Posts Tagged
‘Cap and Trade’
by ilene - July 24th, 2010 9:55 pm
David Rosenberg (the bear) takes a walk on the bullish side and here’s what he finds to be optimistic about. – Ilene
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
Regular readers know I tend to focus on the negative aspects of the markets as opposed to the positives – anyone could put on a smile and skip through oncoming traffic, but the truth is, the investment world can be a very dangerous place so skipping along as if there are no risks involved is beyond foolish. But ignoring the positives is equally foolish. In this world of heightened market risks and particularly clear uncertainty here are 17 reasons to consider the bullish case (via David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff):
- Congress extending jobless benefits (yet again).
- Polls showing the GoP can take the House and the Senate in November.
- Some Democrats now want the tax hikes for 2011 to be delayed.
- Cap and trade is dead.
- Cameron’s popularity in the U.K. and market reaction there is setting an example for others regarding budgetary reform.
- China’s success in curbing its property bubble without bursting it.
- Growing confidence that the emerging markets, especially in Asia and Latin America, will be able to ‘decouple’ this time around. We heard this from more than just one CEO on our recent trip to NYC and Asian thumbprints were all over the positive news these past few weeks out of the likes of FedEx and UPS.
- Renewed stability in Eurozone debt and money markets – including successful bond auctions amongst the Club Med members.
- Clarity with respect to European bank vulnerability.
- Signs that consumer credit delinquency rates in the U.S. are rolling over.
- Mortgage delinquencies down five quarters in a row in California to a three-year low.
- The BP oil spill moving off the front pages.
- The financial regulation bill behind us and Goldman deciding to settle –more uncertainty out of the way.
- Widespread refutation of the ECRI as a leading indicator … even among the architects of the index! There is tremendous conviction now that a double-dip will be averted, even though 85% of the data releases in the past month have come in below expectations.
- Earnings season living up to expectations, especially among some key large-caps in the tech/industrial space – Microsoft, AT&T, CAT, and 3M are being viewed as game changers (especially 3M’s upped guidance).
…

Tags: Bernanke, bullish, Cameron, Cap and Trade, Congress, David Rosenberg, Democrats, earnings, ECRI, fiscal policy, jobless benefits, Monetary Policy, property bubble, Republicans
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by ilene - December 11th, 2009 11:48 pm
By Bryan Walsh, courtesy of TIME
The major U.N. summit on climate change opened Monday in Copenhagen, but the big environmental news was made across the Atlantic in Washington. In an afternoon press conference, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that the agency had finalized its finding that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health and welfare.
The ruling allows the EPA to begin regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, factories and major industrial polluters, although the precise details of that regulation have yet to be worked out. "The threat is real," said Jackson. "If we don’t act to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the planet we will leave to the future will be very different than the one we know today." (See TIME’s special report on the environment.)
Jackson’s announcement was the final step in a response that has been nearly three years in the making — since April 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the Clean Air Act gives the EPA the authority to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases, if they are indeed a threat to human health and welfare. At the time, the court directed the agency to review the latest science on climate change in order to make a determination.
Under former President George W. Bush, the EPA largely punted on the question, even burying analysis from its own scientists in the waning months of that Administration. When President Barack Obama took office, he directed the new EPA to kick-start the regulation process — nearly 11 months and 380,000 public comments later, the agency is now poised to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. "This cements 2009′s place in history as the year the U.S. government began seriously addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution," said Jackson.
Although the announcement had been in the pipeline for a while, the timing was appropriate, with Copenhagen getting under way. The EPA ruling is a signal to other countries that the U.S. is prepared to contribute to a climate treaty, and it is a useful tool for Obama, who will participate in the Copenhagen summit on Dec. 18, its final day. "In light of the EPA endangerment finding, the President’s appearance in Copenhagen will carry even more weight, because it shows that America is taking this issue…

