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5 Economics: ‘Alchymists, sorcerers and charlatans’
In
tracing the career of the erring philosophers, or the wilful cheats, who have
encouraged or preyed upon the credulity of mankind, it will simplify and
elucidate the subject if we divide it into three classes: the first comprising
alchymists…the second comprising astrologers, necromancers, sorcerers,
geomancers and all those who pretend to discover futurity; and the third
consisting of dealers in charms, amulets, philtres, universal-panacea mongers,
touchers for the evil, seventh sons of a seventh son, sympathetic-powder
compounders, homeopathists, animal magnitisers, and all the motley tribe of
quacks, empirics and charlatans.[1]
This citation, from Charles Mackay’s 1841
treatise examining the human propensity to fall prey to panic-mongers and
confidence men, offers a useful summary of the various types of manipulation
and rhetoric that have characterized the AGW debate over the past decade and
more. The refusal of the AGW theorists
to acknowledge and incorporate into their model the first four “ugly facts”
addressed in this paper – that it is not unusually warm; that it is getting
colder; and that while temperatures do not correlate with carbon dioxide
concentrations, they do appear to
correlate with solar activity – might charitably be ascribed, in Mackay’s
idiom, to the work or influence of “erring philosophers.” The next three cases, however – the
vulnerability to market forces and outright fraud of attempts to treat “carbon”
like a commodity; the portrayal by politicians and politically-motivated
activists of “climate change” as a “threat”; and the repeated betrayals by the
proponents of the AGW thesis of the fundamental tenets of science – are
examples of what Mackay called “wilful cheats, who have encouraged or preyed
upon the credulity of mankind.”
This chapter examines how “alchymists,
sorcerers and charlatans” have been able to create and/or exploit past economic
panics and bubbles to generate profits from insufficiently sceptical. The purpose of this examination is to provide
an historical context for a subsequent discussion of the financial alchemy of
carbon trading, through which one of the two gases most important to life on
Earth is transformed: first, into a poison threatening global Armageddon,
necessitating regulatory limits, taxation and fines; and then, through the
alchemy of “carbon credits”, into a commodity, to be bought and sold in
international markets with the political aim of achieving massive reductions in
the production of this horribly dangerous, yet somehow marvellously profitable,
substance.
Because a discussion of these subjects
necessitates a review of relevant historical precedents, the following chapters
are necessarily somewhat longer than the foregoing ones, which – by virtue of
the topics involved – focussed exclusively on the scientific aspects of the AGW
thesis. I therefore beg the reader’s
indulgence as I first delve into some illustrative historical examples of what
can happen when of humans make decisions – especially economic decisions –
without first engaging their critical faculties.
5.1 ‘Artful managers’
John Law
was born into a Scottish family of bankers and goldsmiths in 1671, and enjoyed
an eclectic and somewhat chequered career as an economist and gadfly during the
closing decades of the 17th Century.
Insufficient success as a gambler and a surfeit thereof as a duellist
(he was convicted, condemned, fined and exiled after killing a man over a
lover’s affections in 1694) led to his removing to Paris, where he busied
himself urging the creation of a national bank and the replacement of coins
with paper currency to compensate for the declining availability of precious
metals, due, inter alia, to the
impact on the French national treasury of the wars of Louis XIV. Law established, in 1716, the Banque Générale Privée. In theory, Law’s bank was private – but the
bulk of its founding capital consisted of government debt instruments.
The role
of the government in underwriting his bank’s activities notwithstanding, Law
worked his institution like a private investor, buying numerous companies and
floating their stock in order to increase share prices and income. His most daring venture was the purchase of
the Mississippi Company in 1717 (arguably to assist the burgeoning French
colony in Louisiana) and the floating of shares in a new Compagnie d’Occident that same year. The Compagnie d’Occident was granted an
exclusive franchise over trade between North America and the West Indies,
making its stock enormously attractive to investors – a lure which was only
enhanced when Law’s bank became the Banque
Royale in 1718, meaning that its stock was thereafter guaranteed by the
Crown. Law then absorbed numerous other
companies, vastly increasing the bank’s holdings, and began trading shares in
the Mississippi company in exchange for government debt. Rampant speculation in the shares traded by
the bank led to inflation, and prices soared nearly forty-fold over the course
of the year. Law issued new shares,
reducing the value of existing shares – but the shares, in effect, were not
backed by anything concrete. Law had
offered scintillating descriptions of the magnificence of the Mississippi
venture, especially its allegedly rich (“but alas”, one economist notes,
“wholly illusory”[2])
gold mines, but the reality was that there was no substance to his claims.[3]
When
investors realized this, a sell-off of stock began, confidence collapsed, and
with it, Law’s bank, obliterating as well the financial underpinnings of the
French government. The French regent
appointed Law Controller General of Finances in 1720 (a sterling example, if
ever there was one, of the unwisdom of reinforcing failure), but this did
nothing to stem the tsunami. The bank’s
shares lost 97% of their value when Law’s “Mississippi Scheme” imploded. Panicked investors tried to convert their
stock into hard currency, only to discover that the bank had virtually
none. Law was dismissed, forced to flee
France, and spent the last eight years of his life wandering Europe, eventually
dying in poverty in Venice in 1729.[4]
At roughly
the same time that Law was struggling to maintain the solvency of his bank, the
“South Sea Bubble” was bursting in Britain.
Formed in 1711 by the Lord Treasurer, Robert Harley, the South Sea
Company obtained exclusive rights to the “South Sea”, i.e. South American,
trade markets. The company assumed about
seven and a half million pounds worth of government debt in exchange for a
perpetual annuity of about one-fifteenth that amount, and issued shares
predicated upon its trade monopoly. The
monopoly, however, never paid off; the Treaty of Utrecht that concluded the War
of the Spanish Succession permitted the company to send only a single ship per
year, and the single trading voyage that took place (in 1717) made very little
profit. Deterioration of British-Spanish
relations in 1718 put the future of the company into doubt. Notwithstanding these poor prospects, the
company continued purchasing government debt and issuing shares.
