Dear David,
In your daughter's recent letter she wrote that even if I don't accept the reality of greenhouse gases, all the other arguments hold true, and are reason enough to legislate limits on carbon production and emissions for individuals, communities and corporations. I am not sure I agree.
The H20 (water) and the CH4 (methane) molecules in the atmosphere completely overwhelm the supposed 'global warming effect' of the CO2 (carbon dioxide) molecule. But more importantly, history has taught us, time and again, that doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is usually a mistake.
For several years I have been warning The Left not to jump aboard the climate bandwagon but to read the science instead of relying on the spin. I am what the German Green Party once called a Fundi and, like most Fundis, I believe that in the long run Fundis are Realos.
Getting things done that need to be done by using unproven facts and partial theories about greenhouse gases and climate change is a tactical error. The road to hell is paved with good intentions...and unanticipated consequences...and is trod by those who put their trust in faith instead of facts. Computer forecasts are not facts. Nowadays any fool can command a spreadsheet to produce nonsense.
In the beginning, the Environmental Movement insisted that no one should dump anything into the atmosphere or into the oceans, nor bury obnoxious substances underground or leave them trashing up the planet. From this came the Polluter Pays Principle. They should also have insisted on the Closed System Principle backed up by binding treaties and financial penalties imposed on those responsible for industrial and distribution pollution and man-created environmental pollution (e.g. cities). They should have been compelled to take in their own rubbish at their own expense.
Instead The Right diverted The Left and The Greens off into the weeds by packing them off (all expenses paid) to exotic places to chat at pointless summits (Johannesburg) about meaningless treaties (Kyoto).
The practice of the past 500 years has been to permit the owners of private property...and in particular judicial persons who should never have been given equality before the law with real persons in the first place…to enclose and trash the commons and to steal the personal possessions of real people. Passing on private costs to the personal and the public purse is wrong. It is time to make it unprofitable too. This means laws, courts, fines, bailiffs and prisons.
The invention of the Global Warming Scare with Carbon Dioxide Emissions as its cause has enabled The Right to drastically limit the application of the Polluter Pays and the Closed System principles to a tiny percentage of the pollution they are responsible for.
Duping environmentalists to go along with Carbon Emissions Exchanges...with many more exotic exchanges to follow...legitimises the practise and ensures that the public purse picks up the tab for even this relatively minor clean-up operation. The world has been steadily moving from carbon to hydrogen as its source of piped energy for decades and recent increases in oil and gas prices will accelerate the trend.
The Left has been fooled by the Climate Scare into extending into the Real Economy, the application of market mechanisms and exchange manipulations, which had previously been limited to the Financial Economy.
The techniques of the Commodity Exchanges in London, New York and Chicago are being rapidly expanded until, the Exchange Masters can, at a whim, throttle the lifeblood out of the worldwide supply and distribution system delivered by the globalisation of the latter part of the 20th century.
Until now, apart from the froth and exuberance of futures contracts, these exchanges have served a useful purpose in hedging against volatility in supply and demand, and smoothing fluctuations in the prices of real commodities that readily lend themselves to such manipulations…the overground metal mines, air- and container-ship freightable plantation produce and the like.
But now the scope of these market practices…cornering, insider trading, speculation, gambling etc…are involving ever more exotic commodities like electricity and pollution with the practices institutionalised to create structural monopolies that are impossible to dismantle and easy to meter and monopolise. Pollutants like sulphur dioxide should not be in the atmosphere in the first place.
Electricity grids, gas pipelines and wind farms are the wrong answers for a planet which receives enough energy from the sun in forty-five minutes to meet its needs for a year. We are on a slippery slope.
The Right is intent on transforming Financial Capitalism into Resource Capitalism. And it will use the Disaster Capitalism described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine to force us through the transition. The end result will be global genocide on an unparalleled scale. Susan George has described how the global operation will be carried out in The Lugano Report. When written, this was fiction. It is rapidly becoming reality.
To add insult to the coming massacre, the elitists and their global conglomerates are getting paid for their ethnic cleansing of the planet. Just as bankers create money out of nothing so these Exchange Masters receive their licences to pollute for nothing to sell on to the Real Economy for windfall profits.
Energy Companies get their carbon credits for free…or they have until now. One tiny light at the end of the tunnel is that someone in Whitehall has finally woken up and is pushing the idea of auctioning off the carbon credits as if they were bandwidth for mobile phones.
The Left is being taken for a ride by the One World Government conspirators. These men in suits are not nice guys and it's time The Left started playing hardball again. Instead they are letting themselves be outgunned and outmanoeuvred. It's time to wise up and figure out how to get even. Getting mad is a pretty good way to start.
Best wishes as always.
William Shepherd
Monday 11th August 2008
