The Carbon Racket

Lawrence Solomon at the National Post exposes the folly and risks of emission trading systems (aka carbon cap and trade) that politicians with a "green" ideological persuasion are about to cram down our throats:

"Think we have learned our lesson about creating artificial securities, divorced from the real world and highly leveraged, so volatile and inscrutable as to be capable of sending markets into even worse hells, and entire economies into real depressions?

Think again.

To the layers of confusion that now exist in our financial markets we are about to add another, as opaque and volatile as the others, and as unhinged from the real world — a carbon currency. President-elect Barack Obama wants it, Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants it and their European counterparts, to some extent, already have it.

Europe’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) is the world’s largest trading exchange for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If ambitious Kyoto-style plans come to fruition, ETS will morph to account for, among other things, the carbon content of all industrial and biological processes, and the carbon carrying capacity of all the real estate on our planet. Because carbon is a building block of life, and because we live in a carbon-based planet, carbon prices will become more ubiquitous than the U.S. dollar. It would become, in effect, a globally traded currency tied to gaseous commodities that until recently were nowhere traded."