Revolutionary Politics

Back in 2000, the “Clean Air Act”, which was delayed out of business, as was FASB 114 (which would have prevented the ever evolving recession to depression), was a cap and trade arrangement between upstream energy facilities. IOW, the upstream producers were supposed to comply with an accurate CO2 emissions (TOC, VOC – AP42), and then, based on their permitted emissions (Cap), sell or buy emission credits from each other (Trade).

Three big problems came up.

First was producing an accurate emissions statement. Most of the upstream good old boys hire teams of legal consultants with calculators that use an averaging technique. Truth is, each point to point transfer (equivalent to a transaction) of VOC or TOC compounds can be assessed to the penny. The averaging approach was recommended for downstream marketing terminals, and depending who (which high dollar consultant) was pushing the buttons on the calculator, the same inventory could show an 80% variance up or down. Since the computations for the discrete approach are tedious and beyond the skill sets and aptitude of most regional EPA jurisdictions (CECs), the emissions inventories were accepted out of hand and never audited.

To top it off, the EPA’s own open source software was, and still is, chock full of computational and logic errors, that even if the government wanted to perform an audit it wouldn’t be any more reliable than the guestimate double dog dare you to check the numbers the big buck hack shops supporting the emitters submitted as compliance reports.

Finally, you got two kinds of emitters. You got the big boys, who can afford the small change fines and big shop consultant liars, trying to protect their turf (permit capacity) who want to overstate their emissions because it provides padding just in case they want to add more assets and capacity to their plants, and the you got the little guys who can’t afford the expensive liars – or bribes – or fines – who do the opposite and understate what they are emitting.

They’re all lying – and how anyone can even assert they have a handle on carbon emissions is itself either preposterous or a lie.

Today cap and trade means something else – it means us – the end users are paying for the lies and inefficiencies of the upstream producers and corrupt low iodine government officials that CSPAN treats like Michael Jackson.

By Cadavre on Jul 17, 2009