Tags: Cap and Trade, Copenhagen, environmental summit, EPA, Europe's carbon credit trading system, European fraudsters, Regulate CO2
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by ilene - November 23rd, 2009 2:15 pm
This is another must-read post by Mish on science vs. propaganda. Unfortunately it seems that propaganda trumps science, at least long enough to cause immense damage. - Ilene
Courtesy of Mish
I received a lot of emails in response to Beware The Ice Age Cometh: Hackers Prove Global Warming Is A Scam
Many were from religious zealots of global warming theory, and as you might surmise they were not printable.
A few common sense comments came my way suggesting that the hackers or insiders (I believe the latter) did not prove global warming was a scam, only that that there is proof scammers are involved in global warming.
I have to admit that is true. Apologies offered. That admission aside, even more damning data has surfaced in regards to data manipulation.
The site Watts Up With That? has this interview with Dr. Tim Ball
It seems Dr. Tim Ball was aware of the data manipulation but could not prove it. Here is a partial transcript but I assure you the video is worth listening to entirely.
"[The Emails] confirm suspicions that I have had in 30 years of working in climate science that I saw the hijacking of climate science particularly by computer modelers and then by a small group of people associated with the intergovernmental panel on climate change. The difficulty was that even though I sensed there was these thing going on, proving it is extremely difficult. But now with the exposure of these public files it is not only a smoking gun, it’s a battery of machine guns. … On A global scale it’s frightening. This group of people not only controlled the Hadley Center which controls the global data on temperatures, so that the global temperature record is in their hands, they also control the IPCC. … The IPCC is the basis in all governments for the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord, and so on. ….. The problem they had is they kept saying the 20th century and the latter part of it is the warmest ever. And of course skeptics like myself [and several other names] were saying it was warmer 1000 years ago when the Vikings were in Iceland and Greenland and that’s
…

Tags: Al Gore, Cap and Trade, Crusade, Global warming, Global Warming Religion, interview with Dr. Tim Ball, Propaganda, scam, science, Watts Up With That?
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by ilene - November 21st, 2009 3:54 pm
Courtesy of Mish
It’s now official. Much of the hype about global warming is nothing but a complete scam.
Thanks to hackers (or an insider) who broke into The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and downloaded 156 megaybytes of data including extremely damaging emails, we now know that data supporting the global warming thesis was completely fabricated.
Inquiring minds are reading Hacked: Hadley CRU FOI2009 Files on The Reference Frame by Luboš Motl, a physicist from the Czech Republic.
The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), usually working together with the Hadley center (recall HadCRUT3 global temperatures), has been hacked.
So far, the most interesting file I found in the "documents" directory is pdj_grant_since1990.xls (Google preview, click) which shows that since 1990, Phil Jones has collected staggering 13.7 million British pounds ($22.6 million) in grants.
Phil Jones, the main criminal according to this correspondence, has personally confirmed that the website was hacked and that the documents are authentic. See Briefing Room.
He says that he "can’t remember" what he meant by "hiding the decline." Well, let me teach him some English. First, dictionaries say that hide means
1. to conceal from sight; prevent from being seen or discovered: Where did she hide her jewels?
2. to obstruct the view of; cover up: The sun was hidden by the clouds.
3. to conceal from knowledge or exposure; keep secret: to hide one’s feelings.
4. to conceal oneself; lie concealed: He hid in the closet.
5. British. a place of concealment for hunting or observing wildlife; hunting blind.
6. hide out, to go into or remain in hiding: After breaking out of jail, he hid out in a deserted farmhouse.
Here Are A Few Choice Emails
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@virginia.edu, mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@uea.ac.uk,t.osborn@uea.ac.uk
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
…

Tags: Cap and Trade, Global warming, hackers, Mish, scam
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by ilene - November 19th, 2009 7:31 pm
Courtesy of Mish
Typically, one of the best thing Congress ever does is nothing. And so it is again with the Cap-And-Trade energy bill. Thankfully, Senate Climate Bill Delay Raises Doubt on Chance for U.S. Law.
The U.S. Senate won’t try to pass a bill limiting U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions for months, clouding the prospects for final legislation as the Obama administration focuses on health care and the economy.
“We’re going to try to do that sometime in the spring,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said of climate-change legislation in remarks to reporters yesterday. He didn’t cite a reason for the delay.
President Barack Obama had sought Senate action on a measure, already passed by the House, in time for talks in Copenhagen next month on a new global climate treaty. The Senate slowdown further jeopardizes the measure’s chances of passage, Whitney Stanco, an analyst in Washington for Concept Capital, said in a report today.
“The spring timeline would push the debate closer to the 2010 mid-term elections, potentially setting lawmakers up for a difficult vote before they face their constituents in the ballot box,” said Stanco, whose company advises investors.
Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat and chairman of the panel, said this week that lawmakers will be too busy debating health care, job creation and banking legislation to take up cap-and-trade proposals. “By the time you turn around, it’s March,” Boxer told reporters.
“The Senate is far from the 60 votes needed to move a climate-change bill and that is unlikely to change as long as the economy continues to underperform,” said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at Washington-based Brookings Institution in an e-mail yesterday. “If Obama succeeds in getting a health- reform bill and financial regulation, I think his energies in 2010 will be focused on jobs and the economy.”
Sins of Emission
Inquiring minds are reading Sins of Emission in the Wall Street Journal, how the ethanol boondoggle is an environmental catastrophe.
OCTOBER 29, 2009
Donning FDR’s cape, Eisenhower’s stripes and JFK’s boat shoes, President Obama observed in Florida on Tuesday that his "clean energy economy" will require "mobilization" on the order of fighting World War II, building the interstate highway system and going to the moon. Of course, the only "mobilization" going on at
…

