Saturday, October 06, 2007

Enron And Carbon Trading

The Briefing Room has a report on the connection between Enron and Carbon Trading.

Amidst the talk about the benefits that Kyoto Protocol is supposed to promote, it is perhaps forgotten especially amongst the greenies how Kyoto was born in the corridors of very big business. The name Enron has all but faded from our news pages since the company went down in flames in 2001 amidst charges of fraud, bribery, price fixing and graft. But without Enron there would have been no Kyoto Protocol.

About 20 years ago Enron was owner and operator of an interstate network of natural gas pipelines, and had transformed itself into a billion-dollar-a-day commodity trader, buying and selling contracts and their derivatives to deliver natural gas, electricity, internet bandwidth, whatever. The 1990 Clean Air Act amendments authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to put a cap on how much pollutant the operator of a fossil-fueled plant was allowed to emit. In the early 1990s Enron had helped establish the market for, and became the major trader in, EPA’s $20 billion-per-year sulphur dioxide cap-and-trade program, the forerunner of today’s proposed carbon credit trade. This commodity exchange of emission allowances caused Enron’s stock to rapidly rise.

Then came the inevitable question, what next? How about a carbon dioxide cap-and-trade program? The problem was that CO2 is not a pollutant, and therefore the EPA had no authority to cap its emission. Al Gore took office in 1993 and almost immediately became infatuated with the idea of an international environmental regulatory regime. He led a U.S. initiative to review new projects around the world and issue ‘credits’ of so many tons of annual CO2 emission reduction. Under law a tradeable system was required, which was exactly what Enron also wanted because they were already trading pollutant credits.

Thence Enron vigorously lobbied Clinton and Congress, seeking EPA regulatory authority over CO2. From 1994 to 1996, the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million dollars - $990,000 - to the Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project promotes global warming theories. Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on environmental groups that support international energy controls to “reduce” global warming. Executives at Enron worked closely with the Clinton administration to help create a scaremongering climate science environment because the company believed the treaty could provide it with a monstrous financial windfall. The plan was that once the problem was in place the solution would be trotted out.
You don't suppose that all this CO2 hysteria is a con do you?

I'll let you calculate the odds.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

8 comments:

Karridine said...

How can CO2 be a con?

No, no... CO2 is an ACTUAL COMPONENT of the biosphere, and as such fluctuates as the Sun increases or decreases its radiation.

The Sun provides 99.8% of all radiant energy into the biosphere, regardless of CO2 content, human-made or naturally-occurring.

But humans create ACTUAL CO2, therefore...

...uhm, where was I?

Reliapundit said...

simon i gotta question:

when the CO2 bubble bursts will the escaping CO2 cause global warming?

Reliapundit said...

fyi: here're a few links to a recent co2 trading scam posts:

august

http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2007/08/
carbon-credits-are-scams.html

june

http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2007/06/
bbc-carbon-trading-failure.html

march 07

http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2007/03/
enron-esque-carbon-credit-scam.html

march 06

http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2006/03/
man-made-global-warming-hysteria-is.html

excerpt from 3/06 post (that's19 months ago!):

SO WHY ARE THE LEFTISTS MAKING SUCH A BIG STINK OVER CO2!? SIMPLE:

(A) It allows the Left to harrangue against industrialism, and attack the USA as an evil nation greedily "OVER-CONSUMING" the earth's resources and despoiling the world.

(B) It allows the Left to call for HIGHER TAXES, to raise money for bureaucrats to dispense to THEIR favorite causes, organizations or nations. (This reinforces a most basic presupposition of Leftism: Leftists think that an elite should pick winners and losers, and that the course of human events should not be the result of free people making choices for themselves - the invisible hand of the marketplace.)

(C) It creates a huge and artificial "CARBON TRADING MARKETPLACE" where another elite of new-fangled "CO2 arbitragers" can make huge profits trading CO2 rights from the Third World to the industrialized First World. The rationale is that this creates income for poor Third World nations in a way which is "non-polluting."

In fact, (because there IS NO REAL GLOBAL CO2 problem), all it does it make the traders rich - while raising the cost of energy for everyone, as it garners income for CORRUPT THIRD WORLD REGIMES: The people of the Third World won't see BUPKUS of this income, just as they have seen NADA of all the BILLIONS of dollars of direct financial aid to their "governments" over the last several DECADES!

juandos said...

IMHO reliapundit's comment @ October 7, 2007 2:49:00 AM UTC pretty much tells the tale in spades...

Libtards love their scams even though they try to claim its for the people...

Also you may be interested in reading Alan Caruba's "The Great Cap-And-Trade Scam"...

Like reliapundit infers, Alan Caruba says, "follow the money"...

M. Simon said...

Alan and I used to write for the Sierra Times. I don't know if he still does.

Thanks for the link.

Simon

M. Simon said...

Here is a working link to:

The Great Cap-And-Trade Scam

Anonymous said...

Mosh pit invades simonville

M. Simon said...

Anon,

You must be one of my fans at Climate audit.

Honored.