The
soaring value of the South Sea stocks prompted a nation-wide frenzy in
investment; no get-rich-quick scheme seemed too bizarre to be possible. Companies went public promising everything
from the mundane (“the importation of jackasses from Spain”[5])
to the sublime (“the wheel of perpetual motion”[6])
to the simply unimaginable (“an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to
know what it is”). According to Mackay,
this latter adventurer had judged shrewdly the mood of investors:
The man of genius
who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity merely stated
in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in 5000 shares
of 100l. each, deposit 2l. per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be
entitled to 100l. per annum per
share. How this immense profit was to be
obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised that
in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the
remaining 98l. of the
subscription….Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o’clock,
he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of
2000l. He was philosopher enough to be contented
with this venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again.[7]
At this
point, the unscrupulous began making their influence felt; the company engaged
in the wildest forms of propaganda about the value and prospects of its
stock. Many members of the upper crust
were enticed to participate, lending their names to the endeavour and, as a
result, binding their personal reputations as well as financial interests to
those of the company. The company was
thereafter able to claim a certain degree of legitimacy by publicizing the
identities of its high-profile investors.
Speculation in, and “flipping” of, shares caused the stock price to
soar, from £120 in January 1720, to seven times that six months later. Things came to a head in June 1720 when the
Royal Exchange and London Assurance Corporation Act, passed the previous year,
came into effect. The South Sea Company
obtained such a charter, boosting its stock further, to nearly £900 per
share. This precipitated a sell-off as
investors tried to cash in. The Company
attempted to stabilize prices by buying back its own shares.
By August
of 1720, when the stock price had reached nearly £1000, the essential
instability of the edifice that the company’s managers had created began to
make itself felt. The collapse of John
Law’s Mississippi scheme at about the same time created a crisis of confidence
among investors, which in the long run is the bane of any economic bubble. The sell-off of the stock gathered
momentum. The company responded by
loaning money to investors to enable people to buy the company’s shares, but
the falling stock price meant that people could not afford to pay back the
loans other than by selling their shares.
The collapse accelerated, taking down not only the company itself, but also
the banks and private investors that owned its stock. A Parliamentary investigation, struck in
response to public outrage, subsequently revealed widespread corruption among
the company’s officers, and offered the following eloquent conclusion:
And thus were seen, in the space of eight months, the rise,
progress, and fall of that mighty fabric, which, being wound up by mysterious
springs to a wonderful height, had fixed the eyes and expectations of all
Europe, but whose foundation, being fraud, illusion, credulity, and
infatuation, fell to the ground as soon as the artful management of its
directors was discovered.[8]
In tracing the history of the South Sea
Bubble, Mackay makes a crucial distinction between an investor believing in the
inherent logic of a scheme itself, and believing that it will generate money
regardless of its validity: “…it did not follow that all these people believed
in the feasibility of the schemes to which they subscribed; it was enough for
their purpose that their shares would, by stock-jobbing arts, be soon raised to
a premium, when they got rid of them with all expedition to the really
credulous.”[9] This is a crucial distinction, and
illustrates both the fundamental importance of the principle of caveat emptor, and the hollowness of
claims that the public were duped by unscrupulous salesmen. “Nobody seemed to imagine”, Mackay concludes
acidly,
that the nation
itself was as culpable as the South-Sea Company. Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice of the
people – the degrading lust of gain, which had swallowed up every nobler
quality in the national character, or the infatuation which had made the
multitude run their heads with such frantic eagerness into the net held out for
them by scheming projectors. These
things were never mentioned. The people
were a simple, honest, hard-working people, ruined by a gang of robbers, who
were to be hanged, drawn and quartered without mercy.[10]
The John Law and South Sea bubbles offer
three lessons relevant to this study.
The first, and from our perspective the most important, is that neither
stock-marketers nor investors must necessarily
believe in the logical feasibility of a money-making scheme; all that is
necessary is that they believe that it will generate income. Common-sense questions like “does this
business model/proposed technology/scientific idea really work” are ignored in
favour of the more important economic question: “can I recoup my investment and
make a profit?”, with the qualifying subtext, for the more practiced investor,
being, “can I do so before this hare-brained scheme collapses?” In a market economy, value is relative, not
absolute, and is accorded by the buyer rather than the seller. A thing has no intrinsic value; it is worth
only what someone is willing to pay for it.
It doesn’t matter if the thing being offered for sale is a jackass
imported from Spain, an unseen and entirely imaginary gold mine on the Gulf
Coast, or a share in an “undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know
what it is”; it is worth what the prospective buyer is willing to pay. What this means in a more general historical
sense is that, if an idea is able to generate a profit, then the underlying
validity of the idea itself is, from an economic perspective at least, entirely
irrelevant. This fact is key to
understanding where “carbon trading” came from, and where it is likely to end.
The second lesson that emerges from the
spectacularly disastrous speculations of the early 18th Century is
that they foreshadowed contemporary counterparts. The real-estate bubble of the early 1980s was
the result of precisely the same sort of behaviour on the part of investors,
speculators and managers as the John Law and South Sea scandals. In each case, extant financial mechanisms
were manipulated by speculators to drive up share prices, while investors –
obeying the immutable law, stated above, that the idea underlying a scheme does
not have to make sense so long as it generates a return on investment – poured
money into the mill. The real-estate
bubble was the direct result of “flipping” – the rapid (and for obvious
reasons, illegal) turnover of properties between investors in order to
artificially inflate the price. As with
stocks flipped between investors in the South Sea Company in 1720 (or between
investors and the Company itself), nothing real was created; the enhanced
“value” of the shares was an artefact of an entirely artificial process, used
by, and feeding the lust for profit of, people willing to pay the inflated
prices in expectation of further price increases. Naturally, in all cases the edifice collapsed
when sellers could no longer find buyers willing to pay the
artificially-inflated prices.
