The Green Bubble

After loosing money in real estate a lot of people are banking on the illusive carbon market and Village Green Global, Inc. is capitalizing on those who need help accounting for their carbon usage.

Village Green Global touts  being "a global leader in providing scalable SaaS reporting, compliance and education programs to support energy efficiency and improved bottom-line performance."  And they specialize in "Enterprise Carbon Accounting, using an internationally recognized system for carbon analysis and trading."

On one hand Village sounds like a company doing a little forward thinking and risk taking to develop a system to account for an intangible by-product that is naturally produced by all animals and naturally occurring geologic activity.  There is an element of genius in that endeavor.

But on the other hand, is Village simply helping to proliferate the illusion of a man-made problem while cashing in on the fictitious crisis?  Taking it a step further, would shareholders in the company care if the quarterly profits were based on support and management of bad or at least speculative science? 

Considering that there are millions of unassuming shareholders, usually via mutual funds, investing in companies like British Petroleum who benefit from the growth of their 401(k) accounts and public employee pension funds each quarter with no public outcry for the shareholders to return the profits, I would imagine money might make for a sufficient muzzle. 

With those questions pointed at corporate ethics and the ethics of investors, we are left with energy production, growing retirement accounts, and a means of accounting for and taxing our mere existence through energy consumption. 



How much carbon is
created and money spent
on fire fighting practice?

 I received an interesting email from a colleague wherein an attached document outlined a plan for energy development, energy accounting, and the silver bullet of late, jobs, jobs, jobs. 

I think we should use clean, safe, renewable energy sources.  Now that the cat is out of the bag, please hear me out. The big problems, with "green" technology and "green" energy are many but I want to focus some attention on the job creation myth behind "green energy" and the sales pitch behind it.

The problem with the sales pitch for GREEN-anything is that it will somehow create jobs and replace carbon producing generators.  Unfortunately, both aspects of the sales pitch are wrong.

Let's assume we are able to create massive solar and wind farms that allow us to turn off all of the coal-burning plants.  Great, now where do all of those laid off workers go?  The newly created wind and solar farms are pretty self-sufficient and only require a few workers. 

Also, if you consider the output capacity of wind turbines and solar collectors you find the renewable sources are much more deficient compared to their coal and gas counterparts.  Therefore, you will need a lot more real estate for those generation farms than you do for the energy burners.  That's about when the open-space crowd holds hands to protest the wind and solar farms from being built in their back yards.

An aspect of GREEN that no one wants to discuss is the production and manufacturing of the components.  Where are the parts manufactured for the wind and solar generators?  I have found that most of the parts are not made in the United States.  They tend to be made in Mexico, China, or Malaysia where wages are extremely low and clean energy regulations are at least 100 years away from being implemented.  That begs the questions, just how much carbon will be produced as a direct result of manufacturing the components of "green technology" and are we shooting ourselves in our carbon footprint by outsourcing production to third world countries? 

At what point will investors of GREEN stuff realize that they have been taken for a ride?  At what point will the big GREEN bubble burst?