I know you are going to be shocked when I tell you that the bankers have their fangs in the climate change agenda like a swarm of feasting vampires.
According to the global warming jihadists, “The planet is a space-borne oven that is melting the polar ice caps, destroying the polar bears and turning Des Moines into beachfront property.”
Okay, if not Des Moines, surely Trenton.
The point being that the boundless Global Warming PR campaign is a cleverly orchestrated smoke screen for a financial agenda driven by the Daddy Warbucks crowd of the New World Order.
Their solution to Des Moines and a myriad of other imagined disasters is to pass laws that “dis-incentivize” the production of carbon dioxide by taxing its use.
Oh, and they turn the tax into a kind of security called a derivative so Goldman Sachs and friends can feast on the billions in commissions and markup marketing these things to other banks and corporations.
The marketing folks have branded their carbon dioxide taxing scheme “carbon credits.” And what a scheme it is.
The formal premier took place in Japan.
Kyoto Protocol
The skyline of Kyoto, Japan, is dotted with many of the country’s oldest Buddhist temples. One of these ancient shrines is built on a lake. The water in the lake is so pristine that the best way to tell the real temple from the reflection is to throw a rock in the water and see which of the images ripples.
This, an introductory allegory, is to make the point that things are not always as they seem, even in the land of many Buddhas.
In 1997, an international agreement was signed in Kyoto seeking to limit greenhouse gas emissions. It was named after the host city and carries a handle better suited for a Robert Ludlum novel: The Kyoto Protocol.
The Kyoto Protocol and a subsequent agreement called the Marrakech Accords set “caps” or quotas on the maximum amount of greenhouse gas a country was allowed emit. In turn, each country was to then assign carbon emission caps to its own businesses and other organizations, which are referred to as “operators.”
Thus, every business in every country that signed the Kyoto Protocol has an allowance assigned to it of the amount of carbon dioxide that can be produced.
Businesses that exceed their allowance must buy some “carbon credits.” Carbon credits are securities, like stocks or bonds, and are bought and sold as such. These can be purchased from “green” companies that have not used their allocation of carbon, or they can be bought on a “carbon exchange”—a stock exchange for trading carbon credits.
Let’s take, for example, a furniture factory. The factory is emitting 125 tons of carbon dioxide per year, but its allowance is 100 tons. The factory has two choices: it must either cut its production to bring it into alignment with its 100-ton quota, or buy 25 credits from, say, a biofuel company that is producing “carbon neutral” fuel—an entirely different view of the badly misdirected biofuel craze.
As the population grows, as new companies are created and existing ones expand their productivity, they use more energy. And thus, carbon-based fuels and emissions will increase. The quotas for a country, however, will actually be lowered.
You get the picture: the rule of supply and demand prevails; as the quotas mandate less carbon, the value of the credits increases. Thus, the Kyoto Protocol provides a built-in price increase for the credits … and the economic suppression that goes along with it.
An article by Rolling Stone’sMatt Taibbi laid the structure bare beautifully:
“The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the ‘cap’ on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405?page=8
There’s only one problem with this agenda: carbon dioxide is not harmful. Carbon monoxide, yes. Carbon dioxide, no.
“Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.” —The Oregon Petition
Again, some of this was covered in the first installment of “Anatomy of a Con Job” in last month’s issue. But to fully understand the carbon credit market, we review here some of the basics.
The planet’s opinion leader on man-made climate change was the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—was because, in 2013, leaked emails revealed that the climate oracles at the IPCC had cooked the books à la Bernie Madoff.
Referred to as “Climate Gate,” it turns out the IPCC “scientists” had altered key information about climate temperatures. Turns out they were little more than spin-doctors pushing the idea that man-made carbon dioxide was the cause of catastrophic Global Warming. Their opinions were widely accepted.
Madoff stole money. The IPCC stole minds.
Using the data from the IPCC, climate alarmists have screamed that thousands of scientists agreed that the “science on global warming is settled.”
Trouble is, there are only a few dozen scientists who have agreed to drink that Kool Aid, while dozens of former IPCC scientists have awakened to the organization’s jack-in-the-box science.
Here is a mere handful. Dozens more are available at the link below.
Dr. Lucka Bogataj: “Rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide don’t cause global temperatures to rise …. Temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed.”
