Some people are very good when it comes to spotting a gap in an existing market and it can often lead to a great idea, which evolves into creating a product to fill it. If the product is sound it should sell well, but how big a profit margin it will create will depend on the size of the market to which it is being pitched.
Okay, so that’s how many products are launched onto the market, we all know that, and in most cases the products are going to be useful to a specific consumer and the customer base will build itself in time, via advertising campaigns and word of mouth. Nothing wrong with that.
But what do you do if you hatch an idea for something that, as yet, no one has heard of, but has the potential to go global and make you a huge amount of money? Well naturally, you are going to want to sell it. In order to do that though, you are going to have to create what appears to be a market, one that will allow you to promote the bejaysus out of it and if you get all those things right, you stand to make more millions than you can poke a stick at.
This is not hard to do however, if you have been manipulating money markets for decades, know the right people and have the nous to engineer a global situation that is guaranteed to grant you a customer base world wide.
Anything to do with the environment is big business, which can be measured in billions of dollars, which with encouragement, has naturally attracted a lot of “environmental investment” which has been encouraged by a swathe of “environmental reports” which have convinced almost an entire generation that the world is heading for a climate disaster. And there you have a very big market despite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) owning up that their theoretical simulation models have greatly overstated the Earth’s sensitivity to CO2, and have also admitted that global temperatures have been flat for at least sixteen years (as at 2013) despite an increase in atmospheric CO2 levels.
But no matter, as I said, some people are really savvy with spotting money making opportunities and one of them, who spotted and plotted the Carbon Asset Bubble, and has fed it since its infancy, is Al Gore. To quote him, “As soon as carbon has a price, you’re going to see a wave (of investment) in it…”
Hence carbon markets. Goldman Sachs conceived the carbon credit market and are also behind the cap and trade system. Carbon brokers/traders have been feverishly gearing up for a futures market and carbon exchanges are promising there are billions to be made in potential profit. Hence the concept of climate change represents opportunities for businesses and many private sector companies have taken advantage of emerging low carbon opportunities by embedding an internal carbon price into their business strategies. It’s a popular strategy and the momentum is expected to continue.
The carbon credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market cap and trade program which is where carbon emissions are capped at a politically-determined level. Users and producers of coal, oil and natural gas then buy, sell and trade their allowance to emit a given amount of carbon dioxide. This, in turn, is guaranteed to push up the price of coal, oil and natural gas, and the price increase will be employed as a means to compel consumers to switch from the more conventional energy sources to alternative, less reliable, but more expensive forms of energy. It is an economically damaging, vastly overpriced system, and currently the most popular method of regulating carbon dioxide emissions.
The cap and trade system will increase the price of energy but it will not work to reduce omissions, and Europe’s Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) has not been welcomed by all of the world’s leaders, as those opposing it have recognised how negatively it will impact on people at the lower end of the income scale. It also carries a high potential for market manipulation and fraud. But it will make those who got in on the ground floor very wealthy, which is why carbon emissions trading is still very much on the table and those who created it will work hard to keep it there.
In 1992, the term Sustainable Development was coined at the UN Rio Earth Summit. In 1999, Dow Jones launched the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), and in 2000, the UN Millennium Development Goals were announced. And in 2003, Al Gore met Head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood.
And the Carbon Asset Bubble evolved from there.