Posted on 07/18/2008 8:16:13 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
The price of European emission permits is rising so rapidly that German companies are threatening to leave the country.... And the environment may, in the end, be no better off.
They sat silently through two lectures, but then they couldn't control their anger any longer. The civil servants from the Environment Ministry, the Environment Agency and the German Emissions Trading Authority made it sound easy for industry to take up carbon trading. It was just too much for the managers to tolerate.
"If that's the shape the trading will take, we will simply move our cement operation to Ukraine," a cement factory manager shouted into the lecture hall. "Then there won't be any trading here, nothing will be produced here anymore -- the lights will simply go out here."
The businessmen's anger surprised the emissions-allowance trading experts. They had invited industry representatives to a relaxed forum at the Environment Ministry's office in Bonn. They wanted to present international developments in the carbon trading market. However, the mood in the German business world has soured -- managers no longer have the stomach for academic lectures. The reason is that emissions allowances are already burdening some companies that require a lot of energy for production purposes.
In the last 12 months alone, the price for the right to pump a ton of carbon into the atmosphere has shot up from 23 ($36.5) to nearly 30 ($47.6), according to the European Energy Exchange in Leipzig. This hike of around 30 percent has a direct effect on the electricity production of power companies.
* * *
"If the cement industry is gradually pulled into the trading of carbon emission allowances, companies will move production to countries that don't take part in the scheme," Andreas Kern, President of the German Cement Industry Federation, has warned.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
“The businessmen’s anger surprised the emissions-allowance trading experts.”
Those schemes always make sense to people who aren’t actually subject to them.
killing jobs...sigh
Coming to the U.S. soon ...
take your pick,
the Obomination or McPain.
the Obomination or McPain.
Neither will be my pick.
“killing jobs to save the climate.”
the scu&bag liberals in the world are not interested in saving the climate. they are only interested in coalescing power and getting rid of the oppostion.
they are sneaky, loathesome, lying, oily swine. they have an international agenda and are holding hands with american liberals in congress. (correction: american liberal scu&bags in congress.)
IMHO
Ugh. This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. At least the old environmentalists made water supplies safer and whatnot. These new ones? They do nothing but make things more expensive.
i prefer to think of it as the choice between Bolshevik and Menshevik. the choice of death is up to you.
It’s all about money and government power.
“...a number of other German companies from industrial sectors other than the cement industry will relocate at least part of their businesses because of the new carbon trading scheme — either because of the rising cost of permits, or because of higher electricity prices.”
There are limited ways around a problem. A problem has to be addressed and eliminated.
Address the lie that is the basis of the problem. In the long run it will be cheaper overall to do so.
Paging Ms. Rand...
Why wouldn't they? Why ever would you build a plant where they don't want you? Go where you are wanted. California? You must be kidding. Build over the border on the Mexican side. Or go to China. Or Malaysia. Or anywhere they would welcome your expertise and investment dollars.
And the environment may, in the end, be no better off.
No kidding. Its the biggest flim-flam in modern history. By the time they are done it will make the billions Oil-for-food racked up look like chump change.
Its more than just a grab at your money, it is a naked grab for power. They will take control of you, your company, your assets, or drive you out of the country.
You'll either buy your own government, be a pirate, or knuckle under to the new mafia priesthood.
It's more than that. They make sense to the people who will profit from them.
A lot of the constituency for "carbon trading" schemes and the like come from the financial sector. Banks are just drooling at the chance for a new cooked-up thingy to "trade" and profit from.
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Your Carbon Ration Card
July 7, 2008; Page A12
While American politicians mull a carbon cap-and-trade system for industry, our British cousins are already contemplating the next step: personal CO2 rations.
A Parliamentary committee in May proposed giving all British adults “carbon allowances” that they would be required to spend along with, you know, real money when buying gasoline, airline tickets, electricity or natural gas. Britons who wanted more credits than they were issued could try to buy them again, with real money from those who hadn’t spent their allotment. All of this is supposed to give people a financial incentive to reduce energy consumption and thus their carbon “footprint.”
The Labour government, already in a precarious political state, isn’t dumb enough to support the rationing plan, which Environment Minister Hilary Benn calls “ahead of its time.” Instead, it favors a climate-change bill that Parliament is on the verge of passing that would lay much of the necessary groundwork. But eco-eager Britons don’t have to wait for Westminster. A private test program for personal cap-and-trade began recently with 1,000 volunteers keeping tabs of their gasoline use.
It would cost a country like Britain billions of dollars a year to run a personal cap-and-trade system nationwide, but set that aside. War-time-like energy rations are a clear illustration of the extent to which environmentalists hope to control every aspect of modern life. Do you really want to blow much of your annual “ration” on that long carbon-spewing jet flight to Florida, or should you swap that summer AC for weekend drives in the country?
The global warmists want you to sacrifice for their cause. And the duration of their war on carbon will make the decade-and-a-half of British rationing during and after World War II seem like a fleeting moment. The pending climate-change bill calls for a 60% cut in carbon emissions from their 1990 levels by 2050. Once 2050 rolls around, who exactly will declare the end of hostilities?
The prospect of personal CO2 rations should debunk the idea that the cost of curbing carbon emissions would fall on the owners of dirty old factories. That notion was always a green herring: Like corporate taxes, the business costs of carbon reduction will be passed on to consumers. In that sense, we should be grateful to the Brits for showing us where this anticarbon crusade really ends up.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121538804508931123.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
The people who run the companies know all this crap is a fraud and it pi**es them off to pay money to line someone’s pockets for a fraud. I wish the US companies would blow their stacks, but they don’t, they just quietly move to another country and take the jobs with them.
The one odd strategy that the carbon guys carry with them constantly....is that any carbon scheme they have...means unemployment numbers increase. I don’t think a single one of them ever took a economics class or have ever been unemployed.
>Thousands of German jobs won’t be placed in jeopardy, of course, if enough other countries join the European carbon trading scheme. <
Coming soon to a nation near you.
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