Cap and Trade Is Genocide
by Gregory Murphy
The author is the Associate Editor for 21st Century Science & Technology magazine (www.21stcenturysciencetech.com). PDF version of this article.
Financial interests centered in the City of London and on Wall Street are pushing for the United States to destroy itself by the adoption of a cap-and-trade scheme, based on the hoax of Al Gore's global warming. Part of this policy of cap and trade calls for the deployment of low energy-density, intermittent, renewable energies, like wind and solar, to replace existing baseline sources like nuclear and coal.
The reality of this policy of cutting or capping carbon dioxide emissions is that there will be an explicit limit on the amount of energy produced, and there will be a limit as to what type of sources will be available to produce this limited amount of energy. By limiting the amount of energy available for medical purposes, heating of homes, cooking, and providing freshwater, cap and trade will set the stage for genocide.
The policy has its roots in the fascist ideas of British economist and Cambridge University professor Arthur Pigou, who worked closely with John Maynard Keynes during the 1930s. In a 1920 book entitled, The Economics of Welfare,[1] Pigou argues that the way to change a behavior, is to tax it out of existence. With cap and trade, you tax energy until it becomes too expensive, and this, in turn, forces people to choose between using high-priced energy, and suffering the devastating health consequences of not using it. Essentially, all environmental taxes or policies are of Pigouvian influence. The trade part of the policy means creating a speculative market in carbon dioxide offsets, so that nations or producers whose output is less than the minimum standard, can sell their carbon offset to a producer who is exceeding the limit. As in the derivatives bubble, the speculators will act as middlemen for this exchange.
But, the basis of the whole scheme is a scientific fraud. When you hear the words "carbon dioxide emissions," just think, "hot air." In terms of atmospheric composition, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a minor trace gas, less than 0.04% by volume. It is, however, the main input required for growth of plants. Life-scientists have always known it as the gas of life—and without it, the human body would fail to function. So, the idea that carbon dioxide is pollution, as Al Gore and Prince Charles have claimed recently, is just insane.
The computer models used to try to show the enhanced greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide are based on the false assumption that as carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increase, temperature will increase at an increasing rate. Then, according to this pipedream, the increasing atmospheric temperature will create an increase in water vapor, which is the more significant greenhouse gas, causing a further increase in temperature.
Do You Believe in Perpetual Motion?
To believe such nonsense is like believing in a perpetual motion machine. It implies a major misunderstanding as to how carbon dioxide acts in the atmosphere. In reality, carbon dioxide is most effective as a greenhouse gas at concentrations of about 20 to 100 parts per million (ppm). As concentrations increase beyond that level (today, it is over 300 ppm), the effectiveness of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas decreases exponentially (Figure 1). This exponential decline in the effectiveness of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas is not contested by the believers in global warming; they simply ignore it.
There is an experiment anyone can do to understand this principle: Take a sheet of paper, and place it over a window with sunlight coming through. You will notice that the intensity of the light, as it passes through the paper, decreases. Add another sheet of paper, and you see that more light is stopped. Keep adding paper, and you will notice that after a certain point, adding more paper has little or no effect in blocking the sunlight. The same is true as carbon dioxide concentrations increase beyond a certain level. The idea that there will be a runaway greenhouse effect, because of a doubling of carbon dioxide, is pure alarmism.
In a 1998 paper, in the journal Climate Research, Sherwood Idso, the director of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide, determined that the greatest temperature increase likely to result from a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, would only be 0.4° C (0.7° F).[2] Idso concluded that we have already seen most of the temperature rise that might come about from a doubling of carbon dioxide. But Idso also notes that the temperature increase may be far less than 0.4° C, because of the enhancing effect of carbon dioxide on growth of vegetation, which cools the Earth in various ways.
Depopulation Through Energy Starvation
Given that the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide declines exponentially, as concentrations increase, and that it has been demonstrated, that we have already seen most of the warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide, there is no reason for a cap-and-trade policy—unless it is to fulfill the expressed intentions of certain people to reduce the world population from the present 6.7 billion down to 2 billion, by the use of energy starvation.
According to the latest data from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii (which is located on the mouth of an active volcano, calling into question the reliability of the data), the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is around 385 ppm. For the past ten years, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has increased at a rate of about 2.2 ppm per year. At this rate, it would take about 190 years to double the current concentration of carbon dioxide. In 190 years, can anybody say what the energy sources will be, or what new discoveries will be made that will change society for the better? Nuclear fission and fusion power produce no carbon dioxide.
In 1998, just one year after the Kyoto Protocol was signed, Dr. Tom Wigley, the former director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, and leader of the British climate mafia, argued in a paper, in Geophysical Research Letters, that even if there were full compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, there would only be a small savings on the temperature increase: 0.025° C.[3] So for all of the needless death and the loss to the physical economy that policies like cap and trade would cause, there is no environmental benefit.
The fascist policy of cap and trade that the Obama Administration is promoting must be stopped. The policy is an attack on scientific progress, coming at a time when nuclear power is urgently needed to save civilization from two leading challenges: the deepening world economic breakdown crisis, and the progression of Earth's climate towards a new Ice Age.
As Richard Courtney, former lead material scientist at the British Coal Research Board, put it, "We have to stop this policy for our children and our children's children's sake. If not, then we won't have any children, or children's children, because they will have all starved to death."
The fight for civilization is on. It will be a tough war but with humor and creativity, the fight can and must be won.
[1] An online copy of The Economics of Welfare by Arthur Pigou can be found at http://www.econlib.org/library/NPDBooks/Pigou/pgEW.html.
[2] S.B. Idso, "Carbon-Dioxide-Induced Global Warming: A Skeptic's View of Potential Climate Change," Climate Research, 1998. http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr/10/c010p069.pdf.
[3] T.M. Wigley et al., "The Kyoto Protocol: CO2, CH4, and Climate Implications," Geophysical Research Letters, No. 25, pp. 2285-88, 1998.