Tags: Cap and Trade, General Electric, Mish
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by Zero Hedge - October 28th, 2009 7:07 pm
Courtesy of Cheeky Bastard
Here on Zerohedge the main goal is to present the readers with facts that remain hidden under the radar of the traditional ( soon to be dead ) information providers. Also, we try to provide information which is useful to our readers, and from which our readers can learn something new.
So i decided to present to you a specialist view on the economic impact of Cap and Trade legislation. Based on scientific facts which are, at least, contingent in their nature, this legislature will not only impact every single part of your life, it will also limit your basic freedoms, and not only that; it will put a price on that which makes you a human being, which makes you a living organism. I will not give my personal opinion on this topic, but i think that the article which i will post here will give you a clear picture of what my opinion on this matter is.
Testimony before
The Energy and Commerce Committee
U.S House of Representatives
April 22, 2009
My name is David Kreutzer. I am the Senior Policy Analyst in Energy Economics and Climate Change at The Heritage Foundation. The views I express in this testimony are my own, and should not be construed as representing any official position of The Heritage Foundation.
I want to thank the members of the Energy and Commerce Committee for this opportunity to address you concerning the economic impacts of cap-and-trade policies.
What Is the Problem with Carbon Dioxide (CO2)?
Carbon dioxide is not a toxin, is not directly harmful to human health, and is not projected to become so--even without legislative or regulatory action. CO2 is fundamental to all known forms of life. Indeed, studies show that increased CO2 levels are beneficial for crop production.
Nevertheless, driven by concern that increasing levels of CO2 (and other greenhouse gasses) will lead to a warmer world and cause environmental damage, there have been calls to significantly restrict emissions of all greenhouse gasses, but especially CO2. Among the proposals to reduce CO2 levels are carbon taxes and cap and trade.
The Costs
The typical cap-and-trade proposal seeks to reduce
…

Tags: Cap and Trade, David Kreutzer, Energy and Commerce Committee, Job losses, manufacturing
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by ilene - August 18th, 2009 12:30 pm
Courtesy of Jay Yarow at Clusterstock
Bill McKibben, cofounder and director of 350.org, showed up on the Colbert Report to talk global warming last night.
McKibben told Colbert that prominent climate scientists warn that our planet undergoes radical changes once the parts per million of carbon dioxide floating in the air rises above 350. He then goes on to say we’re at 390, which alarms Colbert.
Should we implement a cap and trade system to fight rising CO2, and the disasters that accompany it--drought, severe weather, flooding, etc.? No way.
It’s "time for end of the world sex!" says Colbert.
That sounds like a good way to deal with the problem to us. How about you?
See Also:
GASP! French Winemakers Say Global Warming Will Destroy The Wine Market
Tags: Bill McKibben, Cap and Trade, Carbon, Colbert, Emissions, end of the world sex, Energy, Garbage, Politics
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by ilene - July 5th, 2009 3:33 pm
Here’s Roy Spencer’s article on the Cap and Trade energy plan that Mish recommended as an excellent read.
Courtesy of Roy W. Spencer, at Roy Spencer’s Global Warming Blog
I don’t think Al Gore in his wildest dreams could have imagined how successful the “climate crisis” movement would become. It is probably safe to assume that this success is not so much the result of Gore’s charisma as it is humanity’s spiritual need to be involved in something transcendent – like saving the Earth.
After all, who wouldn’t want to Save the Earth? I certainly would. If I really believed that manmade global warming was a serious threat to life on Earth, I would be actively campaigning to ‘fix’ the problem.
But there are two practical problems with the theory of anthropogenic global warming: (1) global warming is (or at least was) likely to be a mostly natural process; and (2) even if global warming is manmade, it will be immensely difficult to avoid further warming without new energy technologies that do not currently exist.
On the first point, since the scientific evidence against global warming being anthropogenic is what most of the rest of this website is about, I won’t repeat it here. But on the second point…what if the alarmists are correct? What if humanity’s burning of fossil fuels really is causing global warming? What is the best path to follow to fix the problem?
Cap-and-Trade
The most popular solution today is carbon cap-and-trade legislation. The European Union has hands-on experience with cap-and-trade over the last couple of years, and it isn’t pretty. Over there it is called their Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Here in the U.S., the House of Representatives last Friday narrowly passed the Waxman-Markey bill. The Senate plans on taking up the bill as early as the fall of 2009.
Under cap-and-trade, the government institutes “caps” on how much carbon dioxide can be emitted, and then allows companies to “trade” carbon credits so that the market rewards those companies that find ways to produce less CO2. If a company ends up having more credits than they need, they can then sell those credits to other companies.
While it’s advertised as a “market-based” approach to pollution reduction, it really isn’t since the market did not freely choose cap-and-trade…it was imposed upon…

