| And if you think this alliance is being entered into for your benefit, then you are an idiot! We should remember that the green-industrial complex's business interests played a role in bringing about the recession. The company whose collapse precipitated the credit crunch, Lehman Brothers, enthusiastically embraced the idea of carbon trading, which is held up by all members of the green-industrial complex as the way forward. In its 2007 report, The Business of Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities, Lehman expressed hope that it might become a "prime brokerage for (carbon) emissions permits", meaning it aspired to make money not only from speculating in mortgages but also from trading in thin air. Lehman was inspired by European carbon-trading schemes. Under the plan first proposed in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and introduced in Europe in the early and mid-2000s, the EU and UN allocated to industry legal titles to emit a certain amount of CO2. Because the titles are transferable and because large numbers were allocated to large corporations when the licenses were first introduced, there arose a market in carbon trading. Powerful businesses were able to sell their CO2 permits to smaller companies that needed to emit a certain amount of CO2. Yup, we are going to see a whole universe of rent-seeking and rorting that we've hardly imagined possible, and mostly at tax payers' expense. See here for a small example involving energy-saving CFL globes and the profits to be made, for awhile at least, from putting a fake price onto a fake commodity. Life was grand at first… The price for a tonne of carbon was at its peak of $25, and the nomination forms were rolling in at an incredible pace… Trade of demand-side certificates (carbon credits) mushroomed to almost 9 million throughout 2006, many times the previous year’s total… The scheme’s administrator was IPART, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal… (In 2006) IPART received the results from a Newspoll survey conducted on giveaway installation rates. Newspoll’s survey found that only four of every 10 bulbs found their way into light sockets — half the rate that the booming giveaway companies had been claiming credit for. Half-way through August, IPART made a shock announcement that slashed the installation discount factor accordingly to 0.4, halving the value of NGACs generated by giveaway programs.... The IPART announcement killed light bulb giveaways… Easy Being Green became insolvent and went into third-party administration in October 2007. |
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