Reason #434,965...

...why I will never be wealthy:

When I first started listening to all the high-minded talk about reducing humanity's noxious contributions to the problem of "global warming" -- something I remain unconvinced is actually happening, at least to the degree the alarmists say -- I envisioned a rush to create new pollution-control devices, to to find new, cleaner sources of energy production, to encourage people to waste less and conserve more.

Silly me.

Al Gore and his constant jet flights from here to there and everywhere in between should have been a tipoff. So should his animated renderings of drowning polar bears and melting ice caps, not to mention his 20,000 square-foot mansion.

But what I didn't envision was that the New Entrepreneurs would be making fortunes not from devising ways to consume less, pollute less and still manage to live comfortably, but would be the brokers of so-called "energy credits."

The way this works is as simple as it is absurd: a nasty, pollution-ravaged nation (such as the USA) can buy these "credits" from less=polluted places such as the Bahamas or Upper Volta (if the latter still exists) to offset the noxious crap they continue to pump into the air and water. Thus, the pollution-offender's total "score" is lowered, while the Clean Country's score goes up a bit, but is still within limits.

It's sort of like buying clean air and water, but not actually having them.

Oddly enough, one of the nations making out big in this new scheme is China, which is, environmentally speaking, a real cesspool. Why? Because its industries make a great deal of some particular pollutant -- among many others -- that can be cleaned up easily. Thus, they make it, get rid of it, and factories in some other country that create worse messes can pay China for the "air" it dirtied, then cleaned.

Confused? So am I.

This scheme reminds me of companies such as Enron, that bought electricity from power plants (which used to sell directly to delivery systems) and sold it to said delivery systems. In short, they bought what they didn't make, marked up the price (substantially) and, without doing anything more than shuffling papers, made huge profits from selling it to the companies that once bought direct.

We all know how that idea ended up.

Now there are companies buying and selling these "pollution credits." So-called "environmentalists" -- those who appear in public in Priuses, leaving the Hummer H2 or Escalade back at their 20,000 s.f. pads so the gullible will think they're "activists" -- can pay one of these trading companies a few bucks to offset the "carbon footprint" of their pets with some nice clean air from St Kitts, or a little more for their illegal-alien maids and gardeners.

Man, I wish I had come up with this. This is the hottest thing since the Pyramid Scheme, and all you have to do is buy some fresh air from Tibet and sell it to South Korea. No inventory, no manufacturing, no effort; you just sit there and watch the ol' mazooma roll in from all those fools who signed the Kyoto Accords and all the would-be "carbon neutral" chumps with more money (and p.r. sensitivity) than brains.

Beats the heck out of selling Amway, no?