion to a $3.5 billion global fund over the next 10 years to help Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Congo, Costa Rica and others complete the inventories and monitoring that are the essential first steps to enabling U.S. firms to legitimately begin using these forests against their emissions.

But those preparations face major challenges, first among them establishing clear ownership of forest lands.

Even in Brasilia, Brazil's geometrically planned capital in the middle of the alto plano, land titles remain unclear. Contracts are what is known as buyer-seller deals: property is passed from one to the other without any reference to who actually owns it. And if that's the case in the modern grid city of Brasilia, then consider the sprawling Amazon. In some Amazonian states like Para, there are roughly six times as many land claims as there is land.

Which begs the question: Who owns the rights to the carbon credits? Or more precisely, who's entitled to make money from them? When it comes to doing business, who, exactly, do you pay?

In Brazil, there's already a lot of tension over these questions. The federal government would like all forest deals to be conducted through a coordinated national conservation plan; state governments have expressed their desire to pursue forest deals autonomously; while indigenous leaders assert that much of the forests are their ancestral homes to which they have the rights.

A study conducted last year by the international law firm Baker & McKenzie for the Brazilian government concluded that existing provisions in the country's constitution give the indigenous a firm legal standing to claim the funds generated from carbon credits on their land. It's a finding that promises to further complicate an already complex calculus.

In a broadcast story airing in May, FRONTLINE and CIR will be looking at how this new trading frontier is playing out in real time on the ground in Brazil. In the meantime, we will be posting developments on Carbon Watch as we go.

Over the next year, FRONTLINE/World and CIR will report on key issues of
climate change in a joint project–Carbon Watch–focusing on the multi-billion-dollar carbon trading market. We'll look at which proposals to reduce emissions by 2020 really add up; at the hidden interests behind these solutions; and the new industry players.

You may have noticed over the past year that its become far easier to hop on a US airline to fly across the Atlantic to Europe–the result of an "open skies" agreement, implemented in 2008, that leveraged principles of free trade into the air. Now those open skies are looking pretty turbulent as three of the biggest US airlines–United, Continental and Delta, along with the US Air Transport Association–pursue a lawsuit attempting to block Britain's effort to impose emission limits on the airline industry.

The UK is the first European country to begin executing a plan by the European Union to reduce emissions from aviation. Air travel contributes about three percent of Europe's total greenhouse gas emissions, but according to the European Commission that rate has risen rapidly, some 87% since 1990, as air travel gets cheaper without accounting for environmental costs. The EU estimates that one person flying from London to New York and back generates roughly the same level of emissions as the average European does by heating their home for a year.

En route to Copenhagen, we wrote about the eye-opening experience of having an Air France pilot announcing our flight's carbon footprint. Now it turns out that announcement may have been a portent of much tension to come: The US airline industry has adamantly opposed establishing emission limits on aviation in this country, and is now attempting to staunch the growing gap between the US and Europe's approach to greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, Anglo-American divisions in the airline industry are emerging: British Airways has stated it could voluntarily reduce its emissions to half of 2005 levels over the next decade; and Virgin's Chairman, Richard Branson, has stated he is willing to pay a carbon tax on his aviation business, and has steered some $3 billion in company funds into research projects for non-fossil sources for jet fuels and other greenhouse gas reduction measures.

The London lawsuit could be the first in a series of trans-continental legal battles to come, prompted by global industries facing very different approaches to climate change taken by Europe and the United States, where emission limits have thus far been stymied in Congress.

Over the next year, FRONTLINE/World and CIR will report on key issues of
climate change in a joint project–Carbon Watch–focusing on the multi-billion-dollar carbon trading market. We'll look at which proposals to reduce emissions by 2020 really add up; at the hidden interests behind these solutions; and the new industry players.

An important new report sheds light on a common challenge faced by journalists around the world: fear of British libel laws. The UK's laws are far more friendly to litigants than those in the United States (and most other developed countries), and global figures and businesses--recently, in Iceland, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Ukraine--have increasingly sought to have their libel cases heard there, according to the report published last week by the Center for International Media Assistance. The report's author, Drew Sullivan, a founder of the Sarajevo-based Bosnia-Herzegovina Center for Investigative Reporting identifies a disturbing trend: Publications around the world, including those in the United States, must increasingly vet their stories according to British libel laws due to the potential for global distribution made possible on the internet.

