Snail Trails
*
http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?7724a95d-54f2-403b-abab-db95e878d62a
“We can afford an aggressive cap-and-trade policy to tackle ‘global warming’”
The “Report” states or implies that “cap-and-trade” works well enough to make a difference to the climate; that it costs very little; and that it will not damage the US economy.
The truth is that “cap and trade” does not work. The European Union’s carbon emissions are rising yearly, while those of George Bush’s US are falling yearly. In the EU, “cap-and-trade” has already been tried twice and has spectacularly failed twice, at huge cost. The environmental result: nil. Europe’s emissions continue to rise. There have been similar failures elsewhere in the world. A recent analysis by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of the Lieberman-Warner bill projects that costs of electrical power and gasoline would rise very sharply. Gasoline would cost about 53 cents per gallon more in 2030 and $1.40 per gallon more in 2050.
Nigel Lawson, the former UK Treasury Secretary, in his book An Appeal to Reason – A Cool Look at “Global Warming”, dismisses “cap-and-trade” in a few crisp and characteristically perceptive paragraphs –
“If western governments, at least in Europe, are going to remain obsessed with the alleged need to cut back sharply on CO2 emissions by increasing the cost of carbon, what is the best means of achieving this? The route the politicians (but very few economists) prefer is known as “cap and trade” – a regime in which emissions, or some of them, are statutorily capped, and the emitters are then free to trade the emission permits which result from this system. The trouble is that both in theory and in practice (for it has, to some extent, been put into practice) it is a method that has little to commend it.
“For one thing, it is in no sense the ‘market’ solution that it purports to be. It is essentially a government-controlled, administrative rationing system, in which the rations can subsequently be traded. It is rather as if, instead of seeking to cut back on smoking by taxing it, we were to allocate Soviet-style production permits to the cigarette manufacturers, which they were then permitted to buy and sell amongst themselves. Of course, for the market-makers and other middlemen who trade in the CO2 emissions permits, it is indeed a market, and one which they will not hear a word said against: for them it presents a lucrative and – they hope – growing business opportunity.
“Among its many other drawbacks, cap and trade is arbitrary and distortionary, covering some emissions but not others (it is impractical, for example to extend it to the personal and household sector, including motoring). For those industries where it does apply, it is anti-competitive, since permits are issued to existing emitters, and not to new entrants, who have to purchase them from the market. In general, the administrative allocation system scores badly on transparency, and lends itself to lobbying, corruption, and abuse of one kind or another. This is even more pronounced in an international scheme, when each government is under pressure to allocate generously to its own national emitters. Another problem is that it injects an artificial volatility into the price of energy, making rational investment decisions more difficult – not least any decision to invest in low-carbon or non-carbon energy. And, inevitably, the ethereal nature of the commodity being traded makes it particularly hard to police.
“The only substantial emissions-trading scheme so far attempted, the European Union’s ETS, exhibits all these fundamental flaws – and indeed several more, as recent studies have shown. In practice, it has done nothing to reduce emissions, and has merely awarded subsidies to selected emitters. In theory, some of the disadvantages of the scheme could be avoided if the emissions permits were auctioned, rather than given away, but the design of an auction to cover all emitters – including the personal sector – and extending it internationally would be mind-bogglingly complex and contentious, if indeed it could be done at all. Which is why, for the new and allegedly improved second (2008-2012) phase of the ETS (the first phase is universally agreed, except by those who have made money out of it, to have been a farce), the EU has decided that 98.5% of the permits should be allocated and only 1.5% auctioned.
There are two other forms of governmentally-sponsored carbon trading. Both are impossible to supervise and continue to suffer from such widespread abuse that their net effect on the climate is probably an increase in total carbon emissions. First, the “Clean Development Mechanism” set up under the Kyoto Agreement allows developed countries bound by Kyoto targets to buy “certified emissions reductions” from developing countries rather than cutting its own emissions. The UN is supposed to declare that the reductions would not have occurred in any event and have not been offset by any increase in emissions somewhere else.
China and India have both exploited the Clean Development Mechanism to the full, and greatly to their profit, but without any environmental benefit whatsoever to our planet. Chinese and Indian producers of chlorofluorocarbons, powerful greenhouse gases, are able to earn massive windfall profits by opening or buying plants designed to emit halocarbons – tens of thousands of times more potent than CO2 as greenhouse gases – and then by receiving cash payments via the Clean Development Mechanism to close them down again. Since the payments are scaled to reflect the “global warming potential” of the greenhouse gases emitted by the plants, the profiteers by this scam are making billions. The profits – at the expense of the West – are so gross that the Chinese Communist regime now levies a special windfall tax on them, which it can then spend on paying the cost of its declared program of opening two or three new coal-fired, greenhouse-gas-emitting power stations every week (for the sheer scale of this program, see the Annual Statistical Communiqué of the “People’s” “Republic” of China, 2006). It is difficult to see any environmental merit whatsoever in this mechanism.
Secondly, the “Joint Implementation”, also established under the Kyoto Protocol, allows developed countries emitting below their Kyoto thresholds to sell “carbon credits” (cynically but accurately known on the financial markets as “hot air”) to others who cannot meet their own thresholds. However, the only Kyoto signatory emitting well below its threshold, which the Protocol defines as 5% less than actual 1990 emissions, is Russia, because the collapse of Communism brought thousands of State-subsidized heavy industries to a sudden end. Russia at first stood out against the Kyoto Protocol but, more recently, its leaders realized that it could profit by Joint Implementation to the tune of tens of billions at the expense of the West. Suddenly, it ratified Kyoto. Soon, the profits will roll in, and we will be paying.
There is also a private-sector scheme known as “carbon offsetting,” by which jet-setting celebrities like Al Gore can publicly parade the pretence that their extravagant, carbon-emitting lifestyle is not really adding anything to manmade greenhouse-gas emissions. All they have to do is to buy the modern equivalent of the Indulgences sold for profit by unscrupulous pastors in the mediaeval Church. The Indulgences, coyly marketed under the name “carbon offsets”, are sold by various private scamsters, who craftily suggest to penitents that they can salve their consciences for, say, the carbon emissions arising from a transatlantic flight by paying as little as $5 towards the planting of trees that may or may not take place, and might or might not have taken place anyway. Type “carbon offsets” into Google and look at almost any of the myriad scams on offer. Most of them are so transparently fraudulent that it is at first blush astonishing that prosecutions have not resulted.
