Welcome to the February Green Business issue of NorthBay biz magazine. We decided a year ago to dedicate a monthly cover theme to green business in the North Bay, and the topic is even hotter now. We’re strong proponents of the idea that what’s good for the environment is also good for business. So please enjoy all the stories, special features and columns this month in the North Bay’s only locally owned business publication, NorthBay biz.
Beware: the next great government-created boondoggle will severely restrain the national economy and cost working families thousands of dollars annually while, at the same time, enriching insiders, brokers and interest groups who’ll reap billions—all in the name of combating “man-made” global warming.
This new cap-and-trade system will call for an immediate freeze on U.S. emissions and a host of other expensive mandates. In the resulting command economy, government “regulators” will hold sway over what kinds and amounts of energy will be made available to the nation. Under the new system, the government places an arbitrary “cap” on private-sector emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Each industry will be allocated a fixed quantity of these carbon credits to emit specific amounts of greenhouse gases. If a business emits more than its allocation, it can buy credits from other firms or pay a fine. If a business emits less than its allocation, it can sell its excess credits. This is a bureaucrat’s dream. This carbon market will exist because the government will have created an arbitrary, artificial limit on the right to produce energy. And when government controls your energy, it controls your way of life.
An emission trading system is already in place in the European Union. Hardcore environmentalists vehemently oppose it, claiming it lets polluters continue polluting by buying carbon credits. Critics on both sides denounce the plan as nothing more than a shell game, where you can buy dispensations for your sins. Regardless of its dubious impact on the environment, cap-and-trade will certainly enrich the financial and political prospects of its proponents. Before Enron’s financial collapse, CEO Kenneth Lay was a major booster. In 1997, Lay and other energy industry magnates met with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore to help develop the administration’s position regarding the Kyoto treaty to regulate international greenhouse gas emissions. In an astonishing moment of clarity, the Senate voted 95-to-0 not to ratify the Kyoto treaty. Persisting undeterred, Gore knew however, he was on to a good thing.
It seems that Gore has found some time between proselytizing and collecting awards to engage in some good old-fashioned capitalism. Whoever first said, “follow the money” was really on to something. Gore is the founder and chairman of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). It invests clients’ money in companies that are going green. GIM buys carbon dioxide offsets and is also closely linked to the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). CCX is the only carbon-credit trading firm in the United States. Guess what happens when the government mandates a cap-and-trade system to control greenhouse gas emissions, and everyone’s participation is mandated.
In December 2007, a global warming, cap-and-trade bill passed out of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee chaired by Barbara Boxer. This bill is seriously flawed and will inflict severe economic pain for literally no climate gain. Analysts have estimated costs at several trillion dollars. The bill will force all energy prices to rise—at the pump, at home and at work. Yet, once again, the bill fails to address nuclear energy as, at least, a partial solution. How can we continue to ignore the world’s largest source of emission-free energy?
And all of this is unfolding based on incomplete and unsubstantiated science. Far from the “consensus” portrayed by the media, more and more research is confirming there isn’t enough evidence to conclude whether or not man’s impact on the planet is causing global warming. In fact, more evidence recently is pointing toward the opposite. According to Alexander Cockburn’s The Nation article, “Is Global Warming a Sin?” prior to the start of the Great Depression in 1928, CO2 emissions produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas totaled 1.1 gigatons. This figure plummets to 0.88 gigatons, a 30 percent drop, by 1932 before it begins to rise again in 1933 to 0.9 gigatons. At the same time, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere grew from 305 ppm by volume in 1928 to 307 ppm in 1932. These days, it’s at 380. So even though man-made emissions decreased by 30 percent, atmospheric CO2 continued to rise, which makes it difficult to assert the rise stems from people burning fossil fuels.
Let’s continue to paraphrase Cockburn’s article: The CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased about 21 percent in the past century. The data on the world’s average temperature show about a 0.5 degree Celsius increase between 1880 and 1980, and still rising. But is CO2, at 380 ppm in the atmosphere, playing a significant role in retaining the 94 percent solar radiation the atmosphere absorbs? Or is perhaps water vapor, whose content in a humid tropical atmosphere can be as high as 20,000 ppm, more likely the culprit? Water in the form of oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the Earth and the Sun. Carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane. And water is exactly the component of the Earth’s heat balance for which the global warming computer models fail to account.
Water covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there’s 100 times more CO2 in the oceans dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses, the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. The greenhouse global warming theory has it backward. It’s the Earth’s warming that’s causing increased CO2, not the reverse. The human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces and volumes.
Painting this picture another way, according to Joseph D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, “If the atmosphere was a 100-story building, our annual anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be the equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor.”
At a minimum, further scientific research is necessary before we accept that man-made global warming is an undeniable fact. We should be leery of schemes, like carbon credit trading, that necessitate government seizing enormous amounts of additional power to orchestrate further social engineering, while simultaneously enriching the politically connected few at the public’s expense.
That’s it for now. Enjoy this month’s magazine.
