it’s like this, below..LSS: We don’t need “Tax & Trade” CO2 shenanigans, just some sound practices..

Mark E Hoffer Says: November 7th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
“..”He’s betting on global population growth and global wealth increasing, thus raising the world’s purchasing power to buy stuff that the US makes, said Peter Boockvar, of Miller Tabak & Co. “It’s also a bet that we will still import stuff that the rest of the world makes.”

But the investment is not just about economic growth. It is also about the environment.
Talk of the rail operator benefiting from some form of a “green” upgrade appear wide of the mark – the cost of transforming one of the world’s largest consumers of petroleum products operating on 32,000 miles of track into an electric railway does not bear thinking about.

But there are green benefits to the investment. One is the recently passed US Clean Energy and Security Act, which allows companies to trade carbon credits.

As Burlington Northern transports vastly more freight per emission than road or air hauliers, there is potential for it to trade millions if not billions of dollars of carbon credits in future years.

Burlington Northern also offers vast fuel efficiencies – one train removes 280 freight trucks off US highways – and the coal it transports is largely from low-sulphur coal deposits, which will be increasingly in demand as legislators continue to clamp down on polluters.

These reasons might go some way to explain why Buffett apparently broke one of his golden rules of investing: never overpay.

Matthew Carletti, at Fox-Pitt Kelton, points out that the purchase price – 2.8 times Burlington Northern’s book value and 18 times future earnings – “does not imply ‘value’”.
Given that, and the impact the credit rating reviews could have on Berkshire Hathaway, was Buffett driven by another factor in making the surprise decision?

For a number of years, the 79 year-old has spoken of hunting down an “elephant-esque” deal which would be Berkshire’s crowning moment.
In many ways, Burlington Northern is that elephant, the weight of which will stop any successor from changing Berkshire’s course too dramatically, thereby ensuring Buffett’s legacy is not thrown off the rails.”
http://refreshingnews9.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-did-warren-buffett-pay-44bn-for.html
~~
“…As reported in

http://warofillusions.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/obama-maurice-strong-al...

“The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.””
~~
“…The American Clean Energy and Security Act passed on a vote of 219-212, with eight Republicans voting for and 44 Democrats voting against.
House Democratic leadership pushed the bill through on their last day before Congress’s July 4 recess, under Republican protest.

“Last night at 3:09 a.m., House Democrats filed a 309-page amendment and denied Republican and Democrat amendments to the tune of the 224 that were submitted,” complained Republican Mike Pence of Indiana during the day’s three-hour debate. “What’s the hurry?”

The hurry is the ambitious Obama administration goal of passing climate legislation before global climate talks in Copenhagen in December.
If passed by the Senate, the American Clean Energy and Security Act would create a cap-and-trade program to reduce climate warming emissions.

The program would set limits on major sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, including electric utilities, manufacturers and the transportation industry, then ratchet the limits down through 2050. It would issue emissions permits that industries could trade…”
http://www.statejournal.com/story.cfm?func=viewstory&storyid=61769

Speaking of which, where is Ross these days? I was hoping he’d be around to tell us when ranchers were done culling their herds…

Then, what are we arguing about? Humankind isn’t “solely” responsible. But, we are making a big impact in smaller-than-geologic time frames — time frames that matter. (I don’t care how hot it was when Big Bang occurred or even when the dinosaurs roamed.)

Tax carbon. Then let’s watch our much celebrated ingenuity rise to the occasion.

Implementing the Pickens Plan sure beats bailing out Wall Street. One has an ROI without resorting to nominal-vs-real chicanery and currency debasement.

Personally, I’m not anticipating most of humanity doing the right thing. One can look at this mess in finance ( http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/11/guest-post-was-it-nobody-saw-it-coming-or-everybody-who-saw-it-coming-was-a-nobody.html ) to see that prophets are not without honor except in their own countries. If they’re anything as good as their corporate peers on Wall Street, the polluting establishment will talk enough “sense” into those voters receptive to anti-government, anti-Hollywood, anti-celebrity ad hominem attacks to prevent meaningful legislation from being passed.

Now you propose that alls we have to do is make the farmers do a whole bunch of things that do not contribute to their bottom line, so we can go along happily buring coal and not have to worry about things like CO2 buildup in the atmosphere.

