Gaurdian.UK Fresh from the devastation they have wrought on the global financial system, some of the world’s leading investment banks meet in London today to discuss how they can “cash in” on carbon. But at least delegates and speakers at the Cashing in on Carbon conference are open about not trying to reduce emissions or helping the environment. Oh, no. This event is to see how “investment banks can profit today from an increasingly diverse range of
carbon-related investment opportunities”. Particularly reassuring is the emphasis on “hybrid and complex carbon credit structured products”, and how to identify investor demand for them in the US; “derivative/synthetic carbon products”; and “sub-index arbitrage strategies”. Also, we can refresh our knowledge of the basic options for “productising carbon” and of “access channels for producers … speculators, proprietary traders and investors”. Good to see that execs from Lord [Nicholas] Stern’s company, IDEAcarbon, will be there, too.
Essential surveillance kit for the new green police: the Energy Saving Partnership has taken out a patent on Heatseekers, thermo-imaging vehicles which, at full potential, have the capacity to identify 1,000 properties an hour, or 5,000 properties a night, that are leaking carbon. “Once the property has been scanned, a dedicated team of energy advisers will visit householders to show them the thermal image scan of their homes,” says Inspector Knock-on-the-Door. That’ll go down well after midnight.
England….what can you say?
Is it time to line my walls with tin foil yet?
Just another example of how Government IS the problem. How dare the government—any government—take a look at private property to determine if heat and energy is being wasted.
Don’t they realize that punishing people for wasting energy should be the duty of bounty hunters armed with appropriate laws?
Cleaning up the environment, energy misuse and spread of liberal crap is easy, and I know how to do it. Just turn everybody into informants. Hell, it worked in East Berlin for nearly fifty years. Half my life.
A thermal image of a house does not prove that it is “leaking carbon”. It proves that it’s not well-insulated and is leaking heat.
A house heated by geo-thermal energy (and therefore using no carbon at all for heat) could be leaking heat if the windows are open.
Yah…just like the Bay Area…no burning wood fires on Fridays…gonna start making sure you’re recycling or you get fined. Cripes!
“A house heated by geo-thermal energy…”
There’s not really a lot of geothermal energy in use in the UK
Good!
When polluting the environment is no longer “free” like it is today, people may reconsider what they do.
As president, I would divide the cost of military operations in middle east to protect oil and bake it into the price you pay at the pump. How do you like them apples?
Suggestion:
When the inspector arrives at your door, answer the door naked, and leak some carbon containing fluid on his shoes.
Welcome to city seventeen.
Recently, when I heard something about how these “carbon credits” could be sold and traded. It occurred to me that Al Gore was trying to devise a new world currency to replace Gold. Instead of it being based on something valuable, like precious metals or gems. It’s based on what’s perceived as a pollutant. Or rather the lack of it. The fallacies of this being, who decides what a carbon credit is worth, and how the hell is it measured? I’ll bet they haven’t hammered out these details, between the nations. And if the US government’s deficit spending habit is any
indication of the future. How long before the US and most others are well into the red, in their carbon credits? This crap will only penalize the little guys (“Joe the plumber”), as usual. Who can’t just wave their debt aside, the way big corporations and nations can. This will be a new world order currency, that’s really designed to bring back the bad old days of feudalism. Or just fleece all of us out of even more of our personal property.
Every new financial instrument, seems to be another opportunity to screw over the general populous. It was Allen Greenspan who talked us into this credit mess. And now it’s Al Gore turn to talk us into another credit mess. Carbon credits. With the lame excuse that it could clean up the environment. Yeah, like sub-prime lending made home ownership briefly possible, for all. But who owns title to those homes now? The bailed out banks. And it will be the big polluting corporations that get bailed out in the future, when their carbon credits come due. But not the average Joe.
Here’s how the big polluters get away with it. They built taller smoke stacks, so their pollution is carried farther away and isn’t detected at the plant sites, at ground level. The governments know this, but play along. Meanwhile, our cars, homes, and small businesses get probed for every little emission and leak. And the governments employ their zero tolerance policy, should we not meet some arbitrarily set levels. That doesn’t apply to the much larger entities, that get waivers whenever they fail to meet even their overly generous pollution limits.
According to one documentary (seen only on Youtube and Aussie Tv), the whole Global Warming scare was cooked up by Margret Thatcher’s regime, to get the coal miners off her back. The idea being, to demonize coal, and get the UK to go Nuclear.
This got me thinking about the post-cold war. And the loss of business to US companies that use to make all that weapons grade nuclear fuel. With no new nuclear plants build in decades. They’ve had nobody to sell their plutonium to, except foreign nations. So just maybe Al Gore and friends own a large piece of Nukes Inc, and are pushing for new reactor plants to replace all the coal and oil fired ones. Because they got us believing carbon is the devil. Right now, the wrong people own the oil wells and coal mines. The wrong people being “not Al Gore and his kind”. Although he also owns a big chunk of Occidental Oil too. And doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to divest himself of it.
Great carbon vans driving alongside of the TV licencing vans with the road tax vans right behind them… soon they’ll be convoys of 600 vehicles driving the streets (probably with google-street cams on top of each) checking for infractions of law, tax, child welfare, animal welfare, politically incorrect speech or terms, people that are fat and generally diversity. Or maybe instead of vans they’ll just attach a CTV camera with infrared and heat monitoring sensors on to each citizen then some poor sod in an Indian call center will have to constantly monitor us to make sure our diet, thoughts, excerise level, and energy consumption will be within acceptable standards.
If George Orwell could see us now he’d probably think “Blimey, I never thought they’d go that far….”
But don’t worry America, you’ll be the same us soon enough. They are already taking everyone’s fingerprints and mug-shot at the border….
Maybe it’s time we start dealing in lead when confronted with such crap. It never ceases to amaze me the levels companies and governments will sink in the name of profit / power.
#6 – Good! (for whom?)
Carbon credits are new taxes disguised; trading them is just another scam, designed to “redistribute wealth” – from you to the government and it’s friends.
Imagine we lived in a world where the 19th century level of pollution still existed. Every household and factory spewing carbon dust into the air from burning coal, wood, waxes, and sperm whale oil. Imagine, with our current population levels, just how dark the skies would be, how filthy you would get from just walking around outdoors for more than a couple of hours per day.
If you can’t imagine it, then you could take a trip to any major industrial center in China, or dozens of other nations, whose governments don’t even try to reasonably control pollution.
The US and the EU have, for the most part, very reasonable pollution control laws and regulations. Everyone ‘pays’ for polluting already, through higher costs-of-goods.
Products from China aren’t cheaper just because workers make less money. The Chinese government has made a point of economic expansion, at any cost. More pollution, sick or dying workers and citizens, destroyed natural environments, and substandard goods are the results.
Putting ourselves at an even greater economic disadvantage with the carbon credits and trading BS is not good government or planning.
BTW – when you and Greenpeace decide to use the Rainbow Warrior as a garbage scow cleaning up the Pacific Trash Flotilla in an effort of leading by example, then maybe we can start worring about how much carbon my electric house emitts.