The Cost of Global Warming Greed

How do you make money? You could build a factory that makes chairs or open a store that sells chairs. But of course if you're in the government, you make money by finding new sources of tax revenue, which helps justify giving yourself a salary hike. But what if you're not officially in the government? That's what pork is for, and while environmentalists don't seem to like cows very much, they do love their pork.

"Green" is more like pink thanks to the kind of pork embedded in Obama's stimulus package. The billions ladled out for everything from green jobs to making buildings green to green energy helped shove whopping fistfuls of money into the pockets of environmental consulting groups and companies.

Tesla Motors, a much hyped company which doesn't so much produce cars as magazine articles about itself, got nearly half a billion in federal funding. This for a company that makes six figure sports cars assembled in the UK and powered by shopping carts full of laptop batteries that virtually no one has actually driven. Not to mention a company with an embattled leadership, embroiled in numerous lawsuits, which prior to the 465 million in Federal funds was firing its employees through text messages, because it was down to 9 million dollars in the bank.

Is there really a good reason why half a billion dollars in Federal funds should be paying for luxury sports cars for the rich and famous to be assembled by British workers, whose key corporate investor is Mercedes Benz? Of course there is, because Tesla is "Green" and "Green" is unquestionable.And the same people who view the Ford Explorer as "immoral" for popularizing suburban family SUV's, think that a six figure sports car powered by over 6000 laptop batteries is as "moral" as it gets.

"Green" is not about science, it is about the color of money. It is about greed and class. To understand "Green" and the entire absurdity of man-made global warming, you don't need to look at charts and figures. You just need to look at Al Gore's net worth, which went from around 2 million to over a 100 million dollars. Gore didn't make that money building homes for orphans, he made that money by promoting a crisis and investing heavily in the companies that would stand to profit from it.

Imagine a man standing by the shore on a calm sunny day. He begins to cry, "Flood, flood", and though the river remains still, after an hour or two, people begin to worry whether he might be right. And that's when he opens his "Flood Prevention" concession. That isn't only Al Gore's moneymaking scheme, it's how to make money by creating a crisis that doesn't actually exist. And in the process, environmental stocks have become the new defense stocks. All that was required was to ram through a bill to tax every American in order to fight a war on carbon emissions.

And that's where pork becomes outright loot, because the Al Gores of the Global Warming Panic industry aren't satisfied with waiting for crumbs of pork from the table of congress. What's a few billion here and there when you have to keep lobbying legislators for it. Instead they want to take it directly from you. Taking money from government is big business, but taking money from the pocket of every American, now that is mega-business.

Enter Cap and Trade, in which Al Gore's Wall Street buddies will make billions trading something even more worthless and unreal than mortgages taken out by people who couldn't actually afford them. They'll trade carbon emissions, getting businesses to pay for their "carbon emissions", which of course means you'll be paying for them every time you buy a product, not to mention pay your energy bill. Of course trading carbon emission is a lot like trading in how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's an artificial market created and enforced by government legislation. It has no actual value. Not even the value of a Fannie Mae mortgage. Which is the whole point.

Cap and Trade will create a "product" that no one needs, and will then insure that it's in demand. The companies set up to profit from it will cash in. The average American will be ponying up the cash for it, one way or another. The Wall Street people who have pre-ordered Teslas will be able to take them for a drive. You'll have to settle for a CAFE mandated matchbox car that's death on wheels in any collision with the Tesla.

Since the standards will have to be made more stringent all the time to save the earth from carbon emissions, which is a lot like proposing to save the earth from hydrogen or oxygen emissions, the artificial market will maintain its demand. Every time a factory becomes more "efficient" and invests money in becoming greener (which if they're politically connected will be underwritten by Federal grants), the standards will be tightened. The only answer of course will be to buy more carbon credits.

To understand the totalitarian insanity of this, imagine that you were told that every time you breath out, you are actually destroying the world with your carbon dioxide emissions. The solution will naturally be to regulate your carbon dioxide emissions, which must fall below a pound a day, a ratio to be achieved by limiting your mobility and productivity. Of course if your breathing goes above the metered range, you can buy the right to breathe some more from your friendly neighborhood carbon emissions dealer.

But none of this is really about saving the earth, is it. The same planet which survived collisions with huge chunks of rock from outer space, regular volcanic eruptions and Earth Day concerts, is in no danger whatsoever from the fourth most abundant element in the universe. It's about greed. And it's about class. It's about the sort of people who drive Teslas and Priuses, and the sort of people who drive Ford Explorers and Hummers. It's about the sort of people who make money through hard work, and the sort of people who make money by convincing the government to hand over a share of their money to them. In the name of the Environment.

And with nearly a trillion in carbon credits to be auctioned off in the first seven years alone, we're all set to sail into the "Green Economy." The Green economy being a vapor economy built on reselling worthless government mandated tokens that will allow some companies to stay in business. Like most socialist schemes, Cap and Trade presumes that government control will prevent the bubble from bursting. In reality like the housing boondoggle, this latest unholy mixture of socialist capitalism will make fortunes for a handful and wreck the economy on a scale yet unseen and perhaps unimagined. With the financial sector still reeling and a number of banks and institutions under outright government control, the Obama Administration's green plans will mean easy money for them now, and another financial disaster later.

The problem with mixing socialism and capitalism is that you can't actually force people to buy things. Nor can you force factories to remain in cap and trade nations. And if you can't keep the golden goose alive long enough to bleed him dry, you're left with a third world "People's Democracy" economy. Which is why the real cost of global warming greed will be the destruction of the last remains of American industry and manufacturing.

You can tax people, but you can't make them work for a living. You can take over companies, but you can't make them innovative or profitable. And you can steal and loot, but sooner or later, even Washington D.C. will have to face the fact that the economy is not a closed system, and if you spend enough time fattening your own wallet and bailing out and stimulating your contributors, you will kill the golden goose and be left to play Kim Jong Il, with a lot of power and no economy to exercise it over.

Cap and Trade has outsourced Federal taxation to Wall Street, just in time for Wall Street to be Federalized. The result is an abomination that's two parts capitalist, three parts socialist, and rabidly greedy. By banking on a phony crisis, the environmental lobby and the Obama administration have transformed taxation into a commodities market. The resulting alliance makes it hard to tell apart the private sector from the government, not that there's any point in even trying, because in the final result it's the big promoters of a phony crisis, such as Al Gore, that will profit, and the rest of us who will lose out.