The same mechanism was at work in the
economic crisis that precipitated the Great Depression. As Galbraith notes,
…the collapse in
the stock market in the autumn of 1929 was implicit in the speculation that
went before. The only question
concerning that speculation was how long it would last. Sometime, sooner or later, confidence in the
short-run reality of increasing common stock values would weaken. When this happened, some people would sell,
and this would destroy the reality of increasing values. Holding for an increase would now become
meaningless; the new reality would be falling prices. There would be a rush, pell-mell, to
unload. This was the way past
speculative orgies had ended. It was the
way the end came in 1929. It is the way
speculation will end in the future.[11]
The same dynamic also precipitated the
collapse of the sub-prime mortgage industry in the United States in 2008. That industry’s operations were predicated
entirely on financing otherwise unsustainable levels of debt by assuming that
property only ever increases in value – an historically ludicrous presumption. Moreover, as was the case in both the John
Law and South Sea scandals, the collapse was exacerbated by the fact that the
government was a major share-holder. In
retrospect, of course, the fundamental instability of such systems is patently
obvious, which begs the question: Why do people buy into a scheme when they
know it cannot go on indefinitely? That,
of course, is answered by the first lesson: they do so because they think they
can always sell something for more than what they paid for it.[12]
The third lesson lies not only in the fact
that Ponzi schemes inevitably fail, but why
they fail. They fail because
inflationary speculation is predicated not only upon a logical impossibility –
that of ever-increasing value, a proposition as improbable in historical terms
as perpetual motion is under the laws of thermodynamics – but also upon an
infinite progression of investors: an inexhaustible supply of people who
believe that they will be able to make their money, and get out before things
go sour. Notwithstanding P.T. Barnum’s
contention that a “sucker” is born every minute, however, statistically
speaking, the supply of credulous investors is not inexhaustible. Sooner or later – as John Law, the directors
of the South Sea Company, and all speculators before and since have discovered
to their sorrow – the shareholders wise up.
The first to do so sells earliest and therefore suffers the smallest
loss; but it is often his flight that precipitates the mass exodus which, in
turn, brings the whole edifice crashing down.
The “innovative financial scoundrels” who
should be called to account, by contrast, often escape judgement (occasionally
because, as in the case of the author of the “undertaking of great advantage”,
they managed to escape with their profits before the collapse); but when they
do not, it is invariably they who are blamed for the losses. They stand condemned and vilified as “artful
managers” by a “simple, honest, hard-working” people who, it often seems, are
outraged not so much by their financial losses, as by the fact that their
cupidity, naïveté, and greed have been exploited – and, worse, exposed.
5.2 Of Tulips and Dot-Coms
The activities of investors and speculators
during the John Law and South Sea Bubble disasters – and, for that matter, in
the lead up to and collapse of securities and real estate prices in,
respectively, the late 1920s and early 1980s – were understandable at least in
the sense that, in each case, things of alleged (if vastly over-inflated) value
were being bought and sold. Other cases
of peculiar economic behaviour, however, do not offer the historian even this
much explicatory consolation. Two cases
that illustrate this phenomenon – separated by nearly a score of generations in
terms of time, but by hardly an angstrom in terms of human behaviour – are the
Dutch tulip craze of the early 17th Century, and the American
“dot-com” craze of the late 20th Century.
These two cases are similar to those
described above in the sense that, like the South Sea and John Law scandals,
the Tulip and the dot-com frenzies each resulted in an inflationary
bubble. Where they differ is in the fact
that, in these latter cases, unlike in the former, investors knew precisely
what it was they were buying, knew that their purchases were horribly
overvalued, and knew that a bursting of the bubble was inevitable. And yet they bought anyway. A cursory review of these two cases offers
further useful lessons on the nature of human economic behaviour.
The “Tulipomania” that afflicted Holland in
1636 and that was popularized by Mackay in Extraordinary
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds has in recent years come under
more in-depth scrutiny as economists and social historians alike have attempted
to glean, from scarce historical data, a better understanding of the nature of
economic bubbles. Mackay alleges that
the tulip craze was a classical bubble in the sense that, in the words of one
economist, “people pay a crazy price and people trade like crazy.”[13] According to Mackay, “the rage among the
Dutch to possess [tulips] was so great that the ordinary industry of the
country was neglected…many persons were known to invest a fortune of 100,000
florins in the purchase of forty roots.”[14] By any measure, 2500 florins for a single
tulip bulb, when the average annual wage for a tradesman at the time was
something on the order of 150 florins, qualifies as a significant expenditure.
But was it “crazy”? According to Mackay’s interpretation of the
events of the 1630s, “crazy” may have been too mild a term; bulbs of desirable
species were allegedly sold for prices as high as 4400 to 5500 florins, while
one example of a Semper Augustus bulb
was reputed to have been purchased for “4600 florins, a new carriage, two grey
horses, and a complete set of harness.”[15] This sort of behaviour, of course, could not
last, and when “the more prudent” (to use Mackay’s term) realized that
“somebody must lose fearfully in the end”, the extravagant prices began to
fall, and the tulip bubble burst.
Contemporary re-examinations (to the extent
that such are possible, given the paucity of detailed economic data from the
period in question) have challenged Mackay’s interpretation of events, even to
the extent of arguing that the vast increase in prices was the result not of
classical “bubble” behaviour, but rather a rational market response to
contemporary events and regulatory changes.
To a certain extent, “faddishness” is a characteristic of the wealthy,
and individuals with excess disposable income are both predisposed and able to
pay what others would deem “crazy” prices for luxury items, whether those items
are designer dresses in Hollywood, cube-shaped melons in Japan, or
grossly-overpriced apartments in trendy Manhattan neighbourhoods. Galbraith points out that affluence is a
necessary precondition for the formation of an economic bubble. The desirability of certain varieties of
tulip bulbs, therefore, and the relative wealth of the upper crust of Amsterdam
society at the time, must account for some portion of the price increase.
Historical events may also have played a
role. At the time of the mania, Europe
was a generation into the 30 Years’ War.
One author suggests that the Swedish defeat of a German army (under John
George I of Saxony) at Wittstock on 3 October 1636 led to a revolt among the
German peasantry, giving German nobles something to think about besides
purchasing luxuries, and – as a result – leading to a decline in, inter alia, the price of tulip bulbs in
Holland.[16] Because contract prices were already fixed by
this time, however, investors began to worry about the impact on their
contracts if prices fell rather than rose.
At this point, it is important to note that the tulip bulb market was in
essence a futures market; the bulbs were collected and replanted in September
in anticipation of delivery the following spring. The prices specified in tulip contracts were
therefore by definition speculative.
Moreover, at the same time, a regulatory change (possibly driven by
politically-connected investors concerned about spiralling prices) transformed
the nature of those contracts; in order to insulate purchasers against the
effect of inflationary price spikes, those purchasers could now break their
contracts by paying only a fraction of the value thereof (Mackay says 10%;
others have put the penalty at 1/30th of the original contract value
or 3½%).
