Couldn’t Help But Notice (112707)
On globaloney, if any warming is really taking place, its true source may be cooked carbon-trading books (HT Benny Peiser’s CCNet e-mail):
EU trading scheme slammed for “double counting” carbon credits
New report accuses EU’s emissions trading scheme of lack of transparency over practice that allows different firms to reuse the same carbon allowancesThe EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) has been accused of systematic double counting of carbon allowances by a new report released last week.
The study from green business think-tank E3 International claimed that around 18m allowances had been double counted, making it impossible for independent observers to verify the environmental benefits of the scheme.
Why am I not surprised? The whole carbon-trading scheme seems like Enron on steroids.
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So while carbon-trading schemes chug merrily along with chicanery and lack of accountability, the US Securities and Exchange Commission is hearing calls from globalarmists (link requires subscription) to force real companies providing real goods and services to require “climate change risk disclosure.” What horse manure.
The bolded sentence at the end of the excerpt is the punch line, or I should say punch-in-the-gut line:
In addition, no one knows the shape of post-Kyoto Treaty limits and restrictions. The treaty expires in 2012, and countries already have begun to consider what changes are needed.
Therefore, it is impossible for companies to guess at the earnings effect any new treaty might have.
At present, China and India are specifically exempted from Kyoto Treaty emissions limits (one reason the United States and Australia refused to sign it). If the exemptions continue, companies might avoid countries on which limits are imposed and send more work to China and India.
Thus, while a U.S. company technically might be subject to any new limits negotiated, it might be able to avoid those limits by shifting more work outside the United States.
Among many others, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who buys into globaloney yet bemoans outsourcing, should be asked why it’s a good idea to send jobs overseas in the name of environmental purity.
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Best-kept economic secret (HT Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters) –
The United States tops the overall ranking in The Global Competitiveness Report 2007-2008. Switzerland is in second position followed by Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Finland and Singapore, respectively.
The rankings are calculated from both publicly available data and the Executive Opinion Survey, a comprehensive annual survey conducted by the World Economic Forum together with its network of Partner Institutes (leading research institutes and business organizations) in the countries covered by the Report. This year, over 11,000 business leaders were polled in a record 131 countries.
The report was released at the World Economic Forum (WEF), an annual meeting of the world’s political and business elites that always gets saturation press coverage. Noel writes that although AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN had a combined total of about 200 stories from the WEF, “none of these outlets felt America’s global competitiveness was newsworthy.”
To clarify, AP’s Elaine Engeler wrote a report, but a Google News search on “economic competitiveness” (in quotes) between October 30 and November 6 shows no Old Media outlet actually having carried it (the Engeler’s report is the only relevant listing). The way I see it, that’s even worse media bias against good economic news than Noel indicated, because it means that hundreds of Old Media outlets across the country had AP’s raw material, and each appears to have individually decided not to use it.
As to the US’s standing, I will shamelessly steal Matt’s line at Weapons of Mass Discussion: I blame Bush.
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In France, now that Sarkozy has achieved initial success in taking on the transport workers, it looks like he’ll have to deal with rioting “youths.”
The Kyoto Protocol: The U.S. versus the World?
Using a variety of public opinion polls over a number of years and from a number of countries this paper revisits the questions of crossnational public concern for global warming first examined over a decade ago. Although the scientific community today speaks out on global climatic change in essentially a unified voice concerning its anthropogenic causes and potential devastating impacts at the global level, it remains the case that many citizens of a number of nations still seem to harbor considerable uncertainties about the problem itself. Although it could be argued that there has been a slight improvement over the last decade in the public’s understanding regarding the anthropogenic causes of global warming, the people of all the nations studied remain largely uniformed about the problem. In a recent international study on knowledge about global warming, the citizens of Mexico led all fifteen countries surveyed in 2001 with just twenty-six percent of the survey respondents correctly identifying burning fossil fuels as the primary cause of global warming. The citizens of the U.S., among the most educated in the world, where somewhere in the middle of the pack, tied with the citizens of Brazil at fifteen percent, but slightly lower than Cubans. In response to President Bush’s withdrawal of the Kyoto Protocol in 1991, the U.S. public appears to be far more supportive of the action than the citizens of a number of European countries where there was considerable outrage about the decision.
Carlos Menendez
http://www.segurosmagazine.es
Comment by seguros — November 29, 2007 @ 4:47 am