The Story of Cap & Trade: The Commodification of Air and Water and the Foisting of a Carbon Tax Scheme on the American People

Carbon tax schemes are predicated on the illusion of anthropogenic climate change. Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history, however, constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history. Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. A large body of scientific research — including a NASA study — suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years, not humans.

In 2012, other industries in the European Union are set to come under emission trading.

The founder of the Chicago Climate Exchange, speaking at the State of Green Business Forum in Chicago, urged the attendees to do whatever they can to push for a national cap-and-trade program. After giving a quick history of where value creation for businesses came from in past decades, he said that the next big area for value creation will be in the commoditization of air and water. And they will be made commodities through cap and trade. In the case of carbon, that would set quotas for carbon emissions, and those who exceed their quotas can trade those extra cuts to those that are unable to meet their own quotas.

The Chicago Climate Exchange, which includes some 400 companies, is now the largest cap-and-trade market in the world.

Like a savvy Madison Avenue advertising team, senators pushing climate-control legislation have decided to scrap the name "cap and trade" and rebrand their product as "pollution reduction targets." A clunky and difficult term to define for laymen and some politicians, "cap and trade" had become dirty words on Capitol Hill. Republicans called the plan nothing more than "cap and tax" and one influential senator took great pains last week to declare cap and trade "dead." Senator Joseph Lieberman, an independent trying to draft a bipartisan bill, said: "We don't use that term anymore." Instead Lieberman said, laughing: "We will have pollution reduction targets." [Source]

The Story of Cap & Trade

March 25, 2010

You Tube - The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill. Host Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the heart of this scheme and reveals the “devils in the details” in current cap and trade proposals: free permits to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from whats really required to tackle the climate crisis. If you've heard about Cap & Trade, but aren't sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film is for you.

Kerry Exploits Obamacare Passage to Propose Carbon Tax

March 23, 2010

Infowars.com - Following their successful effort to force totalitarian health control legislation down the throats of the American people, Obama’s allies are now pushing for climate change legislation.

Twenty-two Democratic senators have signed a letter calling for climate legislation within the year, although some observers question whether the White House will want another divisive vote as November midterm elections approach,” reports AFP.

The effort is led by the CFR insider and Bonesman John Kerry.

“In the wake of health care’s passage, we have a strong case to make that this can be the next breakthrough legislative fight,” senator Kerry said on Tuesday. “Climate legislation is the single best opportunity we have to create jobs, reduce pollution and stop sending billions overseas for foreign oil from countries that would do us harm.”

Kerry has teamed up with Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) in an effort to foist a carbon tax scheme on the American people. A proposed Senate bill peddled by the trio would would impose a cap-and-trade system in 2012 on electric utilities. The bill would also levy a hefty gasoline tax on consumers.

The Kerry-Graham-Lieberman draft is consistent with Obama’s principles and similar in its policy aims to the Waxman-Markey ACES Act. In 2008, Obama admitted that a carbon tax would impose a heavy burden on the American people.

Studies reveal that if implemented the Waxman-Markey bill would cost the economy $161 billion in 2020, which is $1,870 for a family of four. As the bill’s restrictions kick in, that number rises to $6,800 for a family of four by 2035.

An earlier bill proposed by Lieberman and former senator John Warner would have established annual targets to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them another 80 percent by 2050.

“The bill was rejected for a very good reason — its passage would have created economic conditions comparable to a new Great Depression and sunk America to near third world status,” noted Paul Joseph Watson for Prison Planet on November 19, 2008.

Carbon tax schemes are predicated on the illusion of anthropogenic climate change. Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history, however, constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history. Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. A large body of scientific research — including a NASA study — suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years, not humans.

Leaked emails from British climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit reveal how the global warming community manipulated data in order to exaggerate global warming.

As Infowars and Prison Planet have long argued, exaggerated and falsified climate data and hysterical arguments of an impending climatic Armageddon are used by our rulers to push for world government and a rollback of civilization for the masses.

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill,” the Club of Rome write in 1991.

