Armageddon Pays!

Remember that loon you used to see in movies and cartoons with the sandwich board that read, "The End Is Near?" Well, he's still out there, only now he's making money with his message. In case you don't know what a carbon credit is, it is a way for big business and Hollywood celebrities to buy their way out of the guilt they feel for supposedly destroying the planet with their carbon emissions, or as I like to call it, a "scam." Consider, if you will, Blue Source, an American offset company that takes money to shoot a bunch of carbon dioxide into the ground to "bury" it. Where they do this, of course, is in depleted oil wells, because it pushes up the remaining oil for them to collect and sell, which in turn causes more fossil fuels to be burned. Burn the oil, collect the CO2, collect the oil, burn the oil, you get the point. Then, of course, there are the companies that are getting paid by their customers for doing things that either don't work or are already mandated to do, like Dupont. In an article by Fiona Harvey and Stephen Fidler for Financial Times (www.ft.com), it's reported that a Financial Times investigation uncovered "Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions" and "Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially." Well, I already knew that! What I didn't know is, "the burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period." What does that really mean? There's a lot of money in it. People who feel scared, or guilty, or both about global warming are more than willing to fork over their hard-earned dollars and Euros to companies that promise to end the planets' suffering, and, somewhere up in Heaven, P.T. Barnum is turning to Boss Tweed and saying, "I told you so." Get enough suckers to buy into this "end of the world" garbage about global warming, and you can make a tidy profit. Get a has-been politician to make a movie about it, a rock star to issue limits on toilet paper usage, and a Democrat in the White House, and you can pave the way for a tax on carbon usage. Armageddon turns out to be a very lucrative industry for everyone but you and me, the people who have to pay for the lies.

photo from fujirockers.org