Meet The Global Warming Cash Cow

Remember the Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth? It was probably the most successful environmental documentary which succeeded in raising international awareness of global climate change. The movie made close to 50 million dollars worldwide. When Al Gore is not giving lectures around the world and writing books about global warming, he manages investments in his company, Generation Investment Management, with his friend from Goldman Sachs, David Blood, as the managing partner of the firm. It’s basically a company which sells “carbon offsets” and invest in “green technologies”.

Other companies also seized the opportunity to make money. Did you notice all the “eco-friendly” products are usually more expensive than the other goods? For example, energy-efficient light bulbs are often more expensive than incandescent light bulbs. Many people go green simply because it is trendy and want to do it for social recognition ( Don’t get wrong, I am not telling you to stop making rational environmentally-friendly choices because you are afraid of  being seen as pretentious. There are far more sensible and practical reasons to go green other than to be seen as cool).

Not only are businesses making huge gains by going “green”, governments collect large amount of  dollars from tax payers by implementing carbon taxes, gas taxes and more. Most of the time these taxes already in our water bills, electricity bills, car taxes etc. without us even realizing it. Besides, the government subsidize a lot of money in large scale agribusiness. Corn, one of the major crops grown in Canada, is not only grown as food, but also be used in biofuels. Unfortunately, this has cause world-wide food prices to spike drastically. The idea of using staple foods for energy is wrong. What happens when there is a large scale drought in the growing areas. Do we not drive, or not eat? More importantly, who pays for all of these government subsidizes and policies? Of course, the tax payer will be asked to contribute vast amounts of their personal wealth to pay for the lie. Already, governments around the world are salivating at the prospects of separating you from your money. The rain forests will also suffer tremendous loss. The poor in these nations will realize they can earn more by slashing the forests and planting food for biofuels. These means the rain forests will disappear ever more rapidly (this will reduce the huge carbon sink provided by the rain forests making the CO2 issue worse).

The general population will also pay much more for food. This is happening now in poorer countries, where riots have broken out over food prices. These will only get worse as governments mandate biofuels. Companies grow what makes the easiest profit, and right now that is for biofuels at the expense of our food sources.

Energy prices, such as gas, will also sharply rise. Oil,coal and nuclear are the cheapest forms of energy. That is why they are currently the most utilized. But with mandates of biofuels and renewable sources (very expensive), energy costs will continue to sharply increase.

The unfortunate truth to all of this is the poor are the most drastically effected. Wealthy and middle class people can absorb the increases more easily. The poor (who are the ones rioting) can not absorb the higher costs for energy or food. Thus they will be forced to eat less, and barely survive. Once this gets to bad, then the government will kick in with higher taxes on the wealthy (the producers of the world) and middle class. They will make the excuse that poor need more and more help (only because of the original government mandates). Of course with government, for every $1 you give them, only about 20% makes it to the people who need it. The rest is absorbed by government beauracracy. Expect taxes to raise sharply if we allow them to implement more “green” solutions.

The bottom line, conservation is always a good thing. I myself often turn of the lights when I am leaving my apartment, recycle my garbage every week etc. But having government mandates on such things as fuel and green products will always have a net negative impact. The poor in this country and others are already beginning to feel the pich from the AGW lie. If you think going green is a great idea, then maybe you should stop to think about the consequences.

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2 Responses to Meet The Global Warming Cash Cow

  1. avatar Chris Ho-Stuart says:

    Interesting thoughts here.

    I really have to control myself to resist that phrase: “AGW lie”. It’s a pity you said that, because it’s silly. It detracts from and undermines your main point (as I see it); knowing the denier articles (I spend a lot of time on them!) isn’t going to change people’s mind about the underlying physical science of what causes warming. That’s basic background information to look at the more tricky issue of how you respond to it.

    You do have some worthwhile challenges on economics.

    I’m in Australia. By and large, I support some recent government initiatives over here — such as the recent “carbon tax”, or “carbon price”. But on the other hand, some other government initiatives have been a disaster.

    Examples. There was a government program to encourage people to insulate their houses. The financial incentives and support for companies to do insulation were enormous. What happened, unfortunately, is we got a heck of a lot of shoddy operators cashing in, doing a hack job of badly installed insulation. Many house fires resulted from improper installation with a number of deaths. A lot of work had to be redone at considerable expense. It was a great idea, implemented very very badly.

    Solar power for homes was encouraged by giving generous feedin payments. In my state, the payments were particularly generous. That is, you get lots of money for feeding power you generate back into the grid. The problem is…. this power comes when the grid least needs it. The costs to government were huge. So the program had to get cut. That caused a big outcry with all the people who had put in systems based on calculations of how long it would take to payback to installation. Government backtracked… the payments would continue — but only for existing systems. End result. The incentive to help development of the industry (which was the major benefit in my view; the power itself comes at the wrong times) vanished. Demand for new systems fell like a brick, all the start up companies lost business, and the effect on the solar power generating industry was dreadful.

    There was also a government support program to assess houses for energy efficiency. Another great idea in principle — but the implementation of it was a disaster again. Heaps of people did the course to allow them to be assessors, so there was a huge glut. People were pressed to do lots of assessments really quickly — devaluing the worth of highly personalized information that was available from more conscientious assessors. The phone in lines to let assessors submit reports and get paid for them (by the government) were hopelessly undermanned given the glut of assessors, and assessors were waiting on the phone for hours to try and get their reports in. It was a total shambles.

    Bottom line. The physics, and science, of global warming is complex but the conclusion that there IS warming and identification of the major cause — anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions — is not in any credible scientific doubt. Denier articles trying to attack this background are uniformly silly. But there ARE crucial and difficult scientific questions about projecting the magnitude of change and the various knockon effects; and there are extraordinarily difficult issues with formulating a policy response that actually helps deal with the issue.

  2. avatar Alicia says:

    Fiona, Your post is very passionate. My primary concern with your draft is the missing link/citations to where your reference material comes from. There are many general statements that need backing up. Specifically, I think you need to back up the statement, “he owns a company called Generation Investment Management, which reaps huge profits off global warming fears.” Be careful the use of the word ’cause’ “Unfortunately, this has cause world-wide food prices to spike drastically.”
    You should define AGW. Chris (previous commenter) has left you some very important and detailed comments. I encourage you to review them seriously.

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