Sinclair's principle and times ahead
Published by Abhilash Ravishankar on Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 1:40 PM
It struck me last night, after I rewatched 'An Inconvenient Truth', that I might be headed towards some interesting times in a few months.
Al Gore says that according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this era of global warming "is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin" and "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence of the global climate." He also goes on to say how the mainstream media has been influenced by a huge lobby which is investing millions of dollars into spreading the picture that Global warming is 'normal' and there is nothing much to worry about.
This reminded me of the movie 'Thank you for Smoking', where a spokesperson(Nick Naylor) for a conglomerate of tobacco companies spins his way in life.
Today, I happen to see this on a post on the SEED (Schlumberger Excellence in Educational Development) site:
Over the past 425,000 years the earth has gone through four ice ages punctuated by brief warm periods. We are currently in such a warm period. The trend over the past century has been one of generally rising global temperature. The consensus among climatologists is that there will be a continued increase during the rest of this century. OK. But what’s the problem? Will a little extra warm weather hurt anyone? In fact, for people living in cold climates a global warming might be a good thing. In some parts of the world the growing season could become longer and agricultural land more productive.And that so, sounded like what Nick Naylor would have said!
I have a Stop Global Warming badge on my site, and I am joining Schlumberger (the world's largest oilfield services company) in July this year. Somehow, all this reminded me of what Upton Sinclair once said:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.Looks like I might talk more about Oil over By-Two Kaapi!
Update: Schlumberger is funding $25m of the Global Climate & Energy Project at Stanford. (Read on...)
Well these are the times where carbon credits are being traded whilst the case is that gaining carbon credits(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credits) should be on top of the company's todo list just as a moral obligation if not a monetary one..
Fine...carbon credit is traded....hmmmph..is it leading to any reduction?(I dono)but one fact is fa sure the carbon credit
trading is surely kicking in revenues in the balance sheet of long lost companies and helping em break even ..while the mightier ones are just buying the credits and adhering to the protocol for the time being....
"Articulation is the easiest job and we are the masters of the trade"
PS-protocol says that trading of carbon credits reduces emissions,but are we reducing them?THere is a trade exchange which deals with the trading, a market has already been created which is bullish from day1...
but is it substantial???
enlighten me!
Indian companies are fast realising there's money to be made by becoming eco-friendly. They have begun trading their carbon credits with companies in the US and the European Union.
Experts peg the Indian carbon credit market at about $30 to 40 million and it's constantly growing.
I dug up a 5-year old report which said:
There is a great opportunity awaiting India in carbon credit trading which is estimated to go up to $100 billion by 2010. In the new regime, the country could emerge as one of the largest beneficiaries accounting for 25 per cent of the total world carbon trade, says a recent World Bank report.
At EOD, Kyoto Protocol might not rein in emissions to the extent which would've been the case if Carbon Credit trading didn't exist. But then Carbon Credits will bring in a fair 'shift' of money from smokin' developed countries to the small green farmers of India & China! But this doesn't seem to be happening as I see in the articles above.
Anybody who can explain why?