This turned futures contracts into options
contracts, leading investors – according to modern analysts – to be more
willing to risk high prices, because they could escape from the contracts at
minimal cost. Contra Mackay, they argue, the resulting price spikes in tulip bulb
options were a rational response by the market, rather than bubble behaviour
attributable to “the madness of crowds”.
Interestingly, from the point of view of
the present study, Mackay’s interpretation offers fewer lessons than that
preferred by the modern re-interpreters of the events of the 17th
Century. If Mackay is right, then the
Dutch “tulipomania” was indeed an example of how actions that may be rational
on an individual level – e.g., agreeing to purchase tulip bulbs at a high
price, and then reselling them to another buyer at an even higher price – can
collectively turn into irrational group behaviour. This is interesting, but from the perspective
of the present study, it does not offer much in the way of generalizable
historical lessons.
If, on the other hand, the modern economists
are correct, then the increase in prices for tulip bulbs in Holland in 1636
demonstrates how government intervention in the market can have unintended
consequences. As one analyst puts it,
“contract prices soared to reflect the expectation that the contract price was
now a call-option exercise, or strike-price rather than a price committed to be
paid for future bulbs.”[17] The transformation of tulip contracts from
futures to options was designed to insulate investors from the adverse
consequences of making bad predictions, but the result was a price spiral in
the tulip market, followed by a price crash.
The latter would no doubt be seen in some quarters as an “adjustment” of
the price of tulip bulbs towards something more representative of their actual
market value (in the sense of “what someone was actually willing to pay for
them”), and of course it was. But what
is interesting is that it came about not in response to market pressures, but
rather as a result of government intervention in the market.
The rise and fall of the first wave of
internet-based businesses in the mid- to late 1990s offers another perspective
on the phenomenon of economic bubbles.
The “dot-coms” (a euphemism for internet-based companies, generally with
evocative names followed by the suffix “.com” to complete the website uniform
resource locater) began to take off in 1995 in tandem with the explosion of the
internet. The rapid expansion of this
new industrial sector was fuelled by a combination of web-based services and a
concomitant boom in the high-tech sector, which saw vastly increased sales of
the communications and computer equipment necessary to support the internet
explosion. Over the next five years, the
tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite Index gained nearly six-fold in value, with 50% of
the increase coming in the period 1999 to 2000.
On 10 March 2000, however, the bubble burst; and by mid-2003, the NASDAQ
had fallen back to 1996 levels – roughly a quarter of the peak it had achieved
at its height.[18]
The explosion of the dot-coms in the
mid-1990s was largely the result of two concurrent phenomena: a massive and
sudden technological transformation (the internet coupled with, and created by,
continual improvements in processor speed and the capacity of electronic
memory), and the availability of large amounts of venture capital as a result
of a particularly strong economy in the US.
The phenomenon was characterized by the emergence of a new business
model: to run a new business at a loss, concentrating on growth rather than
return on investment, on the assumption that revenue generation would follow
once a given company was “big enough” to “dominate” whatever sector it had set
its sights upon. As in any Darwinian
environment, those who succeeded were vastly outnumbered by those who perished,
and estimates for the number of business failures suggest that as many as 90%
of all internet start-ups in the 1990s ultimately failed. Those who survived the Darwinian winnowing
did well; the bubble left behind a number of sector-dominating giants, notably
Google and Amazon.
This period of extraordinary growth
produced a new business term: “burn-rate”, where non-revenue-generating growth
– i.e., how fast a new start-up went through its allotment of venture capital –
was deemed a measure of success. It also
loaded the market with high-tech jobs, especially in the programming and
communications fields, many of which were lost when start-ups failed. The initial public offerings of stock in many
of these companies were eagerly snapped up, netting enormous paper sums, and
generating vast enthusiasm and excitement for the industry – precisely as the
stock offerings for the Mississippi company had done in the early 1700s. Indeed, the peculiar obscurity of many of the
areas of endeavour during the dot-com boom bears a remarkable semantic
similarity to the “undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it
is”, stock options for which were heavily subscribed in London in 1720. In many cases, the venture capital expended
during the 1990s by these “men of genius”, to borrow Mackay’s phrase,
disappeared into the ether just as assuredly as if an unscrupulous
fly-by-nighter had decamped with a satchel full of guineas.
The dot-com bubble emerged, evolved,
expanded and imploded in exactly the same way as its predecessors. Confidence – in the booming economy, as well
as in the promise of new technologies – fuelled investment, which in turn led
to speculation. Share prices soared in a
self-reinforcing spiral. The hard
technology companies contributed their own share to the dynamic, posting record
profits as businesses and governments hastened to upgrade their communications
infrastructure in order to ensure that they didn’t miss out on the coming
“information economy” (an expression which, along with “paperless office”,
“telecommuting”, and “networking”, came into vogue at about this time). Equipment sales, installation fees and the
like at least represented a solid investment in tangible goods and services, differing
from inflated share prices in at least two significant ways: first, they were
real; and second, they were periodic, and had an expected lifespan. This latter characteristic proved to be a
problem for the hardware industry, which (like any industry) thrives on
continual sales. Once an upgrade is
complete, another may not be needed for several years. After feast, comes famine.
Analysts conducting a post-mortem of the
dot-com collapse point to a number of key factors that, taken together,
launched, sustained and eventually sank the industry. At the strategic level, the economy, after
running very hot for three quarters of a decade, was beginning to slow down;
the Federal Reserve, in order to prevent inflation, had implemented a number of
interest rate increases between 1999 and 2000, putting a damper on the
availability of low-interest venture capital.
Another possible influence included the issuance, on 5 November 1999, of
findings of fact by a Federal judge in United
States vs. Microsoft, asserting that Microsoft constituted a monopoly in a
landmark anti-trust case. This sent a shudder
through the high-tech industry.[19] The judge’s ruling was due to be handed down
on 3 April 2000, and anticipation of a sell-off is thought to have played a
role in influencing buy-sell decisions on technology stocks in the weeks
leading up to that date.[20] Some analysts have also argued that a
confluence of pre-programmed sell orders for technology stocks triggered other
computerized trading orders programmed to begin selling in a falling market to
minimize potential losses (a thoroughly logical precaution from a
profit-maximization perspective, but one which, in practice, equates to trying
to stop a flood by opening the fire hydrants).
Finally, it has been suggested that the non-event of Y2K after years of
build-up and doom-mongering predictions about the impending collapse of
world-wide computing and communications infrastructure may have played a role
in the collapse of technology stocks.
