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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ponderosa who wrote (38033)	6/21/2001 5:56:25 PM
From: Jill	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 65232

I think you completely underestimate the current infrastructure of power & money. COMPLETELY underestimate it. Not tos ay fcel for instance can't be a good trading vehicle up & down, but for investment??? NOt anytime soon. From a recent huge report on global warming in the New York Reiew of Books, a few choice excerpts: The last administration did very little to control greenhouse emissions, a fact that surprises many who had read Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance. After pledging to hold America’s carbon dioxide emissions level in the 1990s, the Clinton administration never got around to doing what that would have required: raising the price of conventional fuels, committing large amounts of money to alternative power sources, and requiring increased automobile fuel efficiency, even at the cost of angering Detroit. Instead, as the economy boomed, we left our energy infrastructure pretty much as is, with the result that in the year 2000 Americans produced 12 percent more carbon dioxide than they did in 1990... ANd re: Bush administation current staetd policy: By most accounts, it was less ideology than money that swayed the President. One concern was to meet the expectations of big campaign donors—of the $14 million in contributions by oil and gas groups, for instance, $10 million went to Republicans. The deeper reason, however, was Bush’s fear that doing anything to seriously address CO2 emissions would end up raising the cost of energy, and that voters would not stand for it. In his letter to the Senate, he said he was reversing himself on the power plant emissions because of a Department of Energy study showing that such caps would “lead to an even more dramatic shift from coal to natural gas for electric power generation and significantly higher electricity prices.” This, he wrote, would come “at a time when California has already experienced energy shortages, and other Western states are worried about price and availability of energy this summer, [so] we must be very careful not to take actions that could harm consumers.” The reference to California was gratuitous—California actually depends very little on coal for electricity and by most accounts it was a botched deregulation plan that led to its current fiasco. But the basic point was correct. At least in the short term, making our energy system less carbon-intensive will cost money. There is nothing so cheap, at the moment, as coal—its abundance makes it almost as ubiquitous as sun or wind or hydrogen or the other energy sources favored by environmentalists. And in contrast to those renewable resources, the infrastructure is already firmly in place; there are people making vast sums of money from supplying the need; and it requires very little trouble indeed to increase the supply. And what the Bush administration has now said, unequivocally, is that it does not plan to alter in any serious way our energy system. In fact, it plans to enormously enlarge it. “We need more refineries, we need more power plants, we need more pipelines,” White House chief economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey told Meet the Press in mid-March. This is certainly the path that will please campaign donors—but, to repeat, it is also the path of least resistance with the American people. Though some surveys show Americans concerned about global warming, and even willing to pay a higher price for cleaner power, Bush doesn’t believe those polls any more than Clinton did. He fears that not only will rising prices at the pump anger voters but that, again in the short term, high prices could threaten the economy’s health. “The nation’s last three recessions have all been tied to rising energy prices,” said Abraham—including the one that helped defeat Bush’s father. The Democrats have shown similar cowardice. In the summer of 2000, when it was gas and not electric prices that were starting to spike, Al Gore demanded that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve be tapped to flood the market and lower the cost of oil, instead of letting it rise enough to, say, dissuade Americans from buying SUVs. He calculated that a price rise could cost him the election, and he was likely correct. As Gore said early in his term as vice-president, “The minimum that is scientifically necessary [to combat global warming] far exceeds the maximum that is politically feasible.”