“These subprime carbon assets have an asserted value based on the assumption that it’s perfectly OK to put 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours.”
Bloomberg reports:
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said investors in oil and gas companies who ignore the cost of emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are making a mistake similar to those who invested in subprime mortgages.
“The value of the subprime mortgages was based on a false assumption,” Gore said yesterday in an interview. “In almost exactly the same way, the value of all of these carbon fuel reserves is based on a similarly absurd assumption”…
He’s got that a bit backwards. The comparison with the sub-prime mortgage fiasco is actually quite right. The problem is he’s hooking the wrong horse to it. It was all those fools who bought carbon credits and/or indulged in the carbon offsets markets that bought the magic beans this time.f
I guess he’s saying its absurd to for coal, oil and gas to assume that Obama won’t get reelected and use regulators to impose a carbon scheme, taxes, penalties and mandates sufficient to irreperably destroy those industries. Without that, those “hidden costs” are non-existent or stay where they should be – in the imagination.