Climate change is potentially a $7 Trillion dollar money making venture — for bankers

The tide of money, the vested interests flows

Carbon credit, climate-change, carbon market, 2016.H/t to Eric Worrall at WattsUp.

The current “green” industry is already around $1.5 Trillion a year. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England said he expects this to grow to $5-7 trillion.

Financial Post: Climate change a $7 trillion funding opportunity

He said that given the enormous funding needs for clean infrastructure — he estimates at somewhere between $5 trillion and $7 trillion a year — investment opportunities will rebound.

If clean green energy was efficient, cheap and reliable there would be no “funding need” as the market would leap to exploit that opportunity. Instead most leadinginvestors act like they are skeptics. The fact that central bankers are selling it so aggressively says a lot. Perhaps central bankers want to help the poor and save the world, or could it be that the entire financial industry will profit from a fake, forced market and another fiat currency? What are the brokerage fees on a $7T market…

Again we get this “free market” myth:

[Carbon pricing is the cleanest way for markets to judge the tangible exposure to climate change,” said Carney

Banks, financial institutions, carbon trading.

Carbon pricing has failed to change the weather all over the world. Free markets don’t work when they aren’t free and when they apply to a ubiquitous molecule involved in almost every life form on the planet. And what does “clean pricing” mean anyway? The  cost benefit assessment of using solar panels to reduce your exposure to flood damage in 2100 is as filthy-dirty-a-calculation as anything gets. Calculations don’t get messier, blacker or more pointless than this. Crunch those numbers and then bury them in 6 feet of volcanic ash.

The idea of slapping a market onto a product that is mostly produced and consumed by nature is bizarre in the extreme. Almost none of players in a global carbon market will respond to the incentives on offer. The Pacific Ocean won’t buy a credit, and nor will phytoplankton, cows, sheep or yeast.  Even in the 4% of the market controlled by humans, demand is “inelastic”, meaning the costs of energy already force most of the market to be efficient. The gains that are left are minor, pathetic creeping improvements. So sweeping, economy wide measures are inefficient, even if the IPCC models weren’t broken.

Though it’s not 100% clear whether Carney meant “annually” or over the next 20 years. Bloomberg implies the latter. But hey, a trillion here, a trillion there…

“In terms of orders of magnitude of clean energy, or lower carbon energy infrastructure, cleaner water sanitation etc. that would be put in place over the course of the next 15-20 years,” Carney said. “Given increased urbanization, given brown fields, given policy frameworks that are being put in place — somewhere in the order of $5-7 trillion.”

Given that investment is already at $1.5T,  I presume he  meant $7T per year in 10 – 20 years time. Since we are trying to change the global climate with windmills and cold-showers, a bonfire of this magnitude is “realistic” in the same way that a fund to capture the tooth-fairy could be realistically said to cost a similar amount.

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