Many are wondering why the mainstream media are so slow off the mark reporting the revelations of sleaze and obvious criminality now emerging about the climate scare ringleaders. I can tell you a few reasons. Just think about it. The wealthy capitalists who run the media will be perfectly positioned to become key players in the Carbon Plantfood Reduction Schemes, trading nothing, and making no real difference to global warming (which would be a good thing anyway), but starving the atmosphere of plant food and thereby starving the poor - but the capitalists, who just love a corruptible market, will be perfectly positioned to skim their percentage off the top and become even wealthier than they are. The rest of us, meanwhile, see our fuel and electricity costs go through the roof and watch our standard of living plummet.
And how about the poor? Well, the idea of buying carbon credits is that the buyer goes right on adding plant food to the atmosphere by using power of running a vehicle, but someone somewhere else is paid to not do so. To not do so? Yes, paid to refrain from using electric power and climbing out of third world poverty and backbreaking toil lugging water for miles, lighting the hovel at night or using a computer to gain an education. I leave out of this the claim that the money will go to setting up 'clean' alternatives because none of these technologies actually work on a large scale. Yes, you can supplement your own power with a solar cell on the roof or a small windmill, but power for the backbone of civilisation cannot be got that way due to the low energy intensity and therefore the high costs of harvesting it and bringing it to where it is needed.
Wealth and power, in whatever guise, supports this scheme because it is corruptible, not because it will do a darn thing to 'save the planet'.
Re: ClimateGate: Thinking ten impossible thoughts before ...
This ridiculous scheme has been in effect in the EU for awhile now, and it is every bit the sham you describe. Europe still has heavy industry, and of course whatever those industries produce must be mitigated by carbon offsets. Meanwhile, people outside the EU, like say, Bosnia, Turkmenistan, etc., not being stupid, started dusting off long dormant and inefficient smoke-belching factories or power plants for the sole purpose of being paid millions of euros to shut them down again.
Naturally, the consumers of whatever the EU factory was making, be it widgets or electricity, pay all the more for it, as this ridiculous cost is passed on to them. All the while, the EU autocrats in Brussels pat themselves on the back for leading the way in...whatever they think they are achieving.
Re: ClimateGate: Thinking ten impossible thoughts before ...
Hi Patrick,
It is truly sad and amazing that so many otherwise intelligent people cannot see the stupidity of this. At least if we gave them an honest handout, they wouldn't need to use the power station trick and create real pollution in the bargain.