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At first glance, one might think “Carbon Criminals” is meant to describe the people who extract carbon-based fuel, sell it to the public at a competitive price, and in the process, allegedly edge the planet towards a catastrophic environmental collapse. But perhaps one would be wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with questioning our inordinate dependence on fossil fuel, or taking measures to improve the process of extracting and burning fossil fuel in order to protect our environment. To fail to regularly and scrupulously upgrade safety procedures from top to bottom, throughout the fossil fuel industry, may indeed be considered criminal. And as our technology improves and our prosperity enables us to do more, it is arguably criminal to fail to make the burning of fossil fuel a cleaner proposition each and every decade. But the real criminals are not the industrialists who have made carbon based fossil fuel the engine of civilization – the real criminals are the faceless bureaucrats and cynical opportunists who have convinced us we have to auction and trade carbon emissions allowances and carbon offset credits.
Most people still haven’t thought about how this entire scheme is going to work. And even those who have given this considerable thought, such as the bureaucrats at the California Air Resources Board, are often still in the dark on the details. Read their “Scoping Plan,” and draw your own conclusions as to their readiness to dramatically transform our economy, our [...] Read More
Back in 1970 when we celebrated the first Earth Day, what would we have thought if we had known what environmentalism would become by 2010? Back then I was in 7th grade, and an avid member of my Junior High School’s “ecology club.” We planted trees, collected litter, and painted all the garbage cans on campus green, among other things. And back then, as now, the teachers were enthusiastically encouraging the students to care about the planet.
The results ensuing in the 40-50 years since “Silent Spring” was written and the first Earth Day was celebrated are impressive. When I grew up in California’s Santa Clara Valley in the 1960′s, on a bad air day you couldn’t see the Santa Cruz Mountains five miles away. Then we got rid of unleaded gas and mandated catalytic converters and today, with ten times as many people living in what we now call the Silicon Valley, there is never more than a faint wisp of smoggy haze, even on the worst days. We cleaned up our rivers, got rid of acid rain, saved the Condor and countless other magnificent wildlife species, and on and on and on. And then we went too far.
Today environmentalism is run amok. It is the creator of artificial scarcity, the enabler of the very corporate greed its denizens naively decry, it is a faith and a religion, an ideological smokescreen for statism and socialism, and it has lost most of its connection to the original values we [...] Read More
In 2006 California’s legislature passed AB32, the “Global Warming Solutions Act,” a measure that was touted as a trailblazing breakthrough in the dire challenge to avoid catastrophic climate change. Enthusiastically signed by Republican Governor Schwarzenegger, with “early action” measures diligently enforced by Attorney General Jerry Brown, praised by climate crusader Al Gore, this legislation became the model for the world to follow. But the devil is in the details.
In the Spring of 2007 California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) got to work on an implementation plan, in order to fulfill the legislative mandate to have AB32 fully enforced by 2012. Three years later, after countless public hearings, meetings with industry leaders, and endless legal, economic, and scientific analysis, CARB has a lot to show for their effort. CARB has produced so much material, in fact, that it is impossible to briefly summarize the myriad regulations that AB32 has already spawned. Implementation of AB32 will dramatically impact pretty much every aspect of human activity.
The premise behind AB32 is that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant, and that virtually eliminating CO2 emissions is necessary to prevent the planet’s climate from overheating, with all the apocalyptic consequences; rising oceans inundating coastal regions, epic droughts cascading through the world’s fragile forests and killing them, extreme storms, acidic oceans, collapsing agriculture – the end of life as we know it.
If you accept this premise, than the goals AB32 sets forth are perfectly [...] Read More
A citizen’s initiative that looks likely to make it onto the November ballot this year is the aptly named “California Jobs Act,” which would suspend implementation of AB32, California’s Global Warming Act, until unemployment in the Golden State drops down to 4.8%. Passed in 2006, AB32 calls for California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) to write new regulations designed to lower, by 2020, California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. According to CARB’s report “California 1990 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Level and 2020 Emissions Limit,” in 1990, Californian’s emitted 433 million metric tons of “CO2 equivalents” in 1990, and by 2004 these greenhouse gasses had increased to an estimated 484 million metric tons.
Back in 2006, when AB32 was passed by California’s State legislature, and signed by Governor Schwarzenegger, California’s economy was at the crest of the debt-fueled housing-bubble boom. Now that California’s unemployment rate is nearly 13%, the highest in the nation, it is dawning on California’s voters that schemes to go it alone and adopt the bleeding edge of climate mitigation policies may not be the best prescription for economic recovery. Notwithstanding promises of abundant “green jobs,” and visions of a prospering “green economy,” what is most likely to be the economic outcome if California fully implements AB32 by 2012 as planned?
There are several examples surfacing that suggest CARB’s original economic assessment was overly optimistic. An [...] Read More
One of the most lucid recent commentaries that addresses the question of climate politics and money is by Australia’s Joanne Nova, who posted “The Money Trail” on March 4th. As we wonder again whether the consensus of scientists regarding climate change – if there ever was such a thing – is now unraveling in the wake of climategate, glaciergate, amazongate, methanegate, etc., it is important to also take another look at the money trail.
My own position on climate change has been consistent for many years. Back in 1995, when I launched www.ecoworld.com, I was determined, among other things, to present both sides of the climate change debate. A post from 2008 entitled “Environmentalist Priorities and the Global Warming Scare” offers links to dozens of reports EcoWorld published on the issue of climate change. These reports provide ample references to primary sources of data, and document a growing conviction that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have little to do with any recent climate change, that predictions of impending catastrophic climate events are improbable, and that the cure is worse than the disease. But what about following the money?