Dr. John Christy: “Little known to the public is the fact that most of the scientists involved with the IPCC do not agree that global warming is occurring. Its findings have been consistently misrepresented and/or politicized with each succeeding report.”
Dr. Richard Courtney: “The empirical evidence strongly indicates that the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming hypothesis is wrong.”
Dr. Willem de Lange: “In 1996, the IPCC listed me as one of approximately 3,000 “scientists” who agreed that there was a discernible human influence on climate. I didn’t. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that runaway catastrophic climate change is due to human activities.”
Dr. Mike Hulme: “Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous …. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was only a few dozen.”
Dr. Yuri Izrael: “There is no proven link between human activity and global warming.”
http://climaterealists.com/?id=8355
Cap-and-Trade Legislation
Since the U.S. did not sign the Kyoto Protocol, a repeat convention in Copenhagen, designed to pressure Uncle Sam and others to sign up, turned out to be little more than a cacophonous blizzard of press releases. Then, in 2010, President Obama committed to a goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to 17 percent below the 2005 levels and reducing emissions by 80 percent by 2050.
But then, El Presidente has a habit of making promises that never happen—and this is one of them.
To get the full magnitude of where this insanity is going, consider the British. The former UK Secretary of State for the Environment promised legislation that would set legally binding lower carbon emissions by 60 percent of the current levels by 2050. The current Secretary, Ed Davey, has promised to cut greenhouse gases by half through 2025.
The British Parliament, which appears to be a collective mental disorder, has gone so far as to give local bureaucrats the power to enter a person’s home without a warrant to, among other things, check for refrigerators that do not carry eco-friendly energy ratings.
We have here a system literally going mad before our eyes.
Carbon emission limits, and the buying and selling of “credits” to deal with them (called Cap-and-Trade), are a solution created to deal with a nonexistent problem driven by what is arguably the most well-orchestrated PR campaign in history.
The solution not only establishes a system of planetary economic control by setting carbon emission limits on every single business (and in the UK, on every citizen), but will, incidentally, make its creators and their allies rich beyond all imagining.
On a tactical level, Cap-and-Trade does two particularly destructive things: (1) it suppresses productivity and thus increases unemployment and drives down GDP, and (2) it creates a massive new international Ponzi scheme that has the international banks orgasmic with delight.
There is the stock market, where stocks and bonds are traded, and a commodities market where things like gold and silver and corn, wheat and soybeans are traded. Now cometh the carbon exchanges where carbon credits in the form of derivatives are bought and sold.
Banks and other entities are buying carbon credits, packaging them up, and selling them by the billion. Europe has the biggest carbon market, followed by China.
Carbon trading amounted to about $60 billion in 2013 (up 15% from a year earlier), and is projected to reach trillions.. There were powerful efforts to get Cap-and-Trade legislation passed in the U.S., but in a rare act of sanity, the Senate said, “No.”
There is an interesting side note to the effort to mandate carbon limits in the United States. It is a different look at the high priest of Global Warming, Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.
It is not hard to imagine Al Gore in a minister’s collar.
After all, he went to Vanderbilt Divinity School when he was a young man—an act of “purification,” his wife would later say.
And he has called greenhouse gases “a moral issue … deeply unethical,” which must be why he warns of environmental Armageddon with such a religious zeal:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2006/05/ask_mr_science.html
“ … unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes, including more and stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina…”
“Today, we are hearing and seeing dire warnings of the worst potential catastrophe in the history of human civilization: a global climate crisis that is deepening and rapidly becoming more dangerous than anything we have ever faced.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5441976
There’s just one little point that should be known about Brother Al’s sermon: if Congress had mandated the Cap-and-Trade legislation that was being pushed while Brother Al was sermonizing, Al the Righteous, Al the Moral, Al the Ethical, stood to make billions.
You see, while he was pushing governments around the world to cap carbon emissions, which forces companies to buy carbon offset credits, he was also the chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM), which invests in … you guessed it … carbon dioxide offsets.
A World Bank Private Sector blog regularly gushes about Brother Al, whose partners in GIM were priests of Wall Street propriety—the suspender-wearing bankers from Goldman Sachs. Co-founder of the company was David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Other former Goldmanite big shots included Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris.
