Dark Side of Climate Change: It's Already Too Late, Cap & Trade=Scam, and Only the Few Will Survive

[marmar]

The Dark Side of Climate Change: It's Already Too Late, Cap and Trade Is a Scam, and Only the Few Will Survive

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted July 7, 2009.

Father of the Gaia Theory, James Lovelock says we can't stop climate change, but that humanity will continue in some smaller form.




The recent narrow passage of the Waxman-Markey energy bill, better known as cap-and-trade, marks halftime in Congress' first attempt to put a lid on national carbon emissions. The bill’s supporters ended the half on top in a squeaker -- 219 yeas to 212 nays. But it’s far from clear what this lead means, either for the bill or the climate. The legislation’s fate remains as uncertain as our own.

We can, however, be sure about one thing. Between now and the autumn Senate debate, cap-and-trade’s right-wing critics will escalate their all-cannons assault on the idea that climate change is real and demands a response. They will call "crap-and-tax" the mother of all scams, a poorly cloaked state power grab, and a major goose step down the road to eco-fascism. Given the demagogic hyperbole already on display, it can’t be long before some conservative howler warns that the bill's green facade shares hues with the Koran.

As the fight over cap-and-trade intensifies, human-driven climate change denialists like Rush Limbaugh and James Inhofe will draw the lion's share of the media spotlight reserved for the bill's critics. This is unfortunate. The real debate is not between the bill's supporters and the dead-ender climate clown club. It is between cap-and-trade’s supporters and its critics within the scientific and environmental activist communities. Groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have science if not politics on their side when they decry Waxman-Markey as an industry diluted half-measure with soft gums that falls far short of what is necessary to avoid cataclysmic climate change later this century.

“The giveaways and preferences in the bill will actually spur a new generation of nuclear and coal-fired power plants to the detriment of real energy solutions,” said Greenpeace in a statement the day before the House vote. “To support such a bill is to abandon the real leadership that is called for at this pivotal moment in history. We simply no longer have the time for legislation this weak.” .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/141081/the_dark_side_of_climate_change%3A_it%27s_already_too_late%2C_cap_and_trade_is_a_scam%2C_and_only_the_few_will_survive/

[izquierdista]

1. Cap&trade is a fan dance

And just like the fan dancer never let you see any titties or cooter, even though you KNEW she was naked, Cap'nTrade will make people think it is progress even though they know it is a sham.

[denem]

2. You left out the most important bit - It's ALL a Scam

As they gather in Copenhagen, behind the scenes, climate scientists have concluded that even a 90% reduction in carbon by 2050 won't stop a temperature rise of at least 6C by 2100. Governments are gathering to give the impression that they're doing SOMETHING, anything. It's over. Atmospheric methane levels have doubled in Norway and Canada. Might as well stop slamming Obama et al. Action was need in 1993, not 2009. As Lovelock says, the feedback loops are underway, and a minority (read wealthy) will survive. The best bad option is planning to adapt.

Using Gaia Theory as his lens, Lovelock also examines five dreaded positive feedback loops, those processes now underway that at some point will become ferocious amplifiers of global heating (he finds "warming" too soft a word for the process). Lovelock describes how the most important of these feedback loops already in motion—the loss of reflective ice cover, the death of carbon eating algae as oceans warm, and methane released by thawing permafrost—will soon accelerate the heating trend aready underway, leading to sudden and dramatic shifts in global climate. ...

“There is no tipping point, just a slope that gets ever steeper,” writes Lovelock. “Because of the rapidity of the Earth’s change, we will need to respond more like the inhabitants of a city threatened by a flood. When they see the unstoppable rise of water, their only option is to escape to higher ground. We have to make our lifeboats seaworthy now stop pretending there is any way back to that lush, comfortable, and beautiful Earth we left behind sometime in the 20th century.”

]http://www.alternet.org/environment/141081/the_dark_side_of_climate_change%3A_it%27s_already_too_late%2C_cap_and_trade_is_a_scam%2C_and_only_the_few_will_survive?page=2

[truth2power]

3. Guess who else wants Cap & Trade? Goldman/Sachs. I wonder why?

Read Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone Magazine: The Great American Bubble Machine

http://sites.google.com/site/disclosuredelta/ **see note below

"BUBBLE #6
GLOBAL WARMING

Fast-forward to today. it's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs - its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign - sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are HankPaulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits - a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade." (emphasis added)

>snip

"Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming?Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected."



**Note: For some reason the Rolling Stone site doesn't have the entire article by Taibbi, as far as I can tell. Thus the link, above.

[bluesmail]

4. A report of scientists as far back as the '50's said our planet

by the year @ 2100 would be uninhabitable. You think space shuttles are there ~only~ for discovery, think again. What's on the dark side of the moon? Is Mars really habitable? Why are the greedheads so greedy and anxious? Why is Sir Branton building a Spaceport in N.M? I do a lot of reading and it almost always makes the most sense that the wealthy people on our planet know all this and more, and want to start over on their terms.

[katty]

5. cap and trade--what a cruel joke