For it is the unique, common characteristic of all forms of carbon trading – whether by cap-and-trade, the “Clean” Development Mechanism, the Joint Implementation, carbon offsets, or any other device in the panoply of international nonsense that has sprung into being so profitably for the scamsters and their allies among the international enemies of the West, and so expensively for the rest of us – that not only both parties to each transaction but also all of the States or supranational entities nominally supervising and regulating them have a direct and powerful vested interest in overstating both the scale and the significance of the transactions.
The emitter wishes to salve his conscience and receive absolution by pretending that he has done all that is necessary to make him and his household or enterprise fashionably (though unnecessarily, and climate-irrelevantly) “carbon-neutral”. The counterparty to the emitter’s transaction wishes to attract more business from penitents by suggesting to them that for unrealistically small sums they can be forgiven all their carbon sins. The regulators and legislators wish to demonstrate to their voters (in those countries – unlike the European Union, or Rhodesia – where voters still matter, and still retain the power to choose and to dismiss those who govern them) that they are playing a full and successful part in the great Sancho Panza crusade to “Save The Planet”.
No surprise, then, that notwithstanding all the rhetoric and all the activity and all the “Reports” about the desirability of carbon trading, the trend in worldwide carbon emissions continues relentlessly upward, and at an accelerating rate. Though “carbon offsetting” is indeed enriching the wealthy market-fixers, scamsters, and regulators, while further impoverishing the poor citizenry, it is not – back in the real world – actually offsetting any emissions of carbon dioxide at all: nor is it ever likely to do so.
For, even if the entire Western world were to close down its economies altogether, and revert to the Stone Age but without even the ability to light fires, the planned growth in emissions in India and China alone would replace the West’s entire emissions within little more than a decade.
The central truth about “global warming” is that from here on it is the emerging tigers of Asia who will be the world’s dominant emitters. The West is no longer the chief problem, and no longer holds the solution in its own hands. We are bit-part players.
For the foreseeable future, therefore (setting aside the small decline that has recently occurred because the exceptionally cold winter of 2007/8 cooled the climate-relevant surface or “mixed” layer of the oceans and allowed that layer to take up unusually large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere), carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will continue to rise as they have throughout the half-century since modern gas-chromatograph measurements were first taken by the formidable Charles David Keeling on the shoulder of the Mauna Loa volcano in March 1958.
Therefore, it would not be responsible for the international community, or for any individual nation, to plan on any other basis than that by the end of this century there will be a great deal more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there is today. Not that that matters, for its effect on the climate will be negligible and generally beneficial – see the Technical Appendix.
Yet the principal objection to all forms of carbon trading, however elaborate and however piously intended, is not that it is inherently and inescapably fraudulent, nor that it is inevitably and ineluctably futile, but that it delivers no environmental benefit whatever in return for its massive cost – a cost which, as we shall see, falls almost exclusively upon the poorest while considerably enriching the richest. Carbon trading is Robin Hood in reverse, robbing the poor to enrich the rich. Abraham Lincoln once said, “You cannot make the poor rich by making the rich poor.” You certainly cannot make the poor rich by making the poor still poorer: that is the chief economic effect of carbon trading.
The real reason why carbon trading is a wasteful menace that ought to be forbidden by law is that it is altogether unnecessary. It is unnecessary not only because, as we have seen, the world has not warmed for a decade and is not likely to warm at more than a minuscule, harmless, and beneficial fraction of the rate luridly but inaccurately projected by the IPCC and its self-serving adherents in the international classe politique. It is unnecessary, above all, because the iron economic law of supply and demand is already driving up the cost of all carbon-based fuels, altogether irrespective of any intervention by etatiste meddlers.
It is a truism that the supply of fossil fuels is finite. Also, it is demonstrable not only that the cost of exploration is rising as a proportion of the exploitable reserves discovered but also that the cost of extraction is rising as a direct result of the political risks consequent upon the location of most of those reserves in the territories of unstable, undemocratic regimes that are for various reasons implacably hostile to the free West.
However, it is demand-side pressure, more than supply-side scarcity, that is chiefly responsible for the recent galloping inflation in the prices of fossil fuels, notably gasoline, currently trading at 1000% of its world price little more than a decade ago. This hyperinflation in the cost of fossil fuels is chiefly driven by the sudden surge in demand from emerging nations such as India and China. And the more we use carbon trading to close down our own economies and destroy the jobs of our working people, the more we shall stimulate that already-burgeoning demand for carbon fuels in India and China.
It is very likely that today’s oil price inflation, driven partly by limited and politically-uncertain supply but chiefly by ever-increasing world demand, will continue. Therefore, even if there were any imperative need for action to avert a “climate crisis” (which there is not: see the Technical Appendix), there would still be no need for national or international governmental action to drive up fossil-fuel prices any further: indeed, to do so would be particularly harmful to those on low incomes, and might dangerously deepen the present recession, without delivering any environmental benefit.
The deepening of a worldwide recession, though it is a mere inconvenience to the wealthy nations of the free West, has immediate and fatal consequences in the poorer nations, whose citizens are already starving as a direct result of the unscientific, now-discredited, bureaucratically-driven dash for biofuels , and are now menaced not only by the galloping increases in fuel prices caused by the surge in international demand but also – and quite unnecessarily – by the threat from the international classe politique artificially to increase fuel prices still further by means of “cap and trade”.
In a crude attempt to circumvent and downplay the fact of fossil-fuel hyperinflation, the EDF’s Report” disingenuously tries to argue – as did the now-defunct Stern Report – that the cost of cap-and-trade is negligible and will not add anything much to fossil fuel prices. In one respect, this is true. The first collapse of the European Union’s characteristically bureaucratic and extravagantly pointless cap-and-trade system was engendered by a huge fraud at the heart the system’s very construction. Under the system as originally conceived – or, rather, misconceived – every member-State was allowed to set its own emission limits. As a result, almost every member-State except Britain, whose current crop of ministers and civil servants are lamentably inexperienced and out of their depth in international negotiations, set themselves emission limits that actually exceeded previous total emissions. No surprise, then, those emissions in the EU continued to rise notwithstanding the introduction of cap-and-trade, so that, within a very short time, emissions permits were trading at less than $1 per tonne of CO2. This was indeed cheap – so cheap that it was comfortably exceeded by the monstrous bureaucratic handling charges involved in the trading, whereupon the scam collapsed.
