Nice post Swagman.
I want to add something about when people say that Big Oil is trying it hardest to stop climate change policies that effect them going through.
Turns out Oil and Gas companies benefit from c02 reductions as their biggest competition is the Coal industry! http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/05/22/how-big-oil-benefits-from-global-warming-alarmism/2/
Quote: And coal? Here’s where the global warming regulatory crowd at EPA are doing all they can to help the Big Oil & Gas guys, whether they asked for it or not. Then again, the EPA probably isn’t the coal industry’s biggest problem anyway, and is only hastening its inevitable decline. A greater adversary resides in the free market form of that cheaper, cleaner and abundant natural gas. As Jone-Lin Wang, head of global power research for HIS CERA told the Wall Street Journal, no other threat to coal “even comes close.”
Quote: EPA has actually been an ally of Big Oil & Gas against Big Coal for some time, originally with no better friend then Enron. Flash back to the 1990s, a period when Enron’s natural gas business was encountering difficult market competition with coal.
Quote: Media-fueled alarm about acid rain provided a basis for legislation to create markets for buying and selling excess sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide emission credits, and Project 88 became the Clean Air Act of 1990. Enron was a major SO2 cap-and-trade player.
So Enron and others wondered, why not do the same thing with CO2? Since natural gas is a lower CO2 emitter than coal, this would certainly be a profitability game changer. But there was a problem. Unlike SO2, CO2 wasn’t considered to be a pollutant, so the EPA had no authority to regulate it. But national hype about a global warming crisis advanced by then-Senator Gore’s highly publicized 1988 congressional hearings on the subject soon appeared to provide a dream opportunity to change that.
Enron’s CEO Kenneth Lay had reportedly already met with President Clinton and Vice President Gore on August 4, 1997 to prepare a U.S. strategy for an upcoming U.N.-sponsored, Kyoto Protocol-promoting, climate summit that December. Kyoto presented the first step toward creating a carbon market that Enron desperately wanted Congress to support.