When Al Gore falls, does Nick Smith make a sound? [updated]

Global warming cap-and-trade is this National Government’s big idea (they have damn few, so anything at all is enough to constitute a big one).  Nick Smith’s Emissions Trading Scam is a flagship world-leading policy—leading the world in plundering consumers and shackling producers, in the hope the world will catch on and emulate us.

They’re not.

So here’s a tale for someone to read to Nick Smith.  A story about a man named Al Gore, who several years ago, in the midst of the hype over global warming generated by loud activism, scary science and fraudulent films like his own, got involved in setting up the Chicago Climate Exchange. It really was leading the world. Explains Steve Milloy,

Although the trading in carbon emissions credits was voluntary, the CCX was intended to be the hub of the mandatory carbon trading established by a cap-and-trade law, like the Waxman-Markey scheme passed by the House in June 2009.
At its founding in November 2000, it was estimated that the size of CCX’s carbon trading market could reach $500 billion. That estimate ballooned over the years to $10 trillion.

Al and his friends were looking at billions of dollars of profit if they could scam the politicians to pass the bill, or something like it. Never happened. Never will. And so here’s what some recent trading on Al’s exchange looks like:

 

Impressive, huh?

Al Gore’s exchange is dead, dead, dead.  And it serves the old fraud right.

Al Capone tried to use Prohibition to muscle in on a piece of all the action in Chicago. The CCX’s backers wanted to use a new prohibition on carbon emissions to muscle in on a piece of, quite literally, all the action in the world.

And now the CCX, launched to the sound of unrelenting media hype,  is quietly being taken out and shot.

In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading — the only purpose for which it was founded — this year.

Which leaves just two relevant questions:

• Will Thick Smith take the relevant decision himself—or be forced to?
• If Al Gore’s Chicago Climate Exchange Suffers Total Failure, Does the MSM Make a Sound?

UPDATE: The graph of carbon price per metric ton over the life of the exchange is fascinating. Thanks for the link to reader Julian P. who, like me, “finds it really difficult to feel sorry for the people who bought in at 750 cents.”

Notice too who else bought into the scam when it was spiking?  Yep, mid-2008 was about when Thick Smith started to go hard on his Emissions Trading Scam.

And a year later, once he’d begun its introduction, the Wall Street Journal had this to say:

To the annals of global warming lunacy, add this gem from New Zealand: According to [the Key Government, Nick Smith and] a parliamentary committee, Kiwis should accept lower standards of living to protect the national image abroad.”
            - ‘Kiwi Carbon Haze,’ Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2009

The image to be created presumably being that of a pack of idiots.