The lesson to be learned from this typically incompetent failure on the part of the EU, whose officials are not subject to any effective democratic scrutiny, audit, or recall and who are accordingly not under any pressure to get things right, is this: if cap-and-trade is as cheap as the “Report” suggests, it will have no effect on carbon emissions. The corollary is that, if cap-and-trade actually reduces emissions, it can only do so if it is sufficiently expensive. Otherwise, as the failure of the EU scheme demonstrates, the environmental impact of “cap-and-trade” is actually negative: emissions rise, in a fine demonstration of the Law of Opposite Consequences: whenever a government attempts to interfere in the workings of the economy, even for beneficial purposes, it will be likely to trigger consequences that are not merely unintended but the diametric opposite of those that were, however piously, intended.
Nothing was intended, nothing was saved. They were there in their thousands, tens of thousands, millions, queued up, waiting, desperate, their increasing anxiety unheeded by those who lorded themselves over all of us. The cruelty of it all was beyond understanding. Where had it all gone, the pity for the plight of the ordinary working man? Or woman? Why had democracy failed us all so badly? Where did all our money go? On countless things he didn't support: global warming hysteria, the war in Iraq, massive and wasteful bureaucracies, courts that treated you as the enemy. We all pay. We all suffer.
And stuck in traffic jams, the ceaseless barking of mad dogs, clammy sweat coating us all, these things, these rhymes and reasons, were nothing short of fading memories. All had gone wrong. Depression loomed on the horizon. Men in suits held pointless meetings. Shadows fell across long lives; and everything was swept away. Soon there would be mirrors and shadows and reflections in windows; and he glared as much as he dared; chanting dog, dog, as he passed another parking cop, the supreme parasite, and the traffic banked up in front of him and behind, and the air full of pollution. Take me driving, she asked, and he shuddered at the thought of being stuck in yet more traffic.
Doom and gloom, he writhed, catching his reflection in the rear vision mirror. You're a dunderhead, he could hear her screaming, you haven't done this, you haven't done that, you haven't spent any time with the children. No, he had spent twelve hours in traffic and in a lousy job, trying to pay the bills while she sat around the house, watched daytime television, gossiped to her equally obnoxious gang of girl friends. Why am I doing this? Where did my life go? He could see the lights up ahead changing red, green, red, and still the traffic didn't move. The parking cop he had shouted "dog" at had overtaken him on the street; and he gave him the most intense death stare he could muster.
May bad luck follow you all the days of your life. May you suffer long and may you suffer hard. May all the bad times concentrate in your life. Get a proper job, he shouted, but he hadn't wound down the window; just hoping his hatred seeped like an echo out of the car and across the street, afflicting the parasite's subconscious. All was moving. All was shadowed in innocence. The traffic jolted forward barely a single car space. He was late, always late, and his head swirled with lists of unpaid bills and jobs not done. Everything was chaos; and he had no one to blame but himself.
These malcontents, these losers in the battle of life, and far off he could hear the sirens screaming; a motor cavalcade of someone important sweeping past; flanked by police. What would they know about any person's life, these people who were there supposedly to serve them. These giant egos. These cruel and indifferent idiots. He was shattered by the message. He was coming into darkness, coming around the corner, and he screamed and hit the windscreen, dog, dog, he shouted, remembering his last parking fine, remembering the state of his finances, remembering that these bastards were meant to actually be working for him. For a world he no longer loved. For a place that was no longer his.
It was a culture riddled with educated lies; which made the phenomenon even more puzzling. Useful fools. Educated fools. Universal education fed them through the universities in record numbers; creating a bureaucratic and managerial class without parallel in human history; and in a sense made their indoctrination even easier. Multiplicity. Thinking outside the square. Diversity of views. They herald all these goals and don't mean a word of it; just try disagreeing with them on one of their noble causes; global warming, domestic violence, multiculturalism, race relations, redistribution of wealth. Dog! he shouted one more time, his throat hoarse from shouting. The traffic started to unjam and he moved on past the bastard. Dog! he shouted at the parking cop again. One day he might even wind down his window. Then the bowed, stupid looking little man in his nasty little uniform might even hear him; and book him for abuse. His shouting, muffled inside the car, was as useless as everybody's else's snail trail in this city of broken hearts and wasted lives.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2007/3413carbon_swindle.html
Carbon Trade Swindle Behind Gore Hoax
by Richard Freeman and Marcia Merry Baker
Look behind—if you dare—Al Gore and his science hoax, and you find the very same London-centered oligarchical financial crew that drove the 2003-2006 oil and commodity price increase, amidst the bubbles and hyperinflation that characterize the breakdown-phase of the financial system. The centerpiece of the U.S. emerging market for carbon emissions trading, is the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), created in 2003 as a "voluntary," or pilot agency, part of a London-based network positioned to reproduce the oil bubble on a scale orders of magnitude greater and more dangerous, while at the same time, destroying what's left of the physical economy.
The idea is that if governments cap CO2 emissions, then the "market" will take off for the buying and selling of emissions "allowances." This is the whole point of the "cap-and-trade" plan for CO2. If it sounds crazy, it is. But Gore is just one of the most visible parts of the elaborate (and bi-partisan) schemes that have been set in motion under cover of climate change. Gore's personal financial involvement is blatant, especially through Goldman Sachs—a large shareholder of CCX, and in 2004, the creator of Gore's very own London-based hedge fund, Generation Investment Management.
CCX has multiple interconnections with the London-run Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (ICE), whose subsidiary is the International Petroleum Exchange, the world's largest petroleum futures and options market. The dirty details of ICE and the Great Oil Price Swindle came out extensively at a May 8, 2006 Senate Democratic Policy Committee hearing, where Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said that futures speculation on the ICE was the driver for adding $20 to 25 to the price of every barrel of oil, causing hardship to industry and households, and suffering to underdeveloped nations. (The report, "The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices," is still posted on Sen. Levin's website).
Yet Al Gore got away with advocating cap-and-trade CO2 speculation at his much ballyhooed appearance before the joint House Hearing of the Energy and Science Committees March 21. Gore repeatedly told Congressmen to "put a price on carbon." In response to Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), Gore said, "As soon as carbon has a price, you are going to see a wave [of investment] in it ... there will be unchained investment."
