We print money to bail out banks. Why can't we do it to solve climate change?

UK Guardian ^ | January 30, 2016 | by Matthias Kroll

[Oldeconomybuyer]

We need an estimated $1tn per year to stay below a global temperature rise of 2C. Creating new money might be the only way to meet this financial challenge.

The international community has agreed on an ambitious agenda to curb climate change. Some 195 countries have decided to try and cut greenhouse gas emissions to a level that will limit the rise in average global temperatures to well below 2C. The question we now face is: how are we going to finance the changes needed to reach this goal? Quantitative easing - creating new money - might just be the answer.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

So, Kroll the Troll, announces a proposal to burn one trillion dollars per year forever to stop climate change?

[Malone LaVeigh]

They’re going to have to kill a lot of trees to print up all the money they’re talking about.

[HiTech RedNeck]

What we knew as science used to be rooted in the bible dictum to “subdue the earth.” God wanted it. Since God wanted it, it was also conscience bound to be honest, to represent the best reasoning that humanity could bring to bear, and dishonesty was frowned upon and its results discarded when discovered.

We don’t even have science any more here. We have something worse even than the SWAG.

[HiTech RedNeck]

What they mean, is to stop the slyentists from goading all humanity. It’s a pay up scam.

[arthurus]

Actually they can do it, print and use the money, that is. By doubling the money supply they appropriate half of the resources of the system in which the money supply is doubled. The process is theoretically limited only to the total of existing resources. Actually the entire system breaks down when serious money doubling is attempted and resources, while being appropriated actually evanesce as less and less can be produced. The money doublers gain a larger and larger portion of a smaller and smaller resource base. Zimbabwe is the most recent example.

[arthurus]

It is not a non-problem. It is a deliberately misidentified problem. The problem being addressed is the unfair distribution of wealth i.e. the existence wealth that the self identified elite does not yet possess or control.

[Sirius Lee]

We need an estimated $1tn per year to stay below a global temperature rise of 2C.

I'll bet we can achieve that goal with one penny. Heck, I'll bet that we can stay under a 2C rise by cutting taxes across the board, shutting down the EPA, building more oil pipelines, and cutting the size of government.

[palmer]

We can, perhaps, limit the amount of human addition of CO2 but that will not affect the actual level of CO2 in the atmosphere because human CO2 is a tiny fraction of what is released by the oceans and the volcanoes, etc.

Not when we consider annual net release. The oceans and biosphere emit far more than human sources in fall and winter. But they absorb it all back and then some in spring and summer. That produces this wiggle:

That wiggle is not manmade. Nor can it come from sources like volcanoes. It has to come from natural release and natural uptake and we can't compare natural release to manmade release without also considering natural uptake.

Historically the ice cores show that the temperature rise precedes the CO2 rise

That is true and there would have been a natural rise in CO2 from the natural rise in temperature following the Little Ice Age. That rise would have been from about 280 ppm to about 285 or 290 ppm from a 1C rise in ocean temperature. Instead we have seen a rise of over 100 ppm. Also the rise is 2-3 ppm per year. That would require an ocean temperature rise of 1C every few years which is not happening.

That leaves volcanoes as the possible source. Then we simply ask ourselves, is it pure coincidence that more (mainly underwater) volcanoes became active just in the last century to cause the rise? Why not before that? Why not in the last 20k years for which we have pretty decent CO2 records.

[steve8714]

Because, what could possibly go wrong?

[HotHunt]

[Kid Shelleen]

Don't laugh too hard. If Al Gore can win a Pulitzer Prize and make millions of dollars from carbon credits anything is possible.
I can see the central banks, leftists, and Wall Street happily going along with the program. Its not like it is their own money.
instead of buying existing private and public bonds, central banks would buy our proposed green climate bonds

[angryoldfatman]

Welcome to Starbucks, Mr. Kroll. Oh, you want a venti latte? OK, that’ll be $45,000.

[PIF]

That’s not creating new money, it is inflating old money.

[Moonman62]

Because climate change as reported by the media and promoted by politicians is a fraud, that’s why.

[bert]

the way to solve the climate change issue is to eliminate the climate changers

so long as chicken little has a voice he will continue to shout his crap

[Recompennation]

Social justice paying with fake money, with monopoly money, with watered down currency. Put your life in a pot and draw one out, said van jones.
What we need here is free market system solutions to create jobs and wealth not money printing politicians.

[Rusty0604]

I’m laughing with you.

[Pollster1]

Why only print $1T to solve this problem. Why not print so much money we can give every Brit and Every American $1T? Or even give everyone on earth a trillion American dollars. If this economist thinks an extra $1T would be great, why not do something seven billion times as great?

[Rusty0604]

One hundred year bonds at a very low interest rate. The central banks would have to be forced to buy them because no one else would.

[TomGuy]

"... solve climate change"?

Trying to solve climate change is about like trying to control ocean currents.

As long as the globe rotates, we will have climate change.

If the consensus of progressives get their way, they will have imposed the biggest hoax in human history on the taxpayers on the the planet.

The BIG Lie.

Last week proved that Al Gore's contention/prediction of a decade ago (2006) was nothing but crapola. He predicted climate apocalypse by January 26, 2016. A couple of years later (2008), he predicted that the North Pole ice caps would be gone by 2013.

Hmmm. Inconvenient Truths.