The linked article on “The
Low-Carbon Economy” is distressing to me, as is anything with the potential to
mess up my life. Not being of the
hair-shirted climate change self-flagellate persuasion, I have not bought into the “climate
change” dogma prevalent today, and therefore look very closely at anything
coming from “experts” (I’m sick of inverted commas already in the first
paragraph) that has the potential to affect me.
The Economy is a
nebulous phantasm at the best of times, as is anything which deals with abstracts.
The abstracts here are trillions of units of fiat currencies, the default
reserve currency still (at time of writing) the $US. Whatever it is, billions and trillions of
these notional credit instruments flash electronically around the globe daily,
and somehow maintain everyone’s confidence that we know what we’re doing.
2008 was the most
recent time the wheels came off (or the bubble burst, choose your metaphor) but
you can expect some sort of serious economic reverse roughly every decade. I understand in general how this works, but
one of the things I understand very definitely is that people supposedly much
smarter than me use financial instruments of their own clever devising to
manipulate these money flows for their own benefit.
This entire Sci-Am
article is a study in rent-seeking,
which sums up the entire Carbon Trading and Green Energy industries as far as I
can tell. As I’ve said many times before, a lot of these
Greens are really Watermelons (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) and
have ridden this bandwagon for all it’s worth as a means of wealth distribution
from First to Third World countries. An example:
Using green bonds and modified insurance portfolios
If the top financial layer includes big institutional investors and banks, then a second tier of untapped finance lies with insurance companies extending policies to the most vulnerable populations in the developing world.
Through the use of mobile phone-based services and micro-credit institutions, a great deal of insurance has already been extended to what Jim Roth of LeapFrog Investments calls the “emerging consumer.” Over the past eight years, the social investment fund has backed a portfolio of companies selling insurance products totaling $40 million, of which $33 million went to low-income consumers in Africa and Asia.
“It’s an optimistic story,” said Roth, noting that the vast majority of those consumers had never owned insurance before.
“A key difference is they have less money. So the kinds of insurance policies they can buy tend to have lower premiums and less benefits.”
Governments in the developing world are also now pooling their resources into sovereign insurance funds that make payouts for climate adaptation programs, said Fatima Kassam of the African Risk Capacity Insurance Co., a specialized agency of the African Union. Niger received a $25 million payout last year, having paid in with a $3 million premium. “Governments are coming together to change the model on disaster management,” said Kassam.
Let’s
be clear about one thing to explain why I’m so bent about this sort of
foolishness. The “insurance” is for
climate change adaptation/mitigation.
Since “climate change” can mean literally anything at all that
weather/climate does, no traditional insurance company (i.e. one which intends
to stay in business) would write policies like this. This is very thinly-disguised
wealth transfer.
The problem is
that despite quantitative easing and no physical standard for our notional currencies,
“wealth” is a zero-sum game; the wealth has to come from someone. I am NOT a redistributionist; “law and order
Libertarian” is probably closer to the mark, so I object to beggaring ourselves
to make African kleptocrats richer.
Green energy
policies in the UK dramatically raised electricity prices as subsidized (to the
producers) wind projects were forced into the market. Although this is now easing,
it took clawing back the policies that started it, and similar things have
happened in other places too. Coal is
the big thing to hate these days (Obama leading the pack) but it has the
advantage of being cheap and abundant.
It’s also dirty, but modern scrubbing tech cleans it up quite
acceptably, at least as long as you don’t consider CO2 to be pollution.
This is where
activists end up eventually, when all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked.
Back in the 1960s and 70s pollution was
a real problem, and people rightly took action to clean it up. With the sulfur
dioxide (acid rain) dealt with in the 1980s, North America and Europe ran out
of serious, widespread environmental pollution sources. Coincidentally or not, this is right when
Global Warming popped on the radar as the next apocalypse. Note that we (and both ice caps) are still
here, despite all of the doom-laden pronouncements from 1988 onward. Beware the “green intentions” of any climate
lobby, and follow the money to see why people are really doing what they're doing.