But why have neither Republicans nor Democrats challenged Gore on this? And why have they conspicuously refrained from confronting Sir Nicholas Stern—of the 2006 "Stern Review" on global warming, British Environment Minister David Miliband, and the other British "experts" streaming into Washington, D.C. in 2007, to demand U.S. "economic response" to climate change? Political amnesia. Elected officials are tightly locked in the grip of the Synarchist gamemasters—the Felix Rohatyn wing of the Democratic Party, and the George Shultz wing of the GOP—who have been in on creating this and prior swindles all along.
Look, for example, at the who's who involved in the blatant staging of a "pro-green investment" press conference on the eve of the March 21 Gore House and Senate appearance. On March 19, the "Investors Network on Climate Risk" (INCR) held a Washington event to demand Federal action to impose mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases, claiming they represent a $4 trillion pool of funds demanding green ventures. Members of INCR, founded at the UN in 2003, include British Petroleum, Allianz Insurance, the world's largest insurance firm; DuPont, and hosts of state, labor, and church funds of various kinds, that have been herded into line. The INCR is chaired by British activist Norman Dean, who is simultaneously Director of Friends of the Earth.
Al Gore spoke at the May 2005 INCR Investors Summit at the United Nations, in his capacity as Chairman of his Generation Investment Management. He called for following the model of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, which started up in 2005. "Monetize emissions; trade them; reduce them," was Gore's mantra.
Gore again plugged green markets trading in April 2006, at Oxford University, at the annual Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship. This was held at the Skoll Centre, set up by Jeff Skoll, the E-bay billionaire, whose Participant Productions funded Gore's propaganda movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore pushed carbon swaps and other green investments, along with his co-chairman of Generation Investment Management, David Blood, formerly Chief of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
But now in Washington, the pace of lobbying Congress for carbon markets has reached a frenzy. A March 15 forum was titled "From Kyoto to Chicago," because of the theme, that no new, long-lead time successor treaty to the expiring Kyoto Protocol is required for getting world carbon markets going. Carbon trade can commence if just the United States, Europe and Japan start it up, said Jonathan Pershing, emissions trading expert for the World Resources Institute, on whose board sits Al Gore. The same point was stressed by OECD spokesman Brice LaLonde, advisor to the European Carbon Fund (ECF), and head of Friends of the Earth in France said the same. His co-advisor to the ECF, founded in 2006, is William K. Reilly, the EPA director for President George H.W. Bush, and long-time World Wildlife Fund president.
The Investors' Network for Climate Risk's prime social action affiliate, the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES; founded in 1989), released a January 2007 report entitled, "The Power to Save," which outlined a step-by-step process to put an end to all new power plant construction in Texas, the nation's second-most populous state. The concept is simple: cut emissions; then trade in the scarce emissions "allowances"!
In the current buyout bidding for TXU—the major, 62-year-old Texas electric utility, the offer by KKR and Texas Pacific would acquire TXU on condition that eight of 11 planned coal-fired generator projects be cancelled. The advisor on this so-called environmentalist deal is William K. Reilly, an official in the Texas Pacific Group.
Reilly is co-author of a recent report, "Allocating Allowances in a Greenhouse Gas Trading System"—a how-to booklet for trading in carbon—published by the National Commission on Energy Policy. Launched in November 2002, the NCEP's founding 20 members included Andrew Lundquist, the Executive Director of the 2001 Dick Cheney Energy Taskforce; R. James Woolsey, former CIA Director and long-time Al Gore neo-con advisor, William K. Reilly; John Rowe, CEO of Exelon, and other notables. Funding agencies include the MacArthur Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust and others.
In the face of this political onslaught, it is useful that so far, the House Democratic and Republican leaderships have agreed not to rush into "cap-and-trade" emissions legislation. They are saying that a go-slow approach is desirable, but the amount of top-down pressure to act now—from Wall Street and City of London speculators, cannot be underestimated. On March 15, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee said, "I'm glad to see that this week, Speaker Pelosi had indicated that any bill on global warming considered this year doesn't necessarily have to include a mandatory cap-and-trade scheme." But in reality, these emissions schemes, and their backers should be stopped cold.
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Welcome to your weekly skeptics smorgasbord of inconvenient links and incoherent lefties. We're all going to die of something, and it might as well be while we're having fun with denial; so grab a beverage and belly up to the bar, we're going in...
Part One: Al Gore and Friends
As soon as the US election was over, the Al Gore was back on the trail, promoting his manufactured 'climate crisis' and his favorite topic, himself. Gore, the Great Profit, sees an opportunity to extend his great fortune with a Democrat in the Whitehouse and is already giving the President-elect advice:
“Now is not the time for small steps or a narrow focus. The American people are calling for bold change, and Repower America is the big solution to get our country back on track quickly. Quickly transitioning to clean energy will kick-start our economy, generate millions of new jobs and provide the foundation for long term economic growth.”
Al might not have been able to win his own election, but he's man enough to tell Barack Obama what to do with his win.
Oscar glory, A Nobel Peace prize and still the awards keep coming Al's way. This time the NAACP are honoring Big Al, presumably for being a person of green color.
Not all things are going so well for Al however. His TV enterprise, Current Media, is in trouble just one day after grabbing Canadian taxpayer cash in a partnership deal with the CBC. Current laid off 60 staff and has not launched its long delayed IPO. Al has made no statement yet, but expect one soon that fingers global warming as the cause of this catastrophe.
Goreworld
Earth is now so hot that Al had cut the sleeves off his sweater
Don't forget to get your weekly Gored but not Forgotten fix, and while you're over there at Skeptics Global Warming, check out his rebuttal of Al's NYT column. He takes Al behind the rhetorical woodshed and knocks the green out of him.
This weeks must-read post is all about the carbon trade swindle behind Al Gore. If ever the Goreacle goes to jail, this will be the reason, the cynical and dishonest trade of essentially value-less carbon credits.
Global warming muppet Jim Hansen got caught in an embarrassing lie this week after substituting faulty October data with Septembers numbers, making October 2008 look increbily warm. Corrections have been made, but this debacle goes to Hansen's faded credibility and highlights the central problem with climate models; garbage in, garbage out.
