Thursday, August 27, 2009

Do not look to resolve the green paradox... try to manage it.

Hans-Werner Sinn in the Financial Times August 27, 2009 in “How to resolve the green paradox” August 27, holds that the “owners of oil and gas fields react by pulling forward production” as “green measures... exert a stronger pressure on future prices than on current ones”. Wow! Where can we find these forward looking persons perhaps we could put them in charge of our governments. Unfortunately, “owners of oil and gas fields” are just like all other humans and react in just the same stupid short term way as all of us do.

Does Professor Hans-Werner Sinn really want to know how to” induce resource owners to leave more carbon underground”? I´ll tell him. Use the oil-curse route. Pay them humongous prices for their barrels of oil and see that all those funds go to a petro-autocrat like hugo chávez, and that will mess it up so much that it renders them incapable of extracting it.

No, sadly, the horrible truth we need to face is that the world loves too much its carbon driven economy to abandon it and so our best chance of saving us from the suicidal path we are on lies in new discoveries.... discoveries of what? I have not the faintest idea but let´s try to buy us some time to discover it, perhaps with some carbon taxes, but meanwhile let us not waste very scarce resources on what can only be described as green placebos.

By the way (again) is it not ironic that those from the land of Martin Luther and which most fought against the indulgences offered by the catholic church are now the ones most eagerly promoting the emission indulgences sold by the green church.