In the July/ August ’09 issue of Atlantic on page 19 lies a full page ad from Shell Oil Company featuring a message from their President Marvin Odum in support of Cap and Trade.

Odum opens his letter “For Shell, the debate about whether climate change is real is over.”

It is striking that he does not address the issue as ‘global warming’ but he calls it ‘climate change’. This indicates that global warming is attracting too many legitimate skeptics, but the global harbingers of doom do not want to relinquish the political power this evil mirage has come so close to delivering.

Can anyone debate that “climate change is real”? Now that ‘warming’ is in doubt, can we be too ‘cold’? Are we to make Mother Nature so precise that we should ‘ban’ any deviation from seasonal norms, regardless of their cause? Can we possibly know the origin of climate variations or ‘change’? Is it atmospheric change, variations in our orbital pattern, or a consequence of industrial emissions? Do we actually know what the correct temperature is supposed to be? If we do, it is possible to fine tune this thermostat through some matrix of government or industrial policies? Is this starting to sound more ridiculous by the day?

We can estimate how many barrels of oil are in the ground, how many tons of copper, aluminum or iron ore is in the ground or in industrial storage, or how many bushels of wheat or corn is likely to be harvested; but who knows how many ‘units’ or ‘carbon credits’ there are to be traded. This will be a figure created by the government. Certainly there will be some delusional sham calculation made by scientists who claim to be able to read the pulse of God, but does anyone think that the number of carbon credits will not be adjusted constantly for political purposes?

But why would any oil company support such a ridiculous system? One guess is just political pressure, but I think there are other motivations. It is common for crony capitalists to use government regulation to limit competitors’ entry into their field. This cap and trade policy is perfectly suited for such an ambition; what better way to make your existing energy assets more valuable than to limit your competitors’ access to competing assets?

Perhaps the established energy companies see the political drive as being inevitable and they are just trying to have a voice at the table. But the only thing I am more skeptical of than a massive social change based on incredibly dubious information claiming that the “debate is over” are compliant industry captains cheering them on with public altruistic statements.

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