The Club of Rome is a neo-Malthusian organization with interlocking membership with European power elite groups such as the Committee of 300 (a secret society founded by the British aristocracy in 1727) and the Bilderberg Group. It has argued that world population must be reduced by two billion people through war, famine, disease and any other means necessary.

“The real enemy, then, is humanity itself,” it declared in The First Global Revolution.

The Kerry-Graham-Lieberman proposal will likely encounter stiff opposition in Congress. Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, said climate change and immigration will require serious Republican cooperation.

“I don’t see that developing anytime soon,” he said, especially after Democrats rammed through Obama’s draconian health care “reform.”

Climate Exchange Comes Through the ‘Perfect Storm’

March 13, 2010

The Times - Climate Exchange, the company, might have been forgiven for seeing the Copenhagen summit as a serious blow, but the carbon emissions trader said yesterday that last December’s fudged deal in Denmark had merely applied a brake to its growth rather than halted it.

The company, one of several jockeying for position in the trading of carbon dioxide emission permits, said that its revenues had risen last year by 48 per cent to £33 million and trading volumes surged by 82 per cent. Moreover, for the first time since its launch in 2005, it had turned a profit — of £2.1 million in 2009 against a loss of £2.5 million in the previous year. While that prompted a 7.5 per cent lift in the Climate Exchange share price, which closed up 36p at 510p last night, it follows a halving in the company’s value since last summer.

“We have endured a perfect storm,” Neil Eckert, the cpmany’s chief executive, said. “The failure of Copenhagen was a disappointment. In the United States, President Barack Obama has so far failed to get through his carbon policies. And we have just been through a monster credit crisis and recession.”

Mr Eckert believes, however, that emissions trading will continue to flourish.

“In 2011, the European Union will be auctioning off carbon permits rather than allocating them, and so trading will become an important part of companies’ risk-management policies. And in 2012 other industries like the airlines are set to come under emission trading.”

Carbon trading exchanges enable the trade of CO2 pollution permits that have to be bought by “dirty energy” providers, such as coal-fired power stations, and might be sold by “clean energy” providers, such as wind farms.

A Call to Action on Cap and Trade: The State of Green Business-Chicago

February 9, 2010

GreenBiz.com - By not having a national carbon cap-and-trade policy, the United States is losing out on its chance to become a green and clean technology leader, said Richard Sandor, founder of the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Speaking at the State of Green Business Forum in Chicago, Sandor urged the attendees to do whatever they can to push for a national cap-and-trade program.

After giving a quick history of where value creation for businesses came from in past decades, he said that the next big area for value creation will be in the commoditization of air and water. And they will be made commodities through cap and trade.

In the case of carbon, that would set quotas for carbon emissions, and those who exceed their quotas can trade those extra cuts to those that are unable to meet their own quotas.

Cap-and-trade is nothing new to the U.S., as Sandor explained how it was implemented to bring down acid rain.

The Chicago Climate Exchange, which includes some 400 companies, is now the largest cap-and-trade market in the world. Its members have reduced emission by 400 million tons, an amount larger than France's nationwide emissions.

"What motivated these people?" he said, " It was all about the price signal. The price signal is what motivates individual inventors and companies."

The longer that it takes the U.S. to develop a policy, the more time and interest companies and other entities lose. And the more the U.S. falls behind other countries.

Just today, it was announced that Citigroup and Russian gas company OAO Gazprom purchased energy-intensity credits from three utilities in Tianjin, China, that exceeded efficiency targets, an act that is seen as a precursor to wider-scale carbon trading in the country.

Carbon cap-and-trade, he said, will create jobs, provide business and social value and will be necessary for the future, carbon-constrained world. Although the U.S.'s first steps in cap-and-trade might not be perfect, Sandor said, it can always be improved.

"Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good," he said.

Obama’s Involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange

March 29, 2009

Canada Free Press - “Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now Pushing Through Congress” is a FOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short,

“While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”

The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong. For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming...

Read more here on Obama's connection to the Chicago Climate Exchange.