Copenhagen

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.

A few weeks ago we asked you to send in your questions on climate change for our reporter Mark Schapiro while he was in Copenhagen covering the talks.

Many of you did, sending them via webcam, email and from the summit itself. Questions came in from Tibetans, Russians, Pacific Islanders, Brazilians and many Americans.

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.

"Where there are forests, there are indigenous people. Where there are no forests, there are no indigenous people."

Onel Masardule, a Kuna leader from Panama, smiled at the simplicity of his statement. You could read this as part fact, or depending on the results of the current negotiations, part prophecy.

During the last 24 hours of negotiations, a bloc of countries led by Papua New Guinea, with support from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Colombia, have resisted efforts to impose a package of safeguards to ensure the credibility of forest offsets.

The three countries -- each with substantial amounts of uncut forests and a questionable ability to oversee them -- are objecting to three major provisions, according to Greg Picker, a former member of the Australian climate negotiating team and now a consultant on forest issues to the delegation.

On route to Copenhagen, Mark Schapiro’s first blog post follows a surprising mid-air announcement.

A lot of conflicting agendas are converging on the U.N. Climate Change Summit this week in Copenhagen, and reporter Mark Schapiro and producer Andres Cediel will be in the thick of the action. Throughout the next two weeks, they will be talking to diplomats, industry leaders, activists, economists, and many others with a stake in how the world proceeds from here.

On Democracy Now!, CIR's Mark Schapiro discusses his reporting trip into the heart of the carbon offsets market on the Atlantic coast of Brazil–where a tree owned by General Motors is given an offset value of $1.

Schapiro's report is part of a joint project between CIR and FRONTLINE/World that launched this week: "Carbon Watch: Tracking the New Currencies of Global Warming"