Businesses and government had spent much of the late 1990s upgrading
their technology to prevent Y2K, with the result that no further upgrades were
necessary for some time after the dreaded date had passed. This led to a precipitous drop-off in
equipment purchases, and a resulting decline in the value of tech stocks.
As is always the case, the bursting of the
“tech bubble” was followed by layoffs, consolidations, bankruptcies, mergers
and closures as the decline of the dot-com “sector” accelerated. By some estimates, when the dot-com bubble
burst, more than $5 trillion in “paper value” was wiped out (this figure was
estimated by looking at the NASDAQ, which stood at $6.7 trillion in March 2000,
and $1.6 trillion 30 months later).[21] Much, if not most, of this figure may
represent inflationary value, but it also included enormous amounts of start-up
venture capital that fell victim to the unprecedented “burn rates” that were
the inevitable by-product of the get-big-quick business model. A great deal of capital, both real and
inflationary, was volatilized when the dot-coms went under, leaving in their
wake an economic landscape littered with out-of-work employees and angry
investors, and hordes of analysts and economists arguing about why it had
happened.
All they had to do was look at the
past. The dot-com bubble was nothing
more than yet another iteration of a classical economic bubble in which
investors, flush with money due to a booming economy, were prepared to pump
large quantities of capital into projects that promised an enormous rate of
return to whomever could, in the words of Nathan Bedford Forrest, get there
“firstest with the mostest”. As with the
South Sea Bubble, having a proposal to invest in seemed less important than the
rationality of the proposal itself; all that mattered was the prospect of
achieving a huge return on investment.
There is something ironic in the fact that people tend to weather
difficult economic times, preserving wealth by being sceptical about investment
opportunities, whereas – pace
Galbraith – one of the features of bubbles is that they tend to occur in strong
economic times, when investors are more likely to be profligate in pursuit of
even greater wealth – and, as a result, often end up poorer than before.
At time of writing, it appeared that the
second internet business revolution was under way. Venture capital, in response to the strong
performance by internet giants like Google and Amazon, and upstart businesses
like Wikipedia, eBay, Youtube, Facebook and MySpace, was once again becoming
available. Some industry analysts were
wondering whether the second wave of internet businesses would have a higher
success rate, noting that, on average, the Western countries had ten times as
many internet users as in the mid-1990s.[22] If a second revolution is indeed underway, it
will probably be lower-key and far more cautious than the first. We cannot rely on investors remembering the
grotesque excesses of the 1990s and the horror of the dot-com collapse, because
– as history demonstrates – memory weighs light in the balance against the
prospect of the “next big thing”. It is
more likely that risk calculations will be dampened by the constrained
financial climate in the wake of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage
industry in the US, the clamour for “bailouts” and “stimuli” reaching into the
trillions of dollars, and the uncertain future of large corporations and
taxation schemes at the hands of the Obama administration. These considerations are likely to make even
the most ardent and venturesome of capitalists protective of their remaining wherewithal.
Like the John Law scandal and the South Sea
Bubble, the Dutch tulip craze and the collapse of the dot-coms offer a variety
of lessons relevant to the present study.
The first is that bubbles tend to occur during relatively strong
economic circumstances, when investors have excess capital, are looking for
opportunities, and are willing to tolerate riskier ventures. Constraints on investment capital tend to
make investors more cautious and lest prone to risk-taking. The second lesson is the same one that
emerged from the crises of 1720 – that economic bubbles result from the
expectation of profit, rather than from any conclusion, based on objective assessment,
that a proposal is rational or even possible.
And the third – as demonstrated by the Dutch government’s attempt to
stem the tide by changing the laws regulating the purchase of tulip “futures”,
turning agreed sales into “options contracts” – is that government intervention
to stem a crisis can have unintended consequences, and can worsen an emergency
instead of mitigating it.
As the world begins to flirt with the widespread
trading of “carbon credits”, all of these factors are present, and in spades.
5.3 ‘Innovative financial scoundrels’ [23]
With him there rode a noble
Pardoner
Of Rouncival, his friend
and his compeer;
Straight from the court of
Rome had journeyed he.
…
His knapsack lay before him
in his lap,
Stuffed full with pardons
brought from Rome all hot.
…
Well could he read a lesson
or a story,
But best of all he sang an
offertory;
For he knew well that when
that song was sung,
Then must he preach, and
all with smoothened tongue.
To gain some silver,
preferably from the crowd;
Therefore he sang so
merrily and so loud.[24]
The
Chicago Climate Exchange, headquartered on South LaSalle Street in the Windy
City, bills itself as “North America’s only cap-and-trade system for all six
greenhouse gases”. The Exchange operates
in conjunction with the “Chicago Climate Futures Exchange”, “a landmark
derivatives exchange that currently offers standardized and cleared futures and
options contracts on emission allowances and other environmental products.”[25] In essence, the Exchanges provide North
American businesses the opportunity to voluntarily purchase “carbon credits” in
a futures market, much as one would purchase oil futures, pork belly futures,
or even tulip futures. The trading of
“carbon credits” is, naturally, subject to a brokerage fee, and the trading
agency also sustains itself from the delta between buying and selling prices.
(The
scientific credibility of the Exchange’s business model, incidentally, may be
judged by the fact that water vapour – which is by far the most prevalent
greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and is roughly four times as effective a
greenhouse agent as carbon dioxide – is not one of the “six greenhouse gases”
traded. This is perhaps not surprising,
as establishing a cap and trade regime for steam could adversely impact the
price of a decent cappuccino.)
What,
exactly, is a “carbon credit”? In
essence, it is permission, purchased in advance, to emit a given quantity of
gaseous carbon dioxide as a result of combustion or other industrial
process. The sale of “carbon credits”
has existed for some time; Europe has established a large carbon trading
market, and websites in Canada and the US offer “carbon credits” (generally
called “carbon offsets” when sold on a retail basis) for purchase. Examples of offset retailers include:
Offsetters.ca, carbonzero.ca, climatecare.org, greenlife.com,
carbonneutral.com, climatetrust.org, self.org, nativeenergy.com,
betterworldclub.com, terrapass.com, carbonfund.org, carboncounter.org, climatemundi.fr,
vanrenewable.org, targetneutral.com, livclean.ca, carbonpassport.com,
co2balance.com. These, incidentally, are
only the “carbon credit”-peddling organizations listed on the website of
environmental activist David Suzuki.