Many thanks to Drew, who's work with the Balkan CIR we've highlighted in the past. He's pulled together the growing body of evidence that British libel laws--as well as those of Ireland, France and Australia--have created a form of "libel tourism", in which litigants search for venues most likely to gain a positive verdict, often irregardless of the truth of allegations in a story. One hopeful sign he's also identified: The state of New York recently passed a law ("Rachel's Law," prompted by the case of U.S. author Rachel Ehrenfeld, who refused to accept a UK judgment against her favoring a Saudi financier she'd investigated) which blocks state courts from enforcing civil damages from a UK libel suit if the judgment falls short of ensuring authors the same free speech rights they have in the United States. A similar bill passed the US House of Representatives last year, and is now making its way through the Senate--which would establish an important principle protecting US journalists (at least) from the far reach of British libel laws.

Download the report here.

Even on a normal day in the Bella Center, we suffered from information overload: there was the official daily program, press conferences, side events and presentations by the country delegations all competing for time.

With 15,000 people buzzing through the complex, we seemed to bump into a story at every turn ­ at the cafe, in the coat check line, or from an unlikely tap on the shoulder. In the midst of this, the media center became a refuge of relative calm, as hundreds of journalists quietly typed, edited and filed their reports, trying to make sense of all the activity.

But just when we thought we knew what was going on, the whole dynamic changed on the last day. (See the video for that!) Now that the heads of state were in the building -- Jiabao, Obama, Lula, Chavez -- scheduled events were not just "subject to change," they seemed designed to deceive, sending journalists in one direction as VIPs headed in another.

The media began roaming in packs. We didn't always know whom we were trying to capture; we just knew we didn't want to miss it. After all, Obama would be speaking -- although we didn't know when -- and finally the "Deal or No Deal" issue would be resolved.

When he took the podium around midday, his speech created more questions than answers. The media center began to hum again and negotiators locked themselves behind closed doors. None of us would leave until well past midnight.

Days later, and we're still trying to decode the deal in Copenhagen.

I'm sure there will be a flood of reactions to the "agreement" reached today, which made things pretty quiet and tense in the press center. People were hunched over computers talking in multiple languages, first trying to interpret President Obama's speech -- "hugely disappointing" seemed to be the main reaction -- then following the last-minute back-room bargaining he was engaged in trying to salvage a deal.

But I'm going to go against this wave and continue following the aggressive push here toward carbon markets and the debate over how to regulate them.

This is where the only real money lies at this point, anyway.

During these past two weeks, the Crowne Plaza hotel has been temporary home to the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), which represents global banks, brokerage firms, commodity traders and energy companies at the apex of moving billions of dollars through the global carbon markets.

The buying and selling of so-called carbon "offsets" is now the fastest growing commodity market on earth. Worth practically zero in 2005, the market transacted $150 billion last year; and that number is expected to explode into the trillions once the U.S. passes its own emission limits next year.

With genuine fears about the economic consequences of a market growing this big this fast, traders at a panel on Thursday were grappling with how much regulation was appropriate as carbon emerges as the epitome of the 21st century commodity.

Not surprisingly, there was consensus among the panelists, which included a member of the IETA, an executive with EurEx, a German commodity exchange that opened a carbon trading facility in Chicago last year; and a policy expert with the investment bank, JP Morgan.

Carbon is becoming much like any other commodity but with one key distinction: It is designed not to be delivered (like oil or gold) but to be eliminated, presenting an array of potential regulatory challenges.

David Hunter, the IETA's director for U.S. policy said the group was firmly against a federal cap and trade bill introduced by Senators Collins (R-ME) and Stabenow (D-MI). Measures in the bill want to avoid some of the highly speculative investments that have driven Europe's carbon market, which is regulated under provisions of the Kyoto treaty.

The U.S. bill proposes to cut out middlemen and to strictly limit trading activity between those industries that have emission credits and those industries that need them.

Hunter disputes some of the biggest conerns the bill is designed to address -- chiefly that the market is growing so rapidly it could quickly devolve into the bubble-and-bust scenario that kicked off the global economic crisis two years ago, and that the market could be exposed to the same manipulations the electricity industry went through in the 1990s.

"Nothing like that could happen in the carbon markets," Hunter told me, "because carbon [commodities] are just a piece of paper."

He is right in the fact that, unlike other commodities, no physical commodity is ever actually delivered. Instead, it is an unorthodox financial instrument containing a promise not to emit greenhouse gases.

