It's nice to see the phrases I helped to coin entering the bloggerel lexicon. "Free marketeer" (kinda like "mouseketeer") and "think tankers". But this debate between wether righter than right wing nuts or more moderate wing nuts like Immelt are right on cap and trade has strained this new terminology.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/13/0145/56590#2
"Free" marketeer think tankers are the ones who should want carbon trading. Carbon caps no, but carbon trading allows them a whole new venue for the hedge funds, they rely on to make them richer, to actually make them richer.
There's the problem, they want to own and trade the atmosphere, land, and oceans. But they don't want anyone to tell them what they can do with what they own. Especially government.
Some have suggested something like the fed to rule over the value of carbon and other new trading instruments. Instruments that trade the right to exploit land, sea, and air.
Just like the fed is supposed to maintain the value of the currency by limiting it's growth, this new institution would limit carbon emmisions to maintain the value of these trading instruments.
Without caps on carbon, what would give carbon trading a value system? The proudly ignorant Immelt, who boasts of his votes for the worst president in history (duuuhbya is proceeding to destroy the US manufacturing base, economy, military, etc.), as if it proves his "conservative" credibility, realizes that once cap and trade is instituted, environmentlists will be put in their place.
Corporatists will say, you got what you wanted, a carbon cap, now get out of the way and let the market work. The "free" market will take care of GHG climate problems, if there really are any, on their own without any regulatory interference from government.
After all, look how well the "free" market has worked to resolve the debt crisis. The same debt crisis that unregulated insider hedge fund trading created.
Wake up and smell the "free" marketeer coffee, once the Immelts explain how the cap and trade system coopts the environmental movement, even the nuttiest think tank wing nuts will embrace it.
Sure is nice that the same tyrant that owns foxnews now owns the WSJ, isn't it? Didn't we all know this would happen? The reframing would shift that fact into subtext and the wing nuts would reclaim the supposed credibility of the WSJ.
Eventually an ineffective capping system will be instituted, goals out to 2050, that sort of political parsing. A soft cap, that can be adjusted as needed depending on which party is in control. And the trading system will be the same one that is used to trade everything else, from farmland to weather futures.
An easily scammed unregulated insider trading system. Creating bubbles that burst, making the mega rich richer and the rest of us chattle. Wholy owned cannon fodder, cheap labor, and consumers.
Making life itself merely a tool of the bottomline, the next quarterly earnings reports the ultimate value system.
Our elected representatives elected by corporate lobbyist scamming, our government a ceremonial figurehead, like the british royal family. Rubber stamping the latest demands of corporate power.