Assisting with the creation of Al’s ethical investment house was none other than the godfather of the Wall Street derivatives that fueled the global financial crisis and the star of the trillion-dollar bank bailout of 2008, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hammering Hank Paulson.
Amen, Brother Al. Amen.
People know that it is greed that runs through the veins of Goldman Sachs. They are in a class by themselves, plundering the financial markets like pirates of old. But what about Al the
Ethical?
Few have reported on the conflict of interest in Al’s incessant warnings of the greatest catastrophe in human history if Congress didn’t not legalize carbon restrictions, when his investment company was the largest shareholder in the only U.S. carbon exchange.
Interesting, eh?
But don’t think Brother Al and the Global Warming zealots have given up. There’s too much money at stake and control of the global economy is much too seductive.
August of 2014, President Obama announced that he would skip the bothersome Constitutional provision that mandates approval of two-thirds of the Senate to ratify a treaty, and would commit the United States to an international treaty capping carbon emissions.
“President Obama has committed the United States to forging an international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, without Senate ratification, which the Constitution requires.”
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2014/10/23/obama-avoid-senate-vote-new-climate-treaty
Carbon credits are a vicious scam. Financial products made possible only by political mandates, they are based on a nonexistent problem and will destroy the economies of the world while making international bankers and the global elite rich beyond imagining. e
There are critical environmental problems on this planet which, if not reversed, can result in devastating consequences. But global warming is not one of them and the solutions being pushed by vested interests are not only bogus, they are causing the very problems real environmentalists are concerned about.
SOLUTIONS
- All effort should be made to nullify carbon credits on an immediate basis. This holds true whether on a local, national or international basis. Assuming the President signs a climate agreement at the U.N.’s Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015, it may be a PR victory, but not likely a political one. The Constitution mandates two-thirds approval in the Senate. Nevertheless, your Senators should hear from you loud and clear to ensure the agreement does not become law in the United States.
“This system, which may sound market-friendly, is something only a bureaucrat could dream up. The twist is that the carbon market exists only because the government’s imposition of a cap creates an artificial scarcity in the right to produce energy.” —Deborah Corey Barnes, the Police Report, Washington, D.C.
https://capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/v1185475433.pdf
The damaging effect of such a law on the U.S. economy, or the economy of any nation that adopts similar legislation, is obvious to a blind man. Efforts to pass such legislation should be derailed, or, if already passed, repealed. California, for example, has already passed legislation that mandates a 25 percent cut in emissions by 2020. No one has been corny enough to brand the legislation the state’s “economic terminator,” so I’ll do it here.
- Countries should opt out of the Kyoto Protocol and nullify it, along with any actual agreements that were made in Copenhagen.
This similarly applies to all underdeveloped countries, though from a different perspective. Carbon credits destroy economies, environments, and life. But third-world countries hold considerable leverage: if they opt out of the Kyoto Protocol and forbid carbon credits, it does not matter what laws are passed in the U.S. or EU, the carbon credits system will fall flat. It requires developing and underdeveloped countries’ cooperation, as they have the carbon offset resources (rain forests, etc.).
It is important for them to understand that if they join the system and go for the quick buck now, they will make some short-term money selling credits, but as they gradually industrialize, they will have to buy them back—and what will the cost be then? The African Union has the capability to enforce this.
- Effective action is needed to actually protect the environment: Reduce the use of harmful fertilizers and gradually replace them with non-harmful products (eliminating the production of biofuel would cause the most dramatic and immediate improvement). This would rapidly improve the condition of our rivers and oceans.
- De-escalate deforestation by prohibiting biofuel production, which would also bring about the most immediate environmental improvement and species preservation.
It doesn’t take a great deal of insight to see the amount of control any governmental body could exert over a planet, a national economy, a business or a household by enforcing a system of carbon emission standards. This is, as one observer noted above, nothing less than complete control of the production of energy.
When Gorbachev, speaking for the Club of Rome, said, “The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘internal disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order,” carbon credits are exactly the kind of key to the NWO he meant.
Because, in the final analysis, global warming is nothing more than a PR campaign for global government.
We must act quickly and decisively. The Club of Rome has a massive head start and control of much of the media. But neglect of our responsibilities here is not an option. Not if we value the power of choice, the freedom to produce, and economic self-determinism.
Let’s put this joker back in the box and keep it there. Civilization doesn’t need him.
John Truman Wolfe