You know something is wrong when you are sitting in a restaurant in Frankfurt (Germany’s Wall Street) and the people at the table next to you, bankers having the usual five-course, expensed lunch, are laughing and making lip-smacking estimates on how much they will make from environmental legislation.
The gist of the conversation was this: When the United States signs on to cap and trade for carbon emissions, these bankers and their partners in New York are set to finance, gouge, inflate and generally profiteer on a completely new platform. You could hear the mental hand rubbing: Christmas is coming early, as early as Denmark’s next summit.
Pollution should not be a business for bankers. In fact, pollution should be an anti-business for bankers. After all, bankers finance, prop up and keep afloat hundreds of seriously polluting enterprises without any regard for their output. Bhopal? Paid for and financed by bankers, and so forth.
Now, it is one thing not to hold them even marginally responsible for the decisions they and Wall Street made as regards pollution, but to turn this into a profit-making venture for them is both immoral and counter-productive. In fact, it may be the one way to make sure everyone gets poorer and taxes will rise, without anything ever actually being done about pollution to a large enough degree to make a difference.
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If you make financing cap and trade a financial instrument, you are, at the same time, making sure this new business will have all the usual MBA criteria applied (growth rates, longevity of business’ transactions and solidification as a commodity) and you are making sure that any profit to society will be applied to bankers’ bonuses and not to hospitals, health issues and new technologies that are pollution free.
In fact, so strong will the “business as usual� model be, that financing for new non-polluting technologies will have strong opposition on Wall Street, Frankfurt and in the City (London).
The only way to overcome pollution is to stop polluting, curtail older technologies that spew waste into and onto the earth and make it financially unviable to continue with the wasteful ways of old. By financing cap and trade, by making it a commodity, a wasteful coal plant becomes a trading asset to bankers used to selling junk bonds, making scandalous margins of profit, and then dumping the debt load on the public.
Cap and trade is a public liability policy and all the while it is clearly a boon to impoverished bankers. Now there’s an oxymoron. How much are their bonuses with our taxpayer bailout?
Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.
