when Conservative/pro-business-types start turning on their own kind.

Well played, Immelt. What did Fred Smith and Kimberly Strassel think they were getting into by showing up at a conference that seeks to put the "Eco" in "Economics"? Why would anyone so against the "wastes of Big Government" be so vehemently in support of the "wastes of Big Business"?

A wise Republican for the Environment once said that no one should be more for conservation than a Conservative. Now is the time for unity in a common cause...or maybe I've just been listening to too many Obama speeches...

"Free" marketeer think tankers are the ones who should want carbon trading.  Carbon caps no, but carbon trading allows them a whole new venue for the hedge funds, they rely on to make them richer, to actually make them richer.

There's the problem, they want to own and trade the atmosphere, land, and oceans.  But they don't want anyone to tell them what they can do with what they own.  Especially government.

Some have suggested something like the fed to rule over the value of carbon and other new trading instruments.  Instruments that trade the right to exploit land, sea, and air.

Just like the fed is supposed to maintain the value of the currency by limiting it's growth, this new institution would limit carbon emmisions to maintain the value of these trading instruments.

Without caps on carbon, what would give carbon trading a value system?  The proudly ignorant Immelt, who boasts of his votes for the worst president in history (duuuhbya is proceeding to destroy the US manufacturing base, economy, military, etc.), as if it proves his "conservative" credibility, realizes that once cap and trade is instituted, environmentlists will be put in their place.

Corporatists will say, you got what you wanted, a carbon cap, now get out of the way and let the market work.  The "free" market will take care of GHG climate problems, if there really are any, on their own without any regulatory interference from government.

After all, look how well the "free" market has worked to resolve the debt crisis.  The same debt crisis that unregulated insider hedge fund trading created.  

Wake up and smell the "free" marketeer coffee, once the Immelts explain how the cap and trade system coopts the environmental movement, even the nuttiest think tank wing nuts will embrace it.

Sure is nice that the same tyrant that owns foxnews now owns the WSJ, isn't it?  Didn't we all know this would happen?  The reframing would shift that fact into subtext and the wing nuts would reclaim the supposed credibility of the WSJ.

Eventually an ineffective capping system will be instituted, goals out to 2050, that sort of political parsing.  A soft cap, that can be adjusted as needed depending on which party is in control.  And the trading system will be the same one that is used to trade everything else, from farmland to weather futures.

An easily  scammed unregulated insider trading system.  Creating bubbles that burst, making the mega rich richer and the rest of us chattle.  Wholy owned cannon fodder, cheap labor, and consumers.  

Making life itself merely a tool of the bottomline, the next quarterly earnings reports the ultimate value system.

Our elected representatives elected by corporate lobbyist scamming, our government a ceremonial figurehead, like the british royal family.  Rubber stamping the latest demands of corporate power.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

The right wing idiots are wrong.  OK, fine.  And Immelt is absolutely right about the fact that there is almost no such thing as a truly free market (I'm always a fan of CEI bashing, as they are among the worst purveyors of pro-business wolves dressed up in pro-market sheep's clothing.)

But just because Immelt is against those guys doesn't necessarily mean that he's right on environmental issues.  Look at GE's line of environmental products and it's clear that they stand to make a lot of money off carbon sequestration - which may be good for CO2, if it stays down, but is disastrous on every other environmental metric and will cripple the economy.  Jim Rogers even moreso, since (unlike GE) he runs a company that doesn't have to take any equity risk.  He'd LOVE it if government mandated the most expensive possible fix to environmental problems.

So yes, the criticism that's come to them is shoddy - but GE's motives are far from pure.  And it speaks poorly to our media that two guys who deserve harsh questioning are only getting it from the loony bin.  Where are the thoughtful harsh questions for these guys?

Is PERC pro-market? Yes.  Conservative... right wing?? Eh...

I attended a seminar at PERC several years ago, and was pleasantly surprised at the pragmatism of the fellows and speakers there, who all seemed to have a genuine concern for the environment but saw alternative methods for effective environmental protection.

The guys at PERC often gray the line between the "free market" and "market mechanisms".  In fact, Terry Anderson's seminal book "Free Market Environmentalism," while it does indeed argue for more property rights solutions to environmental problems, actually helped to popularize the "cap-and-trade" prior to the SO2 trading program. - not exactly the "free market".  

Honestly, I think Terry probably had a good point about a program benefiting the ones who can afford the regulations as well as who can afford to lobby so that it benefits them more.  This happened with DuPont and the phase-out of CFC's, so it's not completely off-the-wall.  Of course, the CEO of GE is going to get defensive about a comment like that, but that doesn't make it wrong.

If this guy is promoting Cap and Trade, it is because GE stand to benefit from it, period. They see how thing are turning, so they will do what they can to work it to there advantage.

They see how thing are turning, so they will do what they can to work it to there advantage.

That's pretty much the definition of a CEO.  I don't necessarily think that all of GE's ideas are great, but I'm happy to see such a big firm looking to the future instead of the head-in-the-sand approach of Strassel, Smith, and Anderson et al.

... GE profits from a federal sustainable energy initiative as opposed to a DOD project.

Do "free market" ideologues have any shred of evidence to back up their aspersions against the "hip execs"?

Wait, no. Aspersions without evidence -- that's the denialist way.