I’ve been hearing all sorts of clamoring from all corners on the issue of climate change.

For a while the scientists all said that we were having global warming and this was caused by people burning fossil fuels.

Global warming seems recently to have fallen into disfavor and so now, the same people that were talking about global warming are now talking about climate change.

I guess climate change connotes either warming or cooling, whatever is happening, it ain’t good according to them.

Now, for the most part, I’m not one to get onto any bandwagon with a bunch of hysterical doom and gloomers.

On the other hand, it seems to me that the more we put junk into the atmosphere, the more we pull fish out of the sea and more people populate an already too congested planet, we are going to have problems of some sort at some point in the future. For that reason, we need to be good stewards of the planet.

That doesn’t mean that some should make an obscene amount of money while the rest of us sink into the drink. Yet, that is what is about to happen.

I don’t think that it really makes any difference whether there is climate warming, climate change or just an acid rain problem, we need to do something to show down our pollution of the planet and our overuse of its bounty.

Recently, it was revealed that the hysterical doom and gloom scientific bunch have been deliberately faking data.

Yet, the PTB [that’s the ‘Powers That Be’ to you] have been completely ignoring the flood of revelations that some data have been faked while other data have been suppressed to fit into the hysterical doom and gloom.

The PTB appears to be completely ignoring data that shows that global warming actually stopped ten years ago and, in fact, the planet is getting colder.

My question is why are the PTB so completely dedicated to the need for immediate action to eliminate the use of fossil fuels as fast as possible.

The answer is MONEY!

If there is no climate emergency, then there is no reason to pass Cap and Trade, there is no need for massive government grants to universities and schools to continue to study the problem and there is no need for an urgent push to go green.

There would be no reason to double energy prices in developed countries like ours to pay to develop under-developed countries, like say, Cuba or Bolivia, for example.

Michel Chossudovsky, an economist at the University of Ottawa, outlines the financial impact of the Carbon Trading System.

“The carbon trading system is a multibillion money-making bonanza for the financial establishment,” Mr. Chossudovsky said. “The stakes are extremely high and the various lobby groups on behalf of Wall Street have already positioned themselves.”

According to a recent report by Terry MacAlister in the Guardian, trading carbon credits could well dwarf trading oil futures and become a new source of income for the same people who were making fortunes in the derivative business until the recent real estate crash.

Goldman Sachs is already involved in trading carbon credits in Europe and is just waiting for Cap and Trade to pass here so they can jump into perhaps the most lucrative market they have seen in years.

“The carbon market could become double the size of the oil market according to the new breed of City players who trade greenhouse gas emissions through the EU's emissions trading scheme,” said the Guardian article.

What are carbon credits you ask? If one industry uses more carbon than another, then that user can buy a carbon credit from some industry that doesn’t use as much carbon. Of course, requiring a carbon user to buy a credit costs that business money and that will raise the price of the product that business sells.

Thus, if you sell hydro electric, you earn credits because you don’t use carbon and if you burn coal or oil, you must buy credits because you do use carbon. Of course, someone has to be there to trade the credits. Thus, the bankers come on the scene and they charge a commission for making the trade. They also make a lot of money underwriting the issuance of carbon credits.

Remember, introducing Cap and Trade really doesn’t reduce the number of coal burning power plants. It just increases the cost of burning coal by requiring the energy company to buy credits.

Rather, Cap and Trade is set to become a money making firestorm.

The large financial conglomerates who had been involved in derivative trading, including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Barclay's, Citi Bank, Nomura, Société Générale, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are already actively involved in trading carbon credits, said a recent article by Reuters. “Every major financial house in New York and London has set up carbon trading operations. Very big numbers are dancing in their heads, and they need them to replace the wealth that evaporated in the housing bust,” said Louis Redshaw, head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital talking to The New York Times.

“Carbon will be the world's biggest market over all,” Mr. Redshaw told the Times. He added that the current $60 billion carbon market could grow to $1 trillion within a decade.

But there is no assurance that Cap and Trade will pass in the United States.

The EPA has tried to side step the necessity of having to have Congress okay the legislation by declaring last week that carbon dioxide is a dangerous substance, thus allowing them to regulate carbon emissions without Congressional input. This, of course, was done one day prior to the start of the Copenhagen Conference.

It is interesting to me that the doom and gloomers who believe that we are killing the planet with carbon dioxide arrived at the conference in 140 jet planes and used 1,200 limos to drive them from the airport to the site of the conference. Oh, yes, five electric cars were used to get there as well.

Do as I say, not as I do!

The question really is, are these people dedicated or are they mostly just looking to make lots of Euros, Swiss Francs and Pounds?

Recently, Cap and Trade legislation was rejected in Australia in a major blow to PM Kevin Rudd who has made climate change issues a priority for his government.

The Associated Press noted that, “Australia's opposition party has splintered over a contentious bill aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, with top officials resigning due to the party leader's support for the legislation [and 10 members of Parliament quitting the coalition over it]. The lack of consensus in the opposition Liberal party stymied Friday's Senate vote on the issue, scuttling the government's aims.

“PM Rudd said he wants the legislation passed as an example to the world before he attends [the] UN summit in Copenhagen,” said the AP. It hasn’t happened.

Then recently, Phil Jones, the climate change advocate who has been Al Gore’s principal scientist in residence, the head of East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit, had to resign over the brouhaha about suppressing data that was contrary to Jones’ theory concerning climate change.

As the Wall Street Journal said, "The British scientist at the heart of a scandal over climate-change research temporarily stepped down . . . as director of a prominent research group amid an internal probe that follows the release of hacked emails involving him and other scientists.”

Mr. Jones had been instrumental in getting some $20 million in government grants to fund climate research for himself and his school.

Climate change advocacy really pays for some!

Times online reported that "Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.”

Interestingly, the House of Representatives is poised to investigate who hacked the e-mails. On the other hand, the House appears completely uninterested in why Mr. Jones may have faked data or why real data may have been suppressed.

In New Zealand, researchers found that the government itself had falsified conclusions which the data didn't support.

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition reported that “there have been strident claims that New Zealand is warming. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), among other organizations and scientists, allege that, along with the rest of the world, we have been heating up for over 100 years. But now, a simple check of publicly-available information proves these claims wrong. In fact, New Zealand's temperature has been remarkably stable for a century and a half.”

What was discovered there was that the temperature data had been adjusted when compared to raw data from each weather reporting station. When the adjustments were taken away, “the station [temperature] histories are unremarkable,” said the Coalition. There were no reasons for any large corrections, they found.

They concluded that about half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming.

The findings were that the oldest readings were cranked way down while later readings were artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming.

The question is, does it make any difference? Global warming or no, climate change or no, we need to be good stewards of our planet.

I don’t believe that giving the Wall Street wonder boys a new play thing is going to do anything to help the planet.

Paying a lot of impoverished African nations to help them stop using fossil fuels will only line the pockets of the bosses in those nations as it has so many times in the past when our largess was spread upon their waters and ended up in Swiss bank accounts.

Cap and Trade will do nothing but make a lot of money for the few while yanking the last few pennies left out of the hands of the rest of us who actually have to buy electricity and fuel oil as well as everything else that uses energy in the process of manufacture.