Tags: Cap and Trade, Climate Confusion, climate crisis, Global warming, Green Economy, Roy W. Spencer
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by ilene - July 4th, 2009 9:45 pm
Courtesy of Mish
A quick look at the details of the Energy Plan working its way through Congress shows that Obama’s energy plan will cost jobs. Please consider Energy job losers could get windfall.
Workers who lose their jobs if the pending climate change legislation becomes law could get a weekly paycheck for up to three years, subsidies to find new work and other generous benefits — all courtesy of Uncle Sam — under a little-noticed provision of the bill.
Touted by its House Democratic authors as a jobs engine, the bill offers extraordinary compensation for those who would lose their paycheck as a consequence of its passage.
Adversely affected employees in oil, coal and other fossil-fuel sector jobs would qualify for a weekly check worth 70 percent of their current salary for up to three years. In addition, they would get $1,500 for job-search assistance and $1,500 for moving expenses from the bill’s "climate change worker adjustment assistance" program, which is expected to cost $4.2 billion from 2011 to 2019.
The bill passed the House a week ago in a hotly contested 219-212 vote, with supporters arguing that a principal reason to support the bill is that it would create millions of new jobs. But analyses from the political left and right argue that potentially millions of jobs in industries tied to traditional fossil fuels would be lost and, at least initially, not enough "green" jobs would be created to replace them.
"Can you name another jobs-creation bill that was so concerned about its potential impact that it preemptively included a benefits’ program for the millions of workers it expected to displace?" asked Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the Institute for Energy Research, a pro-oil industry independent think tank.
While the analyses assume displaced workers will eventually find jobs, the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution predicts a net job loss of 0.5 percent over the first 10 years that carbon reduction legislation, called "cap-and-trade," is in effect. The conservative Heritage Foundation found that by 2030 net job losses would top 1.1 million, while the Coalition for Affordable American Energy, an industry group, estimates that more than 3 million jobs would be lost by 2030 as a result of the cap-and-trade system.
All Pain, No Gain
Government interference like this always costs jobs. The plan is a
…

Tags: Cap and Trade, Congress, Green Economy
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by ilene - July 4th, 2009 1:09 pm
Deceit, otherwise known as burying unrelated provisions in bills at the last moment, hoping no one will see them, like the Lilly Protection Act in the Homeland Security Bill, reflects very poorly on Congress but appears to be the way things are done. – Ilene
The well-placed and well-connected are set to make trillions off new climate bill; economic collapse about to accelerate
Courtesy of James Corbett
The Corbett Report
The sweeping new bill which just passed the House last Friday, the Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, is ostensibly about climate change, but it is in fact a bill of staggering economic ramifications that is going to accelerate the takeover of the economy by the well-placed financiers who have already plundered the Treasury and the Fed of $12+ trillion and counting. It was rushed through the House in the tradition of such nightmarish legislation as the Patriot Act and the banker bailout of last October: hundreds of pages were added to it at the last minute and it was humanly impossible for anyone to have read it before they voted on it. This, of course, is exactly what Obama promised his administration would never allow to happen, and for good reason; bills passed in this manner are always the result of fear and panic and inevitably results in legislation that would never be passed upon sober second thought.
In this case, the rush to pass this new bill was an attempt to stop any scrutiny of a plan that is going to utterly transform the American economy, further centralize control of citizens’ lives in the hands of unaccountable federal bureaucrats and complete the transfer of the American economy from Main Street to Wall Street. And all of this in the name of fighting a threat which itself is a demonstrable fraud. In short, the banksters and bureaucrats are sharpening their knives, preparing to butcher what’s left of the carcass of the United States, and a good portion of the public are not only willing to allow it but are actually clamoring for it.
The first thing that needs to be understood about the brand new trillion dollar carbon-trading commodities market that will be brought into existence if this bill passes the Senate is that it is a ripoff designed by and for the very corporate interests…

Tags: Al Gore, Cap and Trade, Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, Global warming, The Corbett Report
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