Bonuses in CO2.

It’s Copenhagen and time to talk about CO2 emissions. As we’re also trying to get our heads around bankers’ bonuses it seems a good time to connect the two.
Assuming bankers are not simply printing their fifty-pound notes themselves their bonuses must be coming from economic activity somewhere. It’s also reasonable to assume our developed commercial dealings have honed the price of everything such that the value in one thing equates to the value in another. Economists also agree that wealth is created from labour and resources both of which equate in value to everything else.
Now lets take a bankers bonus of a million pounds. That would buy roughly 1,000,000 litres of petrol. OK, now my car, a Renault Scenic does around 14 km per litre and emits 183gm/km. That means it emits 2.44kg/litre. Still with me?
So a bankers’ million litres would take me around 9 million miles and create 2.44 million kg of CO2 or 2,440 metric tonnes. OK it’s unlikely the banker will spend it all on fuel for his Audi but his million pound bonus will have come from 1 million pounds worth of economic activity somewhere and that million pounds of economic activity will equate to 1 million litres of fuel somewhere along the line, which equates to 2.4 thousand metric tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere whether he has his central heating set to 80*C with the doors open and flies to Bermuda several times a year for his holidays or not.
So a banker is not worth his weight in gold, he’s worth 24,000 times his weight in CO2 emissions. Now that’s a fat bastard.