AP Runs Out Of Kool-Aid

It's  a miracle!


As sure as God made little green apples, miracles do happen. The AP is shocked, shocked, I say, about what it now sees as pure unadulterated fraud in the Carbon Trade business. No sooner did Chief Justice Roberts administer the flubbed swearing-in oath to President Obama, it was as if a veil lifted from their eyes and their ability to comprehend. They finally understood that the Kyoto Treaty and it's CO2 cap-and-trade processes were actually a scam designed to fleece money from industrialized nations (most notably the U.S.)..

Not only a scam, but one that costs industrialized nations a lot of money, does nothing to lower greenhouse gas emissions and supports the forced removal of people, the destruction of the environment and people's homes.

A Stanford University expert is quoted by AP saying that the carbon trading mechanism "is an excessive subsidy that represents a massive waste of developed world resources."

China, and other third world countries are being paid to build hydro-electric dams, primarily by European nations who signed the Kyoto Protocols.  China is not know to be sensitive to environmental issues, and as a result, winds up forcibly relocating it's people, and destroying a significant amount of unique habitat in the process. 

The AP has found that hydroelectric projects, whose climate impact is most widely questioned, have quickly become the No. 1 technology in the CDM, and China in particular is rushing in to capitalize.

The Chinese now have at least 763 hydro projects in the CDM approval pipeline and are adding an average of 25 a month. By 2012, those projects alone are expected to generate more than 300 million "certified emission reductions," each supposedly representing reduction of one ton of carbon dioxide. Even at recent depressed market prices, those credits would be worth $4 billion.

If the United States enters the Kyoto system, as proposed by President-elect Barack Obama, it would be the biggest player in a market expected to be worth hundreds of billions a year by 2030.

Environmentalists also point out that hydro power has long been a national priority in China. Since the 1990s — long before the CDM — the Chinese have added an average 7.7 gigawatts a year of hydro power, equivalent to six Hoover Dams annually, International Rivers reports.

In other words, Chinese planners aren't suddenly replacing emissions-heavy coal-fired power plants with emissions-free dams.

The Xiaoxi project design document, in fact, says Chinese regulations would block the building of such a relatively low-output coal plant here. But that's how planners determined the "emissions reductions" from the $183-million, 135-megawatt dam — by calculating how much carbon dioxide a 135-megawatt conventional power plant would produce instead.

That bottom line — some 450,000 tons of global-warming gases each year — would be added to RWE's permitted emissions if it buys the Xiaoxi credits, at a current annual cost of $8 million. And such calculations will be repeated at 37 other Chinese hydro projects where RWE will buy credits.

All told, the 38 are expected to produce more than 16 million CDM credits by 2012, legitimizing 16 million tons of emissions in Germany, equivalent to more than 1 percent of annual German emissions.

At today's low market prices, those credits would be worth some $300 million, paid to Chinese developers and presumably billed to German electricity customers, who by 2007 were already paying more than double the U.S. average rate per kilowatt-hour.

Utilities from Italy's Edison to Tokyo Electric are making similar deals for hydro-project credits in a dozen other countries, from Peru to India to Vietnam.

Rather than reduce their own emissions, "firms in developed countries are buying offsets that don't represent real behavioral change, real reductions in emissions," said Wara, the environmental law professor.

The U.S. GAO investigators said they learned that middlemen sometimes manipulate project paperwork to show a need for CDM financing, and they believe "a substantial number" of projects have undeservedly received credits.

The CDM system "can be 'gamed' fairly easily," said German expert Axel Michaelowa, both a critic and a CDM insider, as a member of the U.N. team that registers CDM projects.

The other amazing part of this miracle is that the AP is actually reporting this story....oh, that's right....Bush is gone.

Full Story....

Bush Years Were Good

Yes, that's correct....


Despite President Obama's continuing statements that we're in a crisis, Steve Landsberg in an article in The Atlantic has taken the position that economic events are not out of the historic norm, and the average citizen's life is better now that when George Bush took office four years ago for the following reasons:

You are better off than you were four years ago.

• After adjusting for inflation, the average American earns about $2500 a year more today than on the day of W's second inaugural.
  

• That same average American now spends a little less time at the office or on the assembly line, and a little more time on vacation or on the couch.
  

• He or she shops online for products that were unimaginable just four years ago. (How many of you read this morning's paper on your Kindle or iPhone?)
  

• The air is cleaner than it was a decade ago, and
  

• life expectancy is up.
  

Not that the last president had much to do with any of this. He didn't. It's the way the modern world works. Things improve. Incomes rise, work hours fall, the quality of goods improves.  Few things in economics are as consistent as the growth of real GDP per capita over the past 200 years:

Today we're in a recession--a moment in time when the march of growth stalls and even gets set back by a couple of years. This happens every now and then. Really. But things pick up again and we move on. Some people get set back a little farther than others; some are unemployed for a while. But the pool of resources is still near an all-time high.

In the long run we have nothing to fear but fear itself--and the rush to poor judgment that is the spawn of fear. Poor judgment makes people say things like "Hey! This new guy in town seems likable and right-minded. Let's give him everything he's asking for so he can take care of us." We've been down that road before. I'm hoping for some change I can believe in.