While they’re at it perhaps they can wipe our behinds and make sure we didn’t spill any milk from our bubbas on our chinny chin chins…

“I had a feeling that him and his fellow whiz kids would be no match for the army of lobbyists that live in Washington DC.”

McCain and Palin would have done no better–and probably worse based on their inability to even sound competent prior to having to act that way. Face it, our prized system gave us a choice of two ill-equipped and prepared evils and, with little data, forced us to try and determine the least harmful of them. In the end, we probably lost “less” with the choice made but not materially and that, in any event, is little consolation now and we are not yet a year into the term.

I simply visualize a factory full of robots producing Toyotas or iPods or Barbies. The lion’s share of the value created by the robots accrues to the robot’s owners, with allowances to those who make and maintain the robots, raw material suppliers, and so forth. So the supply side is taken care of…but where are the consumers going to come from? Previously, a significant percentage of the net wealth being created would be cycled back into the system as wages and thereby create demand as consumers. But now, where is the wealth being cycled back in? One guy with 100 million dollars is not going to deliver anywhere near the demand as 10,000 people with 10,000 dollars each. Not to belabor the point then, but what seems to be happening is not a wealth creation problem but a wealth distribution problem.

The traditional model based on wages paid for labor cannot abide the labor of robots. The guy with the $100mil has got to get money into the hands of the people who can buy his products, somehow, or else his own inbound flow dries up. An outright gift to buyers also cannot be fully accomodated under the traditional model (a price reduction is not a gift). The only traditional mechanism allowed is for the $100million man to lend consumers the money to buy his products. This has all sorts of obvious attractions for the lender, as it allows the game to continue and it even enhances his own power since the other party is not only his customer but is also now indebted to him, with all the traditional baggage implied by that condition.

So what we’re watching is the crash of not just an economic model but a socio-psychological one as well. The continuous accumulation of wealth by the robot owners is unsustainable and in essence illusory, and by lending the money they are simply distributing the wealth that was created by the robots. There simply is no framework for doing so other than to call it a loan, and the psychological baggage of expecting it to be paid back is vestigial. It’s not a loan in the sense that I would lend you $20 until payday.

Debt default is the new means of wealth redistribution.

A Goldman Sachs trader who earns $10 million a year simply proves my point. Can you point out where is the specific economic value-added labor that creates 10 million dollars of wealth?
———————————
Hi Reed,
That’s what I see as an ultimate dilemma for capitalism: as we approach the development of “von Neumann machines” that can self-reproduce and produce commodities at the same time, we face a bifurcation into either oligarchy wealth where the rich own robots and the poor starve, or a dismantling of a wealth-ownership based system.
Cheers, Steve Keen

see: http://astore.amazon.com/global_warming_hoax-20/detail/0980076315
The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too fearful to do so
By Lawrence Solomon
**Comments: A must-read for anyone interested in environmentalism or has seen Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Let me start by 1st stating that the author, Lawrence Solomon, is an environmentalist himself and not some right-wing partisan hack on the lines of Rush Limbaugh.

Contrary to what Al Gore and his followers claim, the science of global warming is not “settled” as in man is solely responsible and that apocalyptic scenarios will occur if we do not do anything. In this book, the research of dozens of high-profile international scientists with impeccable credentials affiliated with prestigious institutions ranging from MIT to Cambridge to CERN devastatingly counter what Gore and the global warming alarmists hype.

Though none of the scientists interviewed “deny” that global warming is occurring, various aspects of the alarmists’ positions are challenged from poor statistics, ineffective models, neglecting natural factors, and more.
The author’s columns, published in Canada’s newspaper The National Post, formed the backbone of this book and are worth reading as well. [...]
Like any great scientist should do, obsolete models need to be discarded and old theories must be revised when new evidence surfaces.

This book has made me completely reconsider my views on global warming. Evidence still points that the earth is warming however no longer do I purchase into the alarmists’ view that mankind is solely responsible and that the world will end should we not impose carbon taxes and other anti-economic measures.
http://www.interactivereviews.com/large/0980076315
to begin with..

Are you from the NAR? Don’t look at seasonal trends when we’re talking about year-over-year, decade-over-decade changes.