calaverasslim said:
eeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, whats a carbon credit???
Heard of 'cap and trade'?
It is a government created commodity.
Various businesses are issued a fixed amount of pollution credits. Some need more credits than they are issued to function, while other businesses do not.
This means those that need less than they get can sell theirs to the businesses that need more for a profit.
The system is sold with the plan to issue a certain amount of credits each year and then reduce the total credits issued, squeezing everyone and forcing change to less pollution by making it too expensive to operate in the same way.
For example in the US one of the most abundant natural resources is coal.
It accounts for the largest source of electrical power (those electric cars run by burning coal someplace else instead of gasoline in the engine.)
It is dirty and produces a lot of pollution when used, and is often mined in ways that destroy the land, but at a time when people complain about oil prices and domestic and foreign related policies, realize the threat nuclear power poses from the Japan example, realize the danger from drilling for oil offshore as caused in the Gulf from one single oil well, coal really is key to producing necessary levels of energy.
Contrasted against risks coal use creates moderate known and anticipated problems, while several other energy sources have unexpected catastrophes of great magnitude every so often.
But with cap and trade, coal burning plants, oil refineries etc, must spend money to purchase credits, then pass on that increased overhead to the consumer in higher costs.
This also makes coal, one of our few abundant US resources, less competitive with some other power producing options through the artificially inflated cost of using coal.
Which is of course the intent, but most renewable energy sources produce tiny amounts of power. Entire hydro electric dams might power a small area, hundreds of acres of wind turbines another small area. It is impossible to satisfy even a decent chunk of energy demand with such sources, without littering the entire landscape with such things.
Every building would need to be covered in solar cells, open space covered in dangerous wind turbines, free flowing rivers damned up, etc While still costing a lot more to maintain, and so making the generated electricity more expensive.
Which of course is why carbon credits and fees and fines can make it happen, making what would currently be seen as unreasonably high energy prices standard through constant regulatory price increases in cheap energy sources, bringing the cost of production of inexpensive energy sources up towards the cost of production from cleaner sources. Forcing people to spend the same amount of money anyways, so the clean option doesn't seem so bad anymore. The intent is so the only choice is artificially expensive energy from dirty sources, or actually expensive energy from expensive clean sources.
This artificial government created market, that many in Wall Street love (it is a new high value mandated commodity created out of thin air to manipulate in the market and extract real wealth from society with), results in a product called a 'carbon credit'.
Various businesses can be given or 'earn' carbon credits for stupid things, many of which do nothing to help the environment.
They can then sell these carbon credits to make a profit.
There is even businesses created on a business model to intentionally maximize how many carbon credits they will be issued even though they won't actually need them, so they can then sell these to others allowing them to pollute more.
This would be an example of one of those stupid carbon credits, essentially being given money for reducing pollution by flying around in a high fuel consumption turbine powered helicopter shooting camels while creating more pollution than those camels ever would. The carbon credits earned doing that high pollution creating activity can then be sold to a business, allowing that business to pollute more than it otherwise legally could.
break.
