Sep 26, 2008

Crap and Trade...Here comes end of free market

You thought the 700 billion bailout nearly killed free market... well this will bury it.
 
They're Launching America's First Carbon Cap-And-Trade Program Today?
Did you know that a 10 state coalition is holding our nation's first ever carbon allowance auction at 9:00 AM EDT today? Or that the same states will be imposing a mandatory cap-and-trade program on their electric plants beginning next month? This may surprise those who assumed that June's tabling of the national Lieberman-Warner bill coupled with already runaway energy prices and growing overall economic anxiety signaled a reprieve from this stealth tax and power grab scheme -- at least for the remainder of the year.
 
A recently published report by the National Housing Federation predicts that English households spending 10% or more of their annual income on energy bills (the threshold for energy poverty) will have doubled from 2005 figures to 5.7 million by 2009.  Experts truly fear that many will be forced to decide between heat and food this winter. 
 
Nonetheless, the New York-based Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (http://www.rggi.org/rggi) launches today, striving to freeze CO2 emissions through 2014 and then gradually reduce them to 10 percent below current levels by 2018. ...in theory a utility may legally exhaust into the atmosphere and forcing those that cannot comply to purchase allowances at auction from those that can. Auction proceeds will then, at least in theory, be invested in low-carbon energy solutions such as solar and wind, which would gradually replace fossil-based generators.  Read full here
 
 
HAASE - Without formal federal regulations and monitoring this will just become another "mortgage market" with speculators running "fear and greed" market sectors. Clearly we can see by our current federal market buyout that initial involvement is critical to have checks and balances in place or pay massively later for greed sectors gone amuck.
 
Please read more about "crap and trade" at: CarbCrap