What,
exactly, do you get when you buy a “carbon offset”? According to carbonpassport.com, a UK
website, buying carbon offsets is “a responsible way to neutralise the carbon
emissions we cannot avoid creating at home, when travelling or in
business.” An internal flight within the
UK, the site informs us, can be “offset” for “as little as £3.”[26]
The site further advises that “when you offset your carbon footprint with
Carbon Passport you can choose to buy a car sticker or fridge magnet and will receive
a personalised offset certificate” signed by the Director of Carbon Passport
Limited, and showing how many “tonnes of greenhouse gases” the purchaser has
“offset.”
Carbon
credits have been derided by many in the community of global warming sceptics
as “selling hot air”. This is not
precisely correct; someone who purchases a carbon offset or carbon credit under
a mandatory trading scheme is purchasing permission to emit carbon dioxide,
while someone who does so in a voluntary regime is purchasing absolution for
doing so. The surreal nature of the
“carbon credit” concept is explicable only in terms of a number of
inter-related phenomena. The first of
these is the principle, outlined above, of relative value, in which there is no
such thing as “intrinsic worth”, and value is established only when someone
buys something, thereby establishing a price.
This is the foundational principle of market economics, and it applies
to greenhouse gases as much as it does to gold or grain. In 1989, the National Gallery of Canada
bought a famous painting, “Voice of Fire” by Barnett Newman, for $1.8M. Critics of the purchase argued that the work
– an enormous canvas consisting of three vertical red and blue stripes – was
not “worth” that much. Such arguments
fly in the face of economics; “Voice of Fire” was worth $1.8M because the
Gallery had paid that much for it. The
value was set by the act of purchase. In
the same way, when trading closed at the Chicago Climate Exchange on 27 January
2009, a metric tonne of CO2
was worth $2.05 USD – not because CO2 has any intrinsic value, but
simply because that’s what buyers were paying for it.[27]
Like 17th
century tulips, 21st century carbon dioxide can be bought in a
futures market as well. At the same
close on 27 January 2009, carbon credits for December 2009 were going for
$2.15, while credits for December 2013 were going for $12.25. If the permission to emit a tonne of carbon
dioxide is indeed a commodity likely to be valuable in the future, then why not
treat it like one? Brokers, after all,
buy oil futures today, betting against the likely future cost of a barrel of
oil; why not do the same thing with carbon credits, betting against the likely
future cost of a tonne of carbon dioxide?
The
answer, of course, is because the price of a “future tonne” of carbon dioxide
depends entirely upon the continued validity of the theory that anthropogenic
carbon emissions are the main driver of climate and the principle source of
planetary woe. That thesis, as
demonstrated above, has failed. Value,
however, is based not on theory but – as seen in past bubbles – on
confidence. When confidence finally
collapses, so too will the price of a tonne of carbon dioxide. All of the money spent buying “carbon
futures” will have been wasted. It will
not, however, have been “lost” (just as the golden guineas paid to subscribe
stock in Spanish jackasses were not “lost”), because with the exception of the
brokerage fees charged by the trading house, the money paid to buy “carbon
futures” will have gone to the individuals and organizations “selling” the
credits – in many cases, foreign governments who, like Russia, have “carbon
credits” to sell because the target dates for emissions reductions set in the
Kyoto Accord ante-dated the economic collapse precipitated by the dissolution
of the USSR. In other words, the money paid
for carbon credits will have gone to governments and businesses in other
countries. I leave it to the reader to
ascertain how this benefits the Western nations, governments and citizens out
of whose pockets this money came. Or,
for that matter, how it benefits the planet.
A recent
article in Der Spiegel illustrates
how, in obedience to the law of unintended consequences, carbon credits may in
fact be working counter to what they were intended to achieve. Germany is making great strides in adopting wind
power as an alternative energy source, and is, at present, the world leader in
the field, with over 22 GW installed capacity.[28] The increasing availability of wind-generated
electricity is allowing German fossil-fuelled power plants to lower
production. However, the total number of
EU-issued emissions certificates remains the same; thus, widespread adoption of
wind power in Germany means that more “carbon credits” are becoming available,
leading to lower prices. This allows other,
older, less environmentally-friendly electrical generating stations in Eastern
Europe to purchase credits to allow more generation – and, therefore, in
addition to more “carbon emissions”, a good deal of real pollution as well.
Thanks to the EU emissions-trading scheme, Germany’s installation of wind
turbines amounts a “license to pollute” for Soviet-era coal-fired power plants
in places like Poland and Slovakia.[29] The immutable laws of the marketplace – which
dictate that the price of a good is inversely proportional to its availability
– are making it easier and cheaper for high-output polluters to purchase
absolution in the form of carbon credits than it is to invest in cleaner
production technologies.
Will
carbon prices collapse? In Europe, this
is already happening; over the past six months, the price of a tonne of carbon
dioxide has plummeted from €31 to €8.20, a decline of close to 75%.[30]
Could the same thing happen to carbon “prices” in the US market? To answer this question, one need only look
at what is holding them up. The only
reason a “credit” to emit a metric tonne of carbon dioxide is worth anything at
all is because the present climate panic attributes global warming, as it is
defined by the alarmist lobby, to anthropogenic greenhouse gas production. Companies that emit greenhouse gases are
hedging their bets, buying carbon credits at today’s “low prices” in order to
offset anticipated future emissions, when carbon credits – according to the
same companies that are selling them – are expected to be more expensive.
All of
this makes perfect economic sense – or it would, if there were any evidence
that human-produced carbon dioxide had any measurable impact on climate. The fact that it does not has still not been
acknowledged by Western governments, most of which, in obedience to political
strong-arming by the alarmists, continue to flirt with the idea of imposing
carbon taxes and carbon trading schemes.