A June 2009 CIV FI post entitled “The Climate Alarm Industry” lists several reasons why it is ludicrous to accuse climate skeptics of being motivated by financial incentives, when the financial incentives to be a climate alarmist are several orders of [...] Read More
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a man who always stood up for the worker, once made this very contrarian statement “I would continue where others have stopped, and I would rise when others sleep.” This is an inspiring explanation of the moral worth of polemics, or being contrarian for its own sake. Because not only are polemics a potentially pointless, occasionally perilous game, tolerating the polemicist is the only reason we have political freedom. One might also add that indulging contrarian thought is the only way we preserve a glimmer of truth, during every time our world is seized with misplaced monolithic zeal, and consequently, nurturing the contrarian is a way civilization can better adapt and embrace disruptive and productive innovations and more quickly evolve. So how would workers or contrarians view our latest global panic, the war on CO2 emissions? In considering this question, the differences between unions, who care about workers, and environmentalists, who care about nature, become quite interesting.
Global warming policies and environmentalist policies in general are only in part about global warming or environmentalism, they are more generally about to what extent we redesign our government to give more rights to government and fewer rights to individual property owners. Environmentalists claim their policies benefit the economy, but one might just as easily argue that is not only false, but dangerously false. In the name of environmentalism we are not simply slowing our economy down, we are failing to develop and maintain infrastructure necessary to avoid natural disasters. A certain [...] Read More
If the old saying were coined today, it would be “a few trillion here, and a few trillion there, and pretty soon we are talking about serious money.” Who knows what trillions mean anymore – is the U.S. a $15 trillion economy, or are dollars fluid, and benchmarks meaningless?
Deficits are now counted in trillions of dollars, joining quantities previously ascribed only to global reserves of major commodities, or the annual output of large nations. One trillion. A thousand billion. A million million. Debts and deficits are now routinely counted in trillions with a T. Will requiring counting and auditing CO2 emissions, then taxing and assessing fees on CO2 emissions – and auctioning permits to emit CO2 – become the mechanism for governments to address their exploding debts and deficits, now denominated in trillians, and will such policies best advance the interests of humanity and the earth?
Commodities, along with the value of economic output, or economic capacity, wax and wane in the flux of the global market. If you try to completely regulate all this capitalism, if you try to eliminate all the waxing and waning, you are very likely to create a political economy resembling either fascism or communism. Enforcing a regulatory scheme so comprehensive as to encompass literally all combustion, concerned not merely about clean burning but burning itself, cannot help but require such tyranny.
“A trillion here, and a trillion there, and pretty soon we are talking about serious money.” Is the output of the entire global economy still estimated at approximately $50 trillion dollars per year, even in this slow-down, and if the dollar devalues, what does [...] Read More
The “World Future Council” has recently issued a press release stating “Crimes against Future Generations need to become taboo” (pdf), with a lead sentence that states the following: “How can we prevent and prosecute activites today that severely threaten the living conditions and health of those living in the future?”
Does this sound sinister to you? If you don’t buy into some of the dominant concepts of mainstream environmentalism today, if you appreciate the potential for unintended consequences, and if you are paying attention to the ongoing momentum of mainstream environmentalism, you will find this pronouncement sinister indeed. Here’s more:
“The fundamental rights of future generations need to be recognized in international justice. Investigating the concept of Crimes against Future Generations is a very important initiative to support this,” according to Prof. Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger, a World Future Council “Councillor.”
Like most utopian concepts, this all sounds great except for one glaring, fatal flaw: We can’t predict the future, or the judgement of history. For example, in their press release, WFC notes the problem of rainforest destruction due to oil drilling – ignoring the fact that most rainforest destruction in the past decade or more has been financed by proceeds from European emissions allowance auctions, because “carbon neutral” biofuel plantations were considered until fairly recently to be eligible carbon offset projects. Deforestation on the scale of hundreds of thousands of square miles was enabled by social engineers of WFC’s ilk, their [...] Read More
On May 22nd, 2009, in the Wall Street Journal there is a commentary by Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg entitled “The Climate-Industrial Complex,” and that description says it all. One would think Lomborg is pointing out the obvious – that climate alarm is the pretext to orchestrate a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich – but sadly, this observation is still obscured by overwhelming and terrifying visions of planetary meltdown.
Lomborg has never said global warming isn’t a reality. Like most skeptics, he acknowledges there has been about a 1.0 degree (centigrade) increase in the average temperature of the planet in the past 150 years. Lomborg doesn’t even question the latest and greatest climate models, which, despite the disastrous worst case scenarios that are constantly emphasized, only predict minor sea level rise and moderate temperature increases over the next century. Lomborg’s primary mission has been to simply perform basic cost-benefit analysis on the measures being proposed to allegedly reverse global warming, such as it is. When you do these cost-benefit exercises (read “How Much for a Degree“), the rhetoric of those who think we can actually control climate quickly is seen for what it is – misguided and often misanthropic.
In his May 22nd commentary, however, for the first time, Lomborg went a step further, and exposed the agenda of the “climate-industrial complex.” He quoted U.S. President Eisenhower, who coined the phrase “military-industrial complex,” and said of it [...] Read More
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