Richard Folland, a senior climate change and energy adviser at J.P. Morgan, now one of the world's largest carbon trading firms after buying British carbon brokers Eco Securities last fall, argued that minimal regulations are necessary but that overly intrusive regulations could end up “diminishing liquidity.” And contrary to fears, he said, expanding the number of "market actors" would make the market more difficult to manipulate not less.

Overall, the discussion provided a stark contrast to the main emissions negotiations at the Bella Center. No matter how today's non-binding agreement is received and changes things, the carbon markets will continue to grow at an exponential rate.

Inside Bella there was abundant talk about the growing cataclysmic symptoms of global warming, and much dodging around money. At the Crowne Plaza, there was much talk about money, and barely a reference to reducing the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the next year, FRONTLINE/World and CIR will report on key issues of climate change in a joint project—Carbon Watch—focusing on the multi-billion-dollar carbon trading market. We’ll look at which proposals to reduce emissions by 2020 really add up; at the hidden interests behind these solutions; and the new industry players. This week, our reporters blog from the Copenhagen climate change summit.

Brazil and the United States, the two key players in the REDD negotiations, are now squaring off. Negotiations are down to the wire and one major division remains. Hold on as we head into U.N. speak. Here's what is at the heart of the dispute:

Brazil, with the support of the European Union, is arguing that all deals on forests be conducted on a national basis -- so any market mechanisms involved have to be conducted and overseen by national authorities.

The Brazilians argue this is the only way they can ensure that deforestation activities don't simply move from one state to another, and the only way to stop this problem is at the national level.

The United States, with strong vocal support from Colombia, is arguing that such deals also be conducted on what they call a "sub-national" level -- meaning that individual states or regions, depending on the country, should be allowed to cut their own forest deals, irrespective of whether they fall in line with national policy.

Brazil and the United States, the two key players in the REDD negotiations, are now squaring off. Negotiations are down to the wire and one major division remains.

This sub-level deal making, say opponents, only encourages shifting the problem of "deforestation into another state."

Earlier this week, we spoke with Eduardo Braga, governor of the powerful state of Amazonas in the heart of the Amazon jungle, about his position. Braga has gone through something of a transformation on the question of "states rights" in Brazil.

Until recently he has been a strong supporter of Brazilian states being able to negotiate their own forest deals within their borders, which have become a primary revenue source for Amazonia and other heavily forested states.

In fact, last year Braga signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the state of California to cooperate on forest preservation projects and alternative energy technologies. The hope on both sides was that the forests of Amazonas could be used to offset emissions by California state industries on the arrival of tighter emissions controls expected next year.

This type of transaction may not be as simple now that Brazil's states and federal government are presenting a united front on preventing such unilateral deals from happening. Braga told us that any American partner approaching Brazil with a carbon offset project would have to do their homework first.

"We are not going to support your emissions at the cost of the standard of living of our people." That's the difference now," he said.

"If you do your homework and establish your target to reduce your emissions of greenhouse gases, then you can come to us to help mitigate further emissions," he told us.

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has conceded that carbon markets may play a limited role in preserving Brazil's and other countries' forests. But to get there, the Brazilian negotiators have added an interesting obstacle course and are calling the shots.

The REDD Ahead

In the latest REDD negotiations, and echoing Braga's change of heart, Brazil has taken the position that if developed countries want to gain access to the countrys forests to offset their emissions, they must first demonstrate their own commitment to reducing greenhouse gases at home.

Specifically, Brazil is asking that no more than 10 percent of a developed country's excess emissions can be written off against forest preservation schemes, and that this would only happen after those countries had already committed to reducing their emissions by 30 percent from 1990 levels.

So doing the math, a country with a stated 30 percent reduction goal would have to reach 33 percent to receive the keys to the carbon-rich magic kingdom of the Amazon.

According to Kate Dooley, a forest policy analyst for the UK-based NGO FERN (Forests and the European Union Resource Network), this offer is only on the table if developed countries stick to their commitments to continue negotiations on a binding global agreement under the Kyoto protocol.

Few close to the REDD talks believe these conditions will be met.

Over the next year, FRONTLINE/World and CIR will report on key issues of climate change in a joint project—Carbon Watch—focusing on the multi-billion-dollar carbon trading market. We’ll look at which proposals to reduce emissions by 2020 really add up; at the hidden interests behind these solutions; and the new industry players. This week, our reporters blog from the Copenhagen climate change summit.