Do carbon taxes actually reduce emissions? In 1991, Norway became one of the first
countries in the world to impose a tax on GHG emissions. Since then, Norway’s GHG emissions have risen
by 15%.[31] According to the US Energy Information
Administration, America’s untaxed carbon dioxide emissions grew by 16% percent
over the same period. It is difficult to
see what Norway achieved – other, of course, than to significantly increase the
cost of energy to consumers. Simply put,
the European Union’s experience with carbon taxes and carbon trading has seen market
price collapses and a transfer of emissions from relatively modern Western
European power plants to ‘dirty’ Eastern European power plants. By any measure, it has been an utter fiasco.[32]
What
happens to “carbon markets” when word about the failure of the AGW thesis gets
out? The facts about the insignificance
of anthropogenic carbon emissions in the climate equation will eventually reach
a wider audience. When they do, the
price of CO2 will collapse, reverting to its actual value (nothing). By then, of course, it may be too late; the
money spent on carbon taxes and carbon credits will be gone, and those whose
investments have evaporated will decry, as they always do, the “gang of
robbers” that bilked them – forgetting that any con game has two players: the
artist running the scam; and the dupe who allows himself to be taken in by it.
How much
money have companies already spent to purchase carbon credits and carbon
futures? How much money have
well-meaning but ill-informed private citizens spent to “offset” activities
like driving to work, picking up groceries, or taking the kids to soccer
practice? How many pension fund managers
have bought into the carbon market, on Al Gore’s personal assurance that the
price of hot air is only going to rise?
Where has that money gone? How
much of it has ended up in the pockets of individuals and corporations
established solely for the purpose of profiting from the economic opportunities
offered by the climate panic? How much
will disappear when the whole ridiculous edifice comes crashing down, as – in accordance
with the historical behaviour of all economic bubbles – it eventually must?
Who – if
anyone – will be held accountable for creating the carbon bubble in the first
place?
On 6 April
2008, Generation Investment Management, a private equity fund chaired by Al
Gore, bought a 9.5% stake in Camco International Limited, a company billed as a
“carbon asset developer.”[33] Camco at the time had one of the world’s
largest portfolios of carbon credits, and according to its prospectus,
“generate[s] carbon credits” and then arranges their sale and delivery “to
international compliance buyers and into the voluntary market.”[34] This is not a difficult dynamic to
understand: as a result of this stock purchase, Al Gore stands to benefit,
personally and substantially, from the growth
of the carbon credit market, and from any increase in the value of carbon
credits.
It is interesting, in view of this fact, that
Gore, testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 28 January 2009,
made the following statement:
Quickly building our capacity to generate
clean electricity will lay the groundwork for the next major step needed: placing a price on carbon. If Congress
acts right away to pass President Obama's Recovery package and then takes
decisive action this year to institute a
cap-and-trade system for CO2 emissions – as many of our states and many
other countries have already done – the United States will regain its
credibility and enter the Copenhagen treaty talks with a renewed authority to
lead the world in shaping a fair and
effective treaty. And this treaty must be negotiated this year.
effective treaty. And this treaty must be negotiated this year.
Not next year. This year.[35]
Cui
bono? Surely the relationship between Gore’s business
activities and his insistence that the US government take steps to institute
obligatory carbon trading – “Not next year.
This year” – is neither irrelevant nor immune to scrutiny. Gore is pressing the government of which he
was once a member to take regulatory action in an area where his own corporate
and financial interests are intimately engaged. It is remarkable that legislators and journalists
are not asking the obvious questions. Or
perhaps – in view of Gore’s high public profile, his unique status as an Oscar-
and Nobel Prize-winning former Vice-President, the fact that he is a Democrat, and
his newsworthiness as a full-time prophet of climatic end-times – it is not
remarkable at all.
Why “this year,” and “not next year”? Whence comes this urgency? It cannot be because the planet is warming
catastrophically, because it is not; indeed, as has been shown above, it is cooling,
and if anything is likely to continue to cool over the coming decades. What will another year or two of cooling due
to the value of the carbon credits held by Generation Investment
Management?
Or perhaps the urgency is due to the spreading
realization – not just by scientists, but by the public – that human activity
does not appear to significantly impact climate. Perhaps it is due to the increasing numbers
of scientists who are openly opposing the global warming orthodoxy. Perhaps it is the growing understanding by Western
electorates that “global warming” does not, in fact, pose the dire threat to
humanity that catastrophists predicted.
A Rasmussen poll released in January 2009 showed that more people (44%)
believed that global warming is due to planetary trends than to human activity
(41%). Only three years ago, the spread
was 11 points in the other direction; in April of 2008, 13 points.[36] The reversal of public opinion on the causes
of climate change is bad news for politicians bent on forging an international pact
to regulate carbon emissions. And it is disastrous
for anyone who has a stake in the carbon market. After all, carbon credits are not worth what
you paid for them, but only what someone
else is willing to pay to buy them from you.
If the AGW thesis is wrong – and it is – and human-produced
carbon dioxide has no significant impact on climate – and it doesn’t – then carbon
credits are worthless. Once investors
realize this, the carbon market will swiftly go the way of tulip bulbs, dot-com
stocks, imaginary gold mines in Mississippi, jackasses from Spain, and other
“undertakings of great advantage, but nobody to know what they are.” As noted above, whenever an economic bubble
pops, the first investor to bail out loses the least money. But his flight may also accidentally spark a
sell-off, creating a collapse where there was none before. Anyone holding a large portfolio of a carbon
credits would be ill-advised to attempt to sell, as other investors would take
the large portfolio-holder’s actions as a vote of non-confidence in the stock,
potentially precipitating the very collapse that he or she hopes to
avoid. Moreover, the act of selling
requires a buyer. A collapse of the
carbon market sparked by the implosion of the AGW thesis would by definition preclude
a rebound in prices. In such
circumstances, who would be so foolish as to buy carbon credits on the
down-tick?
The
caliphs of carbon are caught in a cleft stick of their own cutting, deeply
enmeshed in a market whose existence is predicated upon a scientific theory
that has demonstrably failed. The carbon
bubble is over-ripe and ready to burst; the only question is who will be the
first to jump. What is perhaps most distasteful
in this whole enterprise is the fact that “carbon credits” have been sold to a
credulous public as a moral obligation; a means of offsetting the damage
allegedly caused to the environment by the mundane, day-to-day activities of
the citizens of the advanced, industrialized countries. The panjandrums of climate panic tell us, day
in and day out, that emitting carbon is sinful.
How convenient, then, that the well-meaning but scientifically naïve
citizens should be able to assuage their guilty environmental consciences by
funnelling a few dollars here and there to foreign governments via a helpful
middleman, who merely siphons a pittance off the top.
