Carbon offsets to form new bubble

I am no economist, but for an amateur I have a track record in predicting economic trends at least as good as Paul Krugman’s and I didn’t bother attending an Ivy League school to be able to do that.

In predicting economic bubbles there are two things to remember. One is that most bubbles deal with intangibles, such as Michael Milliken’s junk bonds and the dot com bubble that saw insane valuations for non-performing stocks simply because they had an “E” in front of their name.

The other is that most of the investment in bubbles is borrowed and leveraged, such as the recently collapsed U.S. housing bubble, as well as the sub-prime mortgage bubble that spawned bizarre financial instruments like credit default swaps and derivatives.

Well, gang, get your checkbooks out because you’re soon going to see the emergence of a brand new bubble from which a very small number of people will benefit greatly, while a huge number of people will lose their shirts.

This bubble is essentially driven by the Democrats and the Obama White House in collusion with the UN, having made a commitment to enact Draconian eco-legislation that will feature carbon offsets at its core.

Here’s how carbon offsets work: a company that emits carbon into the atmosphere as a by-product of its business transactions will be allocated a certain number of annual “free” carbon credits by the government. That company will be audited annually and if it were discovered that the emissions exceeded the allocation, then the company would have to purchase carbon credits (currently proposed to be valued at $40.00/ton USD) to cover the excess.

The cap and trade market is the most pernicious scheme ever foisted upon a civilization The tulip bulb mania of the 1600’s has nothing on cap and trade.

I posted on FR long ago that cap and trade was Wall St’s next big thing. After the dot com bubble busted in 2000, it took Wall St a couple years to get gov’t to promote home ownership and get banks to lend to anyone with a pulse. When the housing bubble exploded, Wall St had to find another cash cow. That is cap and trade.

Cap and trade as a moneymaker was actually thought up by the ENRON boys, Jeff Skilling and Kenny Lay. They met with POTUS Bill Clinton in the White House to push cap and tax, er trade. They knew it would be the most profitable venture any business could have. Selling air for $ was too perfect to be true. No cost, 100% profit, and all in the name of saving the planet. Who could be against that?

Unfortunately for Kenny boy and Skilling, the Wall St fraudsters at Goldman Sachs, etc., did not like the idea of some interlopers from Texas control such a profitable venture. Shortly after Bush took over, the Wall St boys used their friends in high places (ie gov’t) to take down Enron. With Enron out of the way, the path to profits was clear.

The only thing necessary to bilk the unsuspecting public was to convince them the earth was warming out of control. As a result of the evil energy companies (many from Texas again, hmmm, I sense a theme here) pumping noxious CO2 into our atmosphere, the polar ice caps were melting and civilization was doomed. How to get the public to go along with this, that was the question. Then the Wall St fraudsters hit upon the ultimate combination, one which would not be able to be stopped. Get the ‘one world gov’t’ UN, the liberal Democrat Party, the left wing enviromentalists, and Wall to dance to the same tune. Put a egotistic buffoon like Al Gore as the ‘face’ of the movement, and you have an unstoppable force.

In this collaboration everyone gets what they want. The UN gets control over and cash from the rich western nations, the enviromentalists get the ‘feel good’ notion that they were ‘saving’ the planet, the Democrats get power over the economy, and Wall St gets what they always get, mounds of cash.

The stage was set, and the only thing stopping this plan from working to perfection is one thing. The earth stopped warming. The hysteria you see on AGW goes up in proportion to the cooling of the earth’s atmosphere. The shift in the PDO, the deep solar minimum, and the record Antactic sea ice this summer as well as the recovering Arctic sea ice extent are conspiring to ruin the best laid plans of those who would steal our money, our economic freedom, and our liberty.

Who will win in this epic battle? My bets are on the sun and the earth. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but when it snows in October where I live, the people stop getting fooled.

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