Carbon Bubble = $20 Trillion (According to Former JP Morgan Oil & Gas Banker)

“Randy Wray has described the current state of the commodities market as the biggest speculative bubble of all time, but the carbon bubble is even greater. In order to avoid catastrophic global warming, the Carbon Tracker Initiative found, we need to keep 80 percent of known carbon reserves buried in the ground.”

That’s from a Think Progress piece about the world’s concerning carbon bubble. The piece focuses on an interview with Fullerton, who started his career as an oil and gas banker for JP Morgan. Check it out.

If you’re not going to check out the full piece though,.. or even if you are, I think this is my favorite section of the interview:

The central premise of our work is that there is a fundamental disconnect between the world of economics and finance which sees the economy largely as a monetary phenomenon and the physical aspect of the economy which is a material phenomenon. Historically, when the economy was relatively small we could convert the physical into money and let the market price inputs and outputs. It worked in a nice theoretical abstraction. Limits to growth force physical reality onto the abstraction.

Exactamente (aka exactly).

2 thoughts on “Carbon Bubble = $20 Trillion (According to Former JP Morgan Oil & Gas Banker)”

  1. Thanks, Zach for all your work.
    Do you really think that Wall Street will allow trillions $$$$ be left in the ground untouched? Believe me, I do not ask for mailings and not an “investor” as such, but I do recieve many for “energy” (i.e. Tar sands and other unconventional energy companies). These people live in another reality, one that is “climate” controlled and “number” driven.
    Really, will the United States EVER pass national legislation cutting carbon output in a meaningful amount?
    Big “JIM” Montana Inhofe doen’t think so and the way the system is set up, I think he is telling the truth.
    I work for an airline and Global Warming is at best a mute topic.
    When it was in the “news”, not much support for action and grips about the cost and giving “China” a free ride.
    This is the do or die decade, Sir, and by the looks of things with the talk coming from Obama (developing ALL sources of energy), I wouldn’y put a bet on the former.

    1. Yeah, it’s a monumental challenge. If you go check out the full interview, you’ll see that he very much acknowledges that (he was an insider), but at least he and others are working on it.

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