We’ve seen
such “helpful middlemen” before – in the cynical opportunists who peddled
indulgences to the unlettered medieval peasantry, enabling them to purchase, on
behalf of the deceased, remission of some of their allotted time in purgatory. These “pardoners” routinely described, in
gruesomely vivid prose, the tortures and torments that those poor, condemned
souls were forced to undergo; and from which they might be reprieved, if their
living relatives would only part with a few coins. Chaucer depicted these practices in prose
that is startlingly reminiscent of the modern heirs of those “innovative
financial scoundrels”:
I stand up like a scholar
in pulpit,
And when the uneducated
people all do sit,
I preach, as you have heard
me say before,
And tell a hundred false
jokes, less or more.
…
Of avarice and of all such
wickedness
Is all my preaching, thus
to make them free
With offered pence, the
which pence come to me.
For my intent is only pence
to win,
And not at all for
punishment of sin.[37]
NOTES
[1]
Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 103.
[2]
John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics in Perspective: A Critical History
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), 42.
[3]
See “Mississippi Scheme”, Encyclopedia Brittanica, 15th
ed. (London: Encyclopedia Brittanica, Inc., 1976), Micropaedia, Vol. VI, 938.
[4]
John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of
Reason in the West (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993), 405.
[5]
Lynne Sabel and Phillip
Steele, 1000 Great Events (New York:
Exeter Books, 1985), 162.
[6]
Galbraith, Economics, 42.
[7]
Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 58.
[8]
Mackay, ibid., 73.
[9]
Mackay, ibid, 59.
[10]
Mackay, ibid. 75.
[11]
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1988), 169.
[12]
Galbraith also argues that
prosperity is a component of a crash of this nature, in the sense that
speculation must be fuelled by capital in order to reach truly colossal heights
of folly. Galbraith, The Great Crash, 170. To an extent, this is true; but such capital
can also itself be artificial, for example, when the South Sea Company loaned
money to investors to enable them to purchase its stock; or when sub-prime
mortgage lenders refinanced over-valued houses, enabling mortgage-holders to
accumulate several “generations” worth of debt on the same property. In such cases, speculation is fuelled not by
capital, but by accumulating ever-increasing quantities of debt, further
exacerbating the inflationary spiral, and vastly deepening the pit that awaits
when the spiral ends.
[13]
Justin Lahart, “Bernanke’s
Bubble Laboratory”, The Wall Street
Journal, WSJ.com, 16 May 2008
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121089412378097011.html].
[14]
Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 94.
[15]
Mackay, ibid.
[16]
Daniel Gross, “Bulb Bubble
Trouble”, Slate, 16 July 2004
[http://slate.msn/com/id/2103985/].
[17]
Gross, ibid.
[18]
Data obtained from the NASDAQ Composite Index.
At time of writing, the NASDAQ had regained only half of the value –
roughly 2,500 – of the intra-day peak of 5,132 it had reached eight years
earlier.
[19]
United States vs. Microsoft Corporation, Civil Action No. 98-1232 (TPJ)
[http://www.usdoj/gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm].
[20]
The irony here is stark: if
these analyses are correct, then the industry, fearing the impact on share
prices of a pre-emptive sell-off, initiated an early sell-off, because whoever
sells first loses the least. But the act
of selling early may have precipitated a wider, more draconian sell-off than
would otherwise have occurred, leading to total collapse. The thought that the more volatile zones of
the stock market are subject to this sort of “mutually assured destruction” is
not a comforting one.
[21]
Los Angeles Times, “Will
dotcom bubble burst again?”, Quad City
Times, 16 July 2006
[http://www.qctimes.com/articles/2006/07/17/news/business/doc44bb0a1ab97ce159604273.txt].
[22]
Oliver Bennett, “The new
dotcom boom”, The Sunday Times, 30
March 2008 [http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new/tech_and_web/article3620882.ece].
[23]
The phrase was coined in reference to John Law by Galbraith in Economics, 143. The use of
this phrase as a title should not be taken as an accusation of illegal or
unethical conduct. That said, it is no
great compliment to say of someone that “He never broke any laws” if the laws
themselves are at fault. Nor is it
exculpatory to argue that one was merely following the rules within a system
whose rules permit, even encourage, the exploitation of financial panics for
pecuniary advantage.
[24]
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales;
“General Prologue”, lines 671-716, Librarius.com, [http://www.librarius.com/canttran/gptrfs.htm].
[25]
See http://chicagoclimateex.com/.
[26]
http://www.carbonpassport.com/.
[27]
As a human being takes approximately three years to exhale this much CO2,
breathing – while obviously individually beneficial – would not seem to be a
lucrative source of income.
[28]
Rune Birk Nielsen, “Denmark’s
Largest Offshore Wind Farm Approved”, Danish Wind Industry Association, 26
August 2008 [http://www.windpower.org/composite-2031.htm].
[29]
Anselm Aldermann, “Wind
Turbines in Europe do Nothing For Emissions-Reductions Goals”, Der Spiegel, 10 February 2009 [http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,606763,00.html].
[30]
Julian Glover, “A Collapsing Carbon Market Makes Mega-Pollution Cheap”, The Guardian, 23 February 2009 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/23/glover-carbon-market-pollution].
[31]
Leila Abboud, “An Exhausting
War on Emissions”, Wall Street Journal
Online, 30 September 2008 [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122272533893187737.html]].
[32]
The EU emissions trading scheme is described here [http://ec.europa.eu/environment/
climat/emission/index_en.htm]. One of
its impacts – a thoroughly predictable rise in energy costs – is described
here: [http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssIndustryMaterialsUtilitiesNews/ idUSLF4432920080915].
[33]
AFX UK Focus, “Al Gore-backed investment firm buys 9.5 pct Camco Intl stake”, 6
April 2008 [http://www.iii.co.uk/news/?type=afxnews&articleid=6745270&subject=companies&action=article].
[34]
http://www.camco-international.com/camco_whatwedo.php.
[35]
CNN, “Gore to lobby lawmakers on climate change”, CNNpolitics.com, 28 January
2009 [http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/01/28/gore-to-lobby-lawmakers-on-climate-change/]. Emphasis added.
[36]
“44% say global warming due to
planetary trends, not people”, Rasmussen Reports, 19 January 2009 [http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/issues2/articles/44_say_global_warming_due_to_planetary_trends_not_people].
[37]
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales;
“The Pardoner’s Tale”, lines 105-118.
