They Blog For You

The Guardian story about the 42 million green bulbs sent http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/07/energy-lightbulbs-wasted-lax-regulation to British homes under the CERT (carbon emission reduction scheme) in the last quarter of last year, though few customers had asked for them, illustrates how devious and manipulative comopanies are when left to their own devices in an open market.   They were exploiting loopholes to meet their obligations in the cheapest way possible, even though they knew perfectly well that alternatives like cavity wall insulation would save far more energy.

Several other recent evens illustrate the same theme:

*  Research by ICIS Heren has shown that the forward price of wholesale gas fell last year by two-thirds from over £1 a unit to around 36p, but energy firms have reduced their prices by less than a quarter of this reduction, using their market power as middle-men to pocket the difference in exorbitant profits.

*  EU regulators have noted that Big Pharma patent-holders frequently pay a maker of generic drugs to delay their launch of a cheap copy – a delay that they calculate causes generic drugs to arrive 6 months or more after the relevant patent expires, costing the consumer over £3bn a year.

*  Trafigura, the British oil trader that bought contaminated oil on the cheap and then dumped the waste in West Africa, which led to 15 deaths and thousands hospitalised, is an icon of corporate capitalism – keeping the profits and dumping the costs on someone else.   Price risks are dumped on farmers, health and safety risks are dumped on sub-contractors, insolvency risks are dumped on creditors, social and economic risks are dumped on the State (notably by the banks), toxic waste is dumped on the poor, and greenhouse gas pollution is dumped on everyone.