I have to admit, I waver on Climate Change. But the methodology employed to subvert climate change intervention, and in particular the distractions created by them to real action, are equally applicable to energy security interventions and efforts to expose them are valuable.
“The Story of Cap+Trade (why you can’t solve a problem with the thinking that created it)” is a deceptively simple analysis of the devil in cap and trade’s detail. Designed by Enron and Goldman Sachs (of subprime mortgage fame), the carbon emission cap and trade system is a device to allow “business as usual” to continue while creating a false sense of progress AND lining the financiers pockets with the next Ponzi scheme. It fits in around here in the big list of “business as usual climate solutions”:
- Find a new planet
- Act normal
- Give up
- Cap & Trade
- Deny everything
- Bribe someone
Instead, we’ve all signed up to a market deal. Immediately, all inter-Governmental effort in hammering out a meaningful cap is suspended. The usual and by now thoroughly discredited “market will provide” dream.
Next, we give away free permits to the biggest polluters. It’s not cap and trade, it’s cap and giveaway. In Europe, this decimated European carbon prices while creating billions of extra profit for polluting companies and forcing up energy prices.
Finally, we have offsetting – the ability to montetise your alleged savings by converting your carbon “reductions” and selling them to a polluter. So – chop down a forest then replant it with rubber trees. Scrap a fictitious expansion plan and claim the carbon not produced in credits. Do the whole thing in developing countries where things are nice and vague. Emissions and profits carry on increasing. Ponzi schemers keep on getting rich. Governments get to point at all the trading going on. We get to carry on holidaying in Marbella minus a guilt complex – what’s not to like ?
The result is a huge distraction. Government’s ability to make laws is weakened. Everyone thinks everything is OK (well except the folks who paid for the party and are stitched with the cleanup bill, but they don’t vote and have no money to be duped out of).
Quite a lot of info, for an apparently childish cartoon. Show it to your kids.
The Story of Cap & Trade from Story of Stuff Project on Vimeo.
