Saving the Environment is a big job, but someone has got to do it. Whether its the President of the United States, Governor Arnold or some whacko from Denmark…..there must be an answer someplace….ya think?
Here is the thing. In the old days….a chemical or plating plant located in the middle of an urban city spewed yellow, green and black goop into the air on a daily basis. Usually, this stuff stunk up the place. Your eyes would water and burn and you would complain. Those Chemical and plating people got it figured out and decided to do their spewing at night. People would go out on their porches in the late summer and watch that stuff pollute the night sky and complain that “something out to be done”. The Oil refineries did the same thing. The electrical companies…did the same thing. The paper companies did the same thing. The breweries did the same thing.
When the world discovered plastics these issues got worse and worse and worse. So bad…they had to move those companies out of the urban areas and into deserts, mountains and areas with less inhabited populations. They of course polluted the waterways, the mountains and the forest areas of our country. Then came nuclear power plants. Now we were talking about ocean pollution, river pollution – all joining the great logging industry!
Soon, environmental laws were being created to stem, clean-up and reduce the major pollution being created with a growing manufacturing society. Then they figured it out. Send all that nasty manufacturing and polluting stuff out to other countries. Let them pollute the heck out of the environment…who really cares about South America, Eastern Europe, Africa, India or Southeast Asia? Soon, those great American companies like Alcoa, Dow, Dupont and thousands of others discovered something even better than “free to pollute zones”…..how about tax write-offs and skipping paying US taxes altogether. Move the pollution, take the tax credits and then not even declare any profits…..or pay any taxes to either the foreign country being polluted or the US Government. It was a sweet deal. Hey, welcome to International Business! Maybe they could then start Hedge Funds, Derivative Markets and other Credit Default Sawp deals that dealt with “Pollution Credits”?
Then came the Cap & Trade guys! Oh, these beauties were really clever followers of “Making the Ultimate Profits Available”. Their buddies in the Forest and International Logging Business were able to sell all their expensive Environmental Credits to all their nasty brothern in the Chemical, Oil and Energy Creation businesses. But it was a phony buy. The crazy idea was that if “you polluted” then you needed to buy “credits” from people that were “not polluting”. So who figures out “who is who in the zoo?” These great people continue to pollute but wind up either paying tiny tot fines or buying more meaningless credits from people that have an unlimited supply. The big problem of course is that “the end user” winds up paying for all the cost of Administration of the program, the Bureaucrats salaries, pensions and retirement programs. A real “Cottage Industry” in itself!
The cost of electricity goes up, the cost food stuffs goes up, the cost of gasoline goes up! This of course causes worldwide inflation! The great Banking minds of the world then have to make sure that less demand is required to keep the inflation under control. How about just “Restricting Credit” to start? “Phony Baloney!”…Grand Dad might say! How about just making those Chemical, Oil and Energy Companies… figure out a way- through existing technology or new inventions – to stop polluting?
How many years would it take to invent solutions to the pollution problems of our environment? 100 years? How about 10 minutes? How about using the existing technology and halting their profits for just one year. Hey, we the taxpayers will all wind up paying for it anyway. But let us not continue this Bogus System – “I’ll trade you this for that!” The best one is of course that some Global Corporations actually buy forestry enterprises so they can use their “Environmental Credits” to trade for their other polluting companies with “Pollution Credits-Demerits”!
This week Governor Arnold held a World Climate Change Summit in Los Angeles. What were they talking about? Cap & Trade Systems! What they should have been discussing was graduating to an intelligent way of stopping those that actually pollute….refusing to let them pollute the other parts of the world and bringing our manufacturing jobs back to the United States. If those Chemical, Oil, Plastics and Energy Companies did not pollute……here in the United States or anywhere else……”what a wonderful world it would be!”
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-climate2-2009oct02,0,3269860.story
Your comments are always welcome!
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