Predatory Green Capitalism: Monetising Air! By James Reed

     The world suffers from commodity fetishism, where everything has been converted to a money value, and where the money power controls everything. Some may feel that some things escape this net, such as air, but the global warming nonsense shows that even air will be reduced to a monetary value, and we will pay for air:
  https://washingtonsblog.com/2019/07/predatory-green-capitalism-is-monetizing-the-air-and-its-going-to-cost-you.html
  http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/07/predatory-green-capitalism-is.html

“You asked, "What's left to monetize? It appears the answer is 'very little.'" I respectfully disagree. The Biggest Enchilada of all is left. Air. Specifically carbon dioxide, CO2. We just have to figure how to get the yokels to agree to pay for that which was formerly free. Got it! First we browbeat them into believing its evil and that we have to tax it to save all life on Earth. Then, following in the finest traditions of the degenerate late medieval Catholic Church, we'll commission sellers of "Indulgences" to allow sinning at ever rising prices. a/k/a "Carbon Credit trading". This doesn't require any value added and the profits on "buy zero sell high" are limitless. This is the specific outline and the very same agencies that so love financialization of all kinds, $2 trillion dollar student debt to sustain obscenely paid college administrators and academics, endless academic credentialism and huge Hipster Cities sitting on container ports and mediating the China Trade, are all promoting this financialization of CO2 as hard as possible. This is why a nullity like the Paris Climate Accords continues to be pushed even after its proven every way possible that a) the biggest emitters like China and India won't adhere to them and b) even if they did the prescribed regimes will do nothing anyway. And its why I "don't believe" in it. Or rather, its why I believe its just the next and biggest financial scam.

Thank you, Mark, for answering my naive question: of course Wall Street and the Davos Crowd are salivating over the hundreds of billions of profits to be skimmed from carbon taxes and trading. Not that corporations, financiers or billionaires will pay the carbon taxes; they will be passed on to consumers of everything that emits CO2, i.e. pretty much everything, including us of course. Never mind that plant life needs CO2, and that planting trees could soak up the carbon at a fraction of the cost of neoliberal carbon taxes/credits; the goal of the "environmentalists" flying in on their private jets isn't to actually reduce CO2--it's to engineer a new source of rentier profits via monetizing / financializing CO2. Here's the neoliberal fantasy that's being sold and sold hard: making a market for carbon credits etc. will magically cause those paying more for emitting carbon to emit less. This is the Neoliberal Skim/Scam: privatizing what was once free and funneling the profits to the few at the expense of the many. Call it rentier, call it exploitation, call it predatory-- all are accurate. So streets that once offered free parking now have parking meters that have been privatized to benefit private-sector corporations.

The neoliberal predators have come up with a new sales pitch to cover their predation: "green capitalism," the notion that sending all the Bad Things to the landfill and replacing them with very costly (and oh so profitable to global corporations and financiers) Good Things will magically save a status quo dependent on "Growth" while also magically reducing CO2. Wrong on all counts. If we measure the full lifecycle costs and environmental burdens of the Good Things (all electric vehicles, etc.), we find that replacing all the existing stuff on the planet will actually increase CO2 immensely--the reduction is trivial while the CO2 emitted in the extraction, processing, manufacture, transport and maintenance of the replacement stuff (i.e. "Growth") will vastly increase CO2, as will all the green capitalists' private jets. As Mark pointed out, the majority of CO2 is emitted by nations that have no interest in reducing CO2, nor will they pay carbon taxes or play Wall Street's game of trading carbon credits. So the net result of neoliberal "green capitalism" is higher CO2 and hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth skimmed from those who can least afford it while Al Gore and the rest of the Davos / NGO / philanthro-capitalist elites jet in for another "green" conference.”

     All good points detailing that the global warming scam is not really about dismantling capitalism, but is a movement by one large influential group of super-capitalists, to carve out their vast share of economic reality, using the false scare of a climate apocalypse to reshape present industrial society. Truly amazing that they have got so far with this conspiracy.