Maybe You believe it – maybe you don’t.
Maybe you don’t think the warming planet green house effect is man made.
Maybe it’s a replay of that medieval warming period followed by the mini ice age…
Maybe you are a sceptic, a denialist, a geoengineer, a daft climate engineer or just a smart ass that can’t be bothered
But deep down you know that you can’t keep treating the atmosphere like an open sewer the way the medieval towns had running the middle of the street. Black death came because of it and some other nasty things…
And maybe You agree it’s a good thing to clean up our act. Stop treating the atmosphere like a sewer and maybe clean it up.
Maybe even by cleaning up the atmosphere we can prevent the recurrence of the future kind of ”Black Death”
So we are here together to clean up our act.
One thing matters: Reduce emissions best we can.
One common goal away from complex Cap and trade and Kyoto wishful thinking and away from rewarding polluters through markets…
Our common goal the should be to just reduce carbon emissions.
What if your goal is also to just reduce carbon emissions without ideology?
What if the solution is not an increasingly obsolete cap-and-trade national or international law and bureaucratic boondoggle?
What if it’s rather something easy that even the International Energy Agency sees fit?
Then we can talk beans.
Accounting beans that is.
Because the IEA recently wrote in its 2010 World Energy Outlook, a simple recipe for CO2 reductions.
According to the IEA, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies by 2020 could cut carbon emissions by upwards of 6 percent and maybe all the way to 10% globally.
It could also cut global energy demand by 5-7 percent, enhance energy security, and bring multiple economic benefits.
IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka said:
“Getting the prices right, by eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, is the single most effective measure to cut energy demand in countries where they persist, while bringing other immediate economic benefits.”
But in the way stood reality.
The reality is that, in 2009, global fossil fuel subsidies reached $312 billion.
In the year 2010 the fossil fuel subsidies are $542 billion.
If no action is taken, those subsidies are projected to hit upwards of $600 billion in 2011.
Of course nobody reads these things.
The G20 meeting in South Korea didn’t bother to consider this at all. Having failed to act since last time’s big meeting when they had decided in Glenneagles to reduce fossil fuel emissions by cutting off all subsidies for fossil fuels, they’ve done absolutely nothing about it. They keep subsidizing the death beltching monster daily.
Why? Well they are all elected politicos seeking corporate funds for increasingly expensive campaigns to stay in power. Guess who pays their bill…
Naturally, the IEA report didn’t cause any ripples either.
And because nobody even bothers to read it – it didn’t send the people out to the streets – it didn’t send alternative energy stocks soaring nor fossil fuel stocks tumbling…
But it did give us one more piece of evidence that the solution to our energy security problems, to many of our energy-related economic burdens and for climate change concerns – it all – starts with the eradication of fossil fuel subsidies.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
And even though our grinning idiot politicians don’t turn the spigot off that massively sends taxpayers money into the pockets of the wealthiest Corporates in the world – namely the five sisters – change is coming.
Somebody is gonna slay the Dragon and free the village and the global commons from this pall of death.
And what’s interesting is, that free markets are moving in that direction too.
The economic vultures are circling and with the bust western economies hemorrhaging badly; the case for giving an annual bail-out size fund to the Big oil companies is increasingly untenable even by the standards of corrupt economic regimes – let alone the democratic ones.
The transition of our energy economy is coming and with it the cleaning up of our atmosphere.
And as always – We’ve got choices – We can either embrace it, or we can fall victim to it.
Place your bets now…
As smart long term Life investors, the latter is not an option.
The former will continue to keep us alive, make us wealthy and succesful.
So here it is.
Cheers
Cheers for a new way of life…
A growing economy…
And a new climate wealth…
