Is This How NOT To Prevent Global Heating?

As we roll into 2007 and Democrats have a place at the legislative table Action Point's job of getting that place at the table is done. Therefore, I have moved Action Point onto course for the New Year: fix the economy and tackle global heating, at a minimum. Yes, we will be discussing other topics...but many will be tangentially related to one of those two in some manner.

The economy we can discuss with some abstraction (like whether unfettered free markets are actually worthless as a factor in a civilized society--i.e.--social darwinism) but when it comes to global heating there is little room for philosophy. Like religion, you must accept and embrace that human activity has warmed and will continue to heat the planet and irreversibly create climate change--or not. In that, I am an evangelical environmentalist on a quest to save humanity. I say Believe or suffer the "Hell-fires" of planet Earth and I can tell you when (within a range of a decade or so) and maybe even where, those Hell-fires will be erupting.

Not accepting that human activity is heating the planet opens you to becoming bogged down in the wrong discussion (the discussion anti-heating factions from any industry fearing regulation or industry competition want you stuck in): does human activity affect the heating process? If you believe that question must be first unequivocally answered, you will remain uncommitted to creating change and instead committed to finding the answers, which of course are mostly going to be found in hind-sight. This is not unlike the tactic tobacco and chemistry industries use to keep regulators and lawsuits at bay: seeding doubt.

Using pop evangelical religion as a template, a next question I can ask is how does creating profit-motives "save" CO2 sinners from a fiery Earth? Isn't providing profit as a motivator ( instead of self-corporate sacrifice-- i.e. monetary profit) like telling sinners that priests can buy-off God for their sins? That was a scam in the 16th century and still is.

Those kinds of buy-out-of-Hell scams show us however, where the chinks in the system lie. How do we eliminate intentional avoidance--or redirect the intended motivating effort to solutions that reduce heating effects regardless of monetary profit or loss?

QUZHOU, China — Foreign businesses have embraced an obscure United Nations-backed program as a favored approach to limiting global warming. But the early efforts have revealed some hidden problems.

Emissions from a factory in Qu- zhou match those of a million cars.

Under the program, businesses in wealthier nations of Europe and in Japan help pay to reduce pollution in poorer ones as a way of staying within government limits for emitting climate-changing gases like carbon dioxide, as part of the Kyoto Protocol.

Among their targets is a large rusting chemical factory here in southeastern China. Its emissions of just one waste gas contribute as much to global warming each year as the emissions from a million American cars, each driven 12,000 miles.

Cleaning up this factory will require an incinerator that costs $5 million — far less than the cost of cleaning up so many cars, or other sources of pollution in Europe and Japan.

Yet the foreign companies will pay roughly $500 million for the incinerator — 100 times what it cost. The high price is set in a European-based market in carbon dioxide emissions. Because the waste gas has a far more powerful effect on global warming than carbon dioxide emissions, the foreign businesses must pay a premium far beyond the cost of the actual cleanup.

The huge profits from that will be divided by the chemical factory’s owners, a Chinese government energy fund, and the consultants and bankers who put together the deal from a mansion in the wealthy Mayfair district of London.

Arrangements like this still make sense to the foreign companies financing them because they are a lot less expensive, despite the large profit for others, than cleaning up their own operations.

Such efforts are being watched in the United States as an alternative more politically attractive than imposing taxes on fossil fuels like coal and oil that emit global-warming gases when burned.

But critics of the fast-growing program, through which European and Japanese companies are paying roughly $3 billion for credits this year, complain that it mostly enriches a few bankers, consultants and factory owners.

With so much money flowing to a few particularly lucrative cleanup deals, the danger is that they will distract attention from the broader effort to curb global warming gases, and that the lure of quick profit will encourage short-term fixes at the expense of fundamental, long-run solutions, including developing renewable energy sources like solar power.

As word of deals like this has spread, everyone involved in the nascent business is searching for other such potential jackpots in developing countries.

As for more modest deals, like small wind farms, “if you don’t have a humongous margin, it’s not worth it,” said Pedro Moura Costa, chief operating officer of EcoSecurities, an emissions-trading company in Oxford, England.