David Suzuki was scheduled to speak in Palm Springs this week, which means that once again I am greener than the totalitarian hippy because I didn't fly to Palm springs. Offset that, hippy!
Part Two: AGW Scaremongers and Propagandists
Old religion meets the new religion, can the inquisition be far behind? Perhaps not.
Finally, a scaremonger event that even I can get behind (NSFW).
The NYT held a drawing contest for moonbats and came up with some first-rate insights into the miniscule minds of lefties.
Moonbat art
a moonbat cannot tell nuclear waste from nuclear generation
Alan Colmes, aka 'Skeletor' of Fox News, introduced skeptic author Chris Horner as a climate criminal. Meanwhile ABC News is sending a reporter to Kilimanjaro for some balanced reporting on how the earth is about to explode into a zillion pieces, or something.
Roy Spencer is censored by two scientific publications, because science is about politics and fundraising, not facts and learned debate, dammit.
Buying offsets is hard, how is a university to know which bogus scheme to sign on with?
Wisconsin kills a new coal power plant, the blue state may be black sooner that they expect.
Copyright means nothing if alarmists can indoctrinate you faster, and there's nothing like indoctrinated kids to warm a believers heart.
More bad news for green politicians as New Zealand throws out die-hard green Prime Minister Helen Clark. She can add her failed career to Canada's Stephane Dion's on the unwanted pile of useless scaremongering politicans. Elizabeth May, leader of the greens in Canada, is resisting the inevitable and blames everyone but herself for not gaining a seat.
Who needs facts when even the head of the IPCC can just make stuff up? More here.
Greenpeace, the comedic gift that just keeps giving:
Windmills r us
Wind Farms. Greenpeace is not clear on the concept, apparently
The UK Times waits about 5 seconds after Michael Crichton's death before celebrating that his voice is gone from the climate debate, so we can all be free to be green without uppity writers challenging our beliefs.
Eco-terrorism, approved by Al Gore.
A skeptic needs a hug... it can be lonely out on the sane fringes.
Data, what data? Scientist refuses to share data with a skeptic, making everyone wonder what he's hiding. Nice play, Shakespeare.
AGW, how we know it's bunk, by those Power Line guys.
Part Three: Inconvenient Truths
What's green and full of hot air? No, not Al Gore, the green bubble. Green projects are failing all over the place, and there's more to come.
Global warming is killing amphibians. No, it's not. Is it just me or does there seem to be a trend towards debunking things that global warming was causing? Perhaps some scientists are looking to grab a modicum of credibility back before the backlash starts.
President-elect Obama has a detailed climate plan. Oh, wait, nevermind.
Did you know that alternative warming theory is valid? The Coloradoan does.
Biofuels were never a good idea, burning food for fuel is immoral in today's world. Now the problems with ethanol are acknowledged.
BP quits green projects in the UK, leaving the government in the lurch. Heh.
That crashing economy you hear? No, the other one, the carbon crash. The real economy is laready killing the green revolution.
Germany needs power, coal to the rescue, activists go under the bus along with EU climate goals.
If a picture is worth a thousand words:
Chilly
(source)
Green opportunist T Boone Pickens delays his wind farms, he's having a bad week.
Part Four: AGW in the News
The U.S. Department of Energy pulls the plug on a global warming project, and the scientists are upset. Clearly this is unfair, the scientists have adhered to all the rules of modern science by linking their research to global warming, yet they still lost funding. I can hear the trembling across campuses all over the world.
It's ski-time in Austria, Switzerland and Italy, already.
Bikiskini
global warming, I love it
The US Navy wins a war with environuts, sonar bombing runs will commence soon.
Australia's ABC News clearly has no agenda when it interviews skeptics.
The UK government passed a global warming bill while snow lay on the ground in early October for the first time in 85 years.
Change we can believe in. Oh, wait. Here's more on what the new guy might do with climate policy.
Will America's new President buy oil from Canada?
What happens if you hold a climate conference and no one shows up?
While I'm tooling around town laughing at prius drivers from my SUV, it seems some of the micro-car drivers are regretting their leap.
Smarter hummer
A Hummer with its pilot fish in a natural setting
Part Five: Real Science
More on that NASA error in the GISS data from September and the attempt by NASA to blame skeptics for their embarrassment.
Is the Sun waking up? Maybe, slowly.
Bjorn Lomborg takes time off from his hit show Mamma Mia and offers good advice to the President-elect.
Ahem. It's the Sun, stupid.
Climate control is a futile quest. Resistance is also futile, but what has that got to with anything?
Climate change knows three realities: science reality, which is what working scientists deal with every day; virtual reality, which is the wholly imaginary world inside computer climate models; and public reality, which is the socio-political system within which politicians, business people and the general citizenry work.
An embarrassingly large hole will open in the ozone layer this year, almost exactly 12 months after scientists celebrated 20 years of banning CFC's. Oops. Don't forget that many of the geniuses that missed the effect of cosmic rays on the ozone layer today claim to know what's 'wrong' with the climate.
No O zone
Hole-y cow, it's a biggie
Hmm, I don't think I mentioned that it's the Sun, stupid. Or did I?
Part Six: Global Hottie
Regular readers will know that I do (sometimes) try to provide a reason for linking to the hottie. These same readers know and understand that these links are tenuous at best. The odd reference in Part 5 about resistance and futility might have seemed odd when you read it, but now you see the wisdom of the blogger at its evil worst. It's a shameless segway to a spottie (space hottie). Deniers, please surrender to Borg beauty and this week's global hottie, Jeri Ryan.
Jeri3
(yes, I do know she's out of uniform)
That's your weekly round-up, rounded-up as it were. Happy weekending to all of you.
http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?7724a95d-54f2-403b-abab-db95e878d62a
“We can afford an aggressive cap-and-trade policy to tackle ‘global warming’”
The “Report” states or implies that “cap-and-trade” works well enough to make a difference to the climate; that it costs very little; and that it will not damage the US economy.
The truth is that “cap and trade” does not work. The European Union’s carbon emissions are rising yearly, while those of George Bush’s US are falling yearly. In the EU, “cap-and-trade” has already been tried twice and has spectacularly failed twice, at huge cost. The environmental result: nil. Europe’s emissions continue to rise. There have been similar failures elsewhere in the world. A recent analysis by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of the Lieberman-Warner bill projects that costs of electrical power and gasoline would rise very sharply. Gasoline would cost about 53 cents per gallon more in 2030 and $1.40 per gallon more in 2050.
Nigel Lawson, the former UK Treasury Secretary, in his book An Appeal to Reason – A Cool Look at “Global Warming”, dismisses “cap-and-trade” in a few crisp and characteristically perceptive paragraphs –
“If western governments, at least in Europe, are going to remain obsessed with the alleged need to cut back sharply on CO2 emissions by increasing the cost of carbon, what is the best means of achieving this? The route the politicians (but very few economists) prefer is known as “cap and trade” – a regime in which emissions, or some of them, are statutorily capped, and the emitters are then free to trade the emission permits which result from this system. The trouble is that both in theory and in practice (for it has, to some extent, been put into practice) it is a method that has little to commend it.
“For one thing, it is in no sense the ‘market’ solution that it purports to be. It is essentially a government-controlled, administrative rationing system, in which the rations can subsequently be traded. It is rather as if, instead of seeking to cut back on smoking by taxing it, we were to allocate Soviet-style production permits to the cigarette manufacturers, which they were then permitted to buy and sell amongst themselves. Of course, for the market-makers and other middlemen who trade in the CO2 emissions permits, it is indeed a market, and one which they will not hear a word said against: for them it presents a lucrative and – they hope – growing business opportunity.
“Among its many other drawbacks, cap and trade is arbitrary and distortionary, covering some emissions but not others (it is impractical, for example to extend it to the personal and household sector, including motoring). For those industries where it does apply, it is anti-competitive, since permits are issued to existing emitters, and not to new entrants, who have to purchase them from the market. In general, the administrative allocation system scores badly on transparency, and lends itself to lobbying, corruption, and abuse of one kind or another. This is even more pronounced in an international scheme, when each government is under pressure to allocate generously to its own national emitters. Another problem is that it injects an artificial volatility into the price of energy, making rational investment decisions more difficult – not least any decision to invest in low-carbon or non-carbon energy. And, inevitably, the ethereal nature of the commodity being traded makes it particularly hard to police.
“The only substantial emissions-trading scheme so far attempted, the European Union’s ETS, exhibits all these fundamental flaws – and indeed several more, as recent studies have shown. In practice, it has done nothing to reduce emissions, and has merely awarded subsidies to selected emitters. In theory, some of the disadvantages of the scheme could be avoided if the emissions permits were auctioned, rather than given away, but the design of an auction to cover all emitters – including the personal sector – and extending it internationally would be mind-bogglingly complex and contentious, if indeed it could be done at all. Which is why, for the new and allegedly improved second (2008-2012) phase of the ETS (the first phase is universally agreed, except by those who have made money out of it, to have been a farce), the EU has decided that 98.5% of the permits should be allocated and only 1.5% auctioned.
There are two other forms of governmentally-sponsored carbon trading. Both are impossible to supervise and continue to suffer from such widespread abuse that their net effect on the climate is probably an increase in total carbon emissions. First, the “Clean Development Mechanism” set up under the Kyoto Agreement allows developed countries bound by Kyoto targets to buy “certified emissions reductions” from developing countries rather than cutting its own emissions. The UN is supposed to declare that the reductions would not have occurred in any event and have not been offset by any increase in emissions somewhere else.
China and India have both exploited the Clean Development Mechanism to the full, and greatly to their profit, but without any environmental benefit whatsoever to our planet. Chinese and Indian producers of chlorofluorocarbons, powerful greenhouse gases, are able to earn massive windfall profits by opening or buying plants designed to emit halocarbons – tens of thousands of times more potent than CO2 as greenhouse gases – and then by receiving cash payments via the Clean Development Mechanism to close them down again. Since the payments are scaled to reflect the “global warming potential” of the greenhouse gases emitted by the plants, the profiteers by this scam are making billions. The profits – at the expense of the West – are so gross that the Chinese Communist regime now levies a special windfall tax on them, which it can then spend on paying the cost of its declared program of opening two or three new coal-fired, greenhouse-gas-emitting power stations every week (for the sheer scale of this program, see the Annual Statistical Communiqué of the “People’s” “Republic” of China, 2006). It is difficult to see any environmental merit whatsoever in this mechanism.
Secondly, the “Joint Implementation”, also established under the Kyoto Protocol, allows developed countries emitting below their Kyoto thresholds to sell “carbon credits” (cynically but accurately known on the financial markets as “hot air”) to others who cannot meet their own thresholds. However, the only Kyoto signatory emitting well below its threshold, which the Protocol defines as 5% less than actual 1990 emissions, is Russia, because the collapse of Communism brought thousands of State-subsidized heavy industries to a sudden end. Russia at first stood out against the Kyoto Protocol but, more recently, its leaders realized that it could profit by Joint Implementation to the tune of tens of billions at the expense of the West. Suddenly, it ratified Kyoto. Soon, the profits will roll in, and we will be paying.
There is also a private-sector scheme known as “carbon offsetting,” by which jet-setting celebrities like Al Gore can publicly parade the pretence that their extravagant, carbon-emitting lifestyle is not really adding anything to manmade greenhouse-gas emissions. All they have to do is to buy the modern equivalent of the Indulgences sold for profit by unscrupulous pastors in the mediaeval Church. The Indulgences, coyly marketed under the name “carbon offsets”, are sold by various private scamsters, who craftily suggest to penitents that they can salve their consciences for, say, the carbon emissions arising from a transatlantic flight by paying as little as $5 towards the planting of trees that may or may not take place, and might or might not have taken place anyway. Type “carbon offsets” into Google and look at almost any of the myriad scams on offer. Most of them are so transparently fraudulent that it is at first blush astonishing that prosecutions have not resulted.
For it is the unique, common characteristic of all forms of carbon trading – whether by cap-and-trade, the “Clean” Development Mechanism, the Joint Implementation, carbon offsets, or any other device in the panoply of international nonsense that has sprung into being so profitably for the scamsters and their allies among the international enemies of the West, and so expensively for the rest of us – that not only both parties to each transaction but also all of the States or supranational entities nominally supervising and regulating them have a direct and powerful vested interest in overstating both the scale and the significance of the transactions.
The emitter wishes to salve his conscience and receive absolution by pretending that he has done all that is necessary to make him and his household or enterprise fashionably (though unnecessarily, and climate-irrelevantly) “carbon-neutral”. The counterparty to the emitter’s transaction wishes to attract more business from penitents by suggesting to them that for unrealistically small sums they can be forgiven all their carbon sins. The regulators and legislators wish to demonstrate to their voters (in those countries – unlike the European Union, or Rhodesia – where voters still matter, and still retain the power to choose and to dismiss those who govern them) that they are playing a full and successful part in the great Sancho Panza crusade to “Save The Planet”.
No surprise, then, that notwithstanding all the rhetoric and all the activity and all the “Reports” about the desirability of carbon trading, the trend in worldwide carbon emissions continues relentlessly upward, and at an accelerating rate. Though “carbon offsetting” is indeed enriching the wealthy market-fixers, scamsters, and regulators, while further impoverishing the poor citizenry, it is not – back in the real world – actually offsetting any emissions of carbon dioxide at all: nor is it ever likely to do so.
For, even if the entire Western world were to close down its economies altogether, and revert to the Stone Age but without even the ability to light fires, the planned growth in emissions in India and China alone would replace the West’s entire emissions within little more than a decade.
The central truth about “global warming” is that from here on it is the emerging tigers of Asia who will be the world’s dominant emitters. The West is no longer the chief problem, and no longer holds the solution in its own hands. We are bit-part players.
For the foreseeable future, therefore (setting aside the small decline that has recently occurred because the exceptionally cold winter of 2007/8 cooled the climate-relevant surface or “mixed” layer of the oceans and allowed that layer to take up unusually large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere), carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will continue to rise as they have throughout the half-century since modern gas-chromatograph measurements were first taken by the formidable Charles David Keeling on the shoulder of the Mauna Loa volcano in March 1958.
Therefore, it would not be responsible for the international community, or for any individual nation, to plan on any other basis than that by the end of this century there will be a great deal more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there is today. Not that that matters, for its effect on the climate will be negligible and generally beneficial – see the Technical Appendix.
Yet the principal objection to all forms of carbon trading, however elaborate and however piously intended, is not that it is inherently and inescapably fraudulent, nor that it is inevitably and ineluctably futile, but that it delivers no environmental benefit whatever in return for its massive cost – a cost which, as we shall see, falls almost exclusively upon the poorest while considerably enriching the richest. Carbon trading is Robin Hood in reverse, robbing the poor to enrich the rich. Abraham Lincoln once said, “You cannot make the poor rich by making the rich poor.” You certainly cannot make the poor rich by making the poor still poorer: that is the chief economic effect of carbon trading.
The real reason why carbon trading is a wasteful menace that ought to be forbidden by law is that it is altogether unnecessary. It is unnecessary not only because, as we have seen, the world has not warmed for a decade and is not likely to warm at more than a minuscule, harmless, and beneficial fraction of the rate luridly but inaccurately projected by the IPCC and its self-serving adherents in the international classe politique. It is unnecessary, above all, because the iron economic law of supply and demand is already driving up the cost of all carbon-based fuels, altogether irrespective of any intervention by etatiste meddlers.
It is a truism that the supply of fossil fuels is finite. Also, it is demonstrable not only that the cost of exploration is rising as a proportion of the exploitable reserves discovered but also that the cost of extraction is rising as a direct result of the political risks consequent upon the location of most of those reserves in the territories of unstable, undemocratic regimes that are for various reasons implacably hostile to the free West.
However, it is demand-side pressure, more than supply-side scarcity, that is chiefly responsible for the recent galloping inflation in the prices of fossil fuels, notably gasoline, currently trading at 1000% of its world price little more than a decade ago. This hyperinflation in the cost of fossil fuels is chiefly driven by the sudden surge in demand from emerging nations such as India and China. And the more we use carbon trading to close down our own economies and destroy the jobs of our working people, the more we shall stimulate that already-burgeoning demand for carbon fuels in India and China.
It is very likely that today’s oil price inflation, driven partly by limited and politically-uncertain supply but chiefly by ever-increasing world demand, will continue. Therefore, even if there were any imperative need for action to avert a “climate crisis” (which there is not: see the Technical Appendix), there would still be no need for national or international governmental action to drive up fossil-fuel prices any further: indeed, to do so would be particularly harmful to those on low incomes, and might dangerously deepen the present recession, without delivering any environmental benefit.
The deepening of a worldwide recession, though it is a mere inconvenience to the wealthy nations of the free West, has immediate and fatal consequences in the poorer nations, whose citizens are already starving as a direct result of the unscientific, now-discredited, bureaucratically-driven dash for biofuels , and are now menaced not only by the galloping increases in fuel prices caused by the surge in international demand but also – and quite unnecessarily – by the threat from the international classe politique artificially to increase fuel prices still further by means of “cap and trade”.
In a crude attempt to circumvent and downplay the fact of fossil-fuel hyperinflation, the EDF’s Report” disingenuously tries to argue – as did the now-defunct Stern Report – that the cost of cap-and-trade is negligible and will not add anything much to fossil fuel prices. In one respect, this is true. The first collapse of the European Union’s characteristically bureaucratic and extravagantly pointless cap-and-trade system was engendered by a huge fraud at the heart the system’s very construction. Under the system as originally conceived – or, rather, misconceived – every member-State was allowed to set its own emission limits. As a result, almost every member-State except Britain, whose current crop of ministers and civil servants are lamentably inexperienced and out of their depth in international negotiations, set themselves emission limits that actually exceeded previous total emissions. No surprise, then, those emissions in the EU continued to rise notwithstanding the introduction of cap-and-trade, so that, within a very short time, emissions permits were trading at less than $1 per tonne of CO2. This was indeed cheap – so cheap that it was comfortably exceeded by the monstrous bureaucratic handling charges involved in the trading, whereupon the scam collapsed.
The lesson to be learned from this typically incompetent failure on the part of the EU, whose officials are not subject to any effective democratic scrutiny, audit, or recall and who are accordingly not under any pressure to get things right, is this: if cap-and-trade is as cheap as the “Report” suggests, it will have no effect on carbon emissions. The corollary is that, if cap-and-trade actually reduces emissions, it can only do so if it is sufficiently expensive. Otherwise, as the failure of the EU scheme demonstrates, the environmental impact of “cap-and-trade” is actually negative: emissions rise, in a fine demonstration of the Law of Opposite Consequences: whenever a government attempts to interfere in the workings of the economy, even for beneficial purposes, it will be likely to trigger consequences that are not merely unintended but the diametric opposite of those that were, however piously, intended.
Nothing was intended, nothing was saved. They were there in their thousands, tens of thousands, millions, queued up, waiting, desperate, their increasing anxiety unheeded by those who lorded themselves over all of us. The cruelty of it all was beyond understanding. Where had it all gone, the pity for the plight of the ordinary working man? Or woman? Why had democracy failed us all so badly? Where did all our money go? On countless things he didn't support: global warming hysteria, the war in Iraq, massive and wasteful bureaucracies, courts that treated you as the enemy. We all pay. We all suffer.
And stuck in traffic jams, the ceaseless barking of mad dogs, clammy sweat coating us all, these things, these rhymes and reasons, were nothing short of fading memories. All had gone wrong. Depression loomed on the horizon. Men in suits held pointless meetings. Shadows fell across long lives; and everything was swept away. Soon there would be mirrors and shadows and reflections in windows; and he glared as much as he dared; chanting dog, dog, as he passed another parking cop, the supreme parasite, and the traffic banked up in front of him and behind, and the air full of pollution. Take me driving, she asked, and he shuddered at the thought of being stuck in yet more traffic.
Doom and gloom, he writhed, catching his reflection in the rear vision mirror. You're a dunderhead, he could hear her screaming, you haven't done this, you haven't done that, you haven't spent any time with the children. No, he had spent twelve hours in traffic and in a lousy job, trying to pay the bills while she sat around the house, watched daytime television, gossiped to her equally obnoxious gang of girl friends. Why am I doing this? Where did my life go? He could see the lights up ahead changing red, green, red, and still the traffic didn't move. The parking cop he had shouted "dog" at had overtaken him on the street; and he gave him the most intense death stare he could muster.
May bad luck follow you all the days of your life. May you suffer long and may you suffer hard. May all the bad times concentrate in your life. Get a proper job, he shouted, but he hadn't wound down the window; just hoping his hatred seeped like an echo out of the car and across the street, afflicting the parasite's subconscious. All was moving. All was shadowed in innocence. The traffic jolted forward barely a single car space. He was late, always late, and his head swirled with lists of unpaid bills and jobs not done. Everything was chaos; and he had no one to blame but himself.
These malcontents, these losers in the battle of life, and far off he could hear the sirens screaming; a motor cavalcade of someone important sweeping past; flanked by police. What would they know about any person's life, these people who were there supposedly to serve them. These giant egos. These cruel and indifferent idiots. He was shattered by the message. He was coming into darkness, coming around the corner, and he screamed and hit the windscreen, dog, dog, he shouted, remembering his last parking fine, remembering the state of his finances, remembering that these bastards were meant to actually be working for him. For a world he no longer loved. For a place that was no longer his.
It was a culture riddled with educated lies; which made the phenomenon even more puzzling. Useful fools. Educated fools. Universal education fed them through the universities in record numbers; creating a bureaucratic and managerial class without parallel in human history; and in a sense made their indoctrination even easier. Multiplicity. Thinking outside the square. Diversity of views. They herald all these goals and don't mean a word of it; just try disagreeing with them on one of their noble causes; global warming, domestic violence, multiculturalism, race relations, redistribution of wealth. Dog! he shouted one more time, his throat hoarse from shouting. The traffic started to unjam and he moved on past the bastard. Dog! he shouted at the parking cop again. One day he might even wind down his window. Then the bowed, stupid looking little man in his nasty little uniform might even hear him; and book him for abuse. His shouting, muffled inside the car, was as useless as everybody's else's snail trail in this city of broken hearts and wasted lives.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2007/3413carbon_swindle.html
Carbon Trade Swindle Behind Gore Hoax
by Richard Freeman and Marcia Merry Baker
Look behind—if you dare—Al Gore and his science hoax, and you find the very same London-centered oligarchical financial crew that drove the 2003-2006 oil and commodity price increase, amidst the bubbles and hyperinflation that characterize the breakdown-phase of the financial system. The centerpiece of the U.S. emerging market for carbon emissions trading, is the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), created in 2003 as a "voluntary," or pilot agency, part of a London-based network positioned to reproduce the oil bubble on a scale orders of magnitude greater and more dangerous, while at the same time, destroying what's left of the physical economy.
The idea is that if governments cap CO2 emissions, then the "market" will take off for the buying and selling of emissions "allowances." This is the whole point of the "cap-and-trade" plan for CO2. If it sounds crazy, it is. But Gore is just one of the most visible parts of the elaborate (and bi-partisan) schemes that have been set in motion under cover of climate change. Gore's personal financial involvement is blatant, especially through Goldman Sachs—a large shareholder of CCX, and in 2004, the creator of Gore's very own London-based hedge fund, Generation Investment Management.
CCX has multiple interconnections with the London-run Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (ICE), whose subsidiary is the International Petroleum Exchange, the world's largest petroleum futures and options market. The dirty details of ICE and the Great Oil Price Swindle came out extensively at a May 8, 2006 Senate Democratic Policy Committee hearing, where Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said that futures speculation on the ICE was the driver for adding $20 to 25 to the price of every barrel of oil, causing hardship to industry and households, and suffering to underdeveloped nations. (The report, "The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices," is still posted on Sen. Levin's website).
Yet Al Gore got away with advocating cap-and-trade CO2 speculation at his much ballyhooed appearance before the joint House Hearing of the Energy and Science Committees March 21. Gore repeatedly told Congressmen to "put a price on carbon." In response to Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), Gore said, "As soon as carbon has a price, you are going to see a wave [of investment] in it ... there will be unchained investment."
But why have neither Republicans nor Democrats challenged Gore on this? And why have they conspicuously refrained from confronting Sir Nicholas Stern—of the 2006 "Stern Review" on global warming, British Environment Minister David Miliband, and the other British "experts" streaming into Washington, D.C. in 2007, to demand U.S. "economic response" to climate change? Political amnesia. Elected officials are tightly locked in the grip of the Synarchist gamemasters—the Felix Rohatyn wing of the Democratic Party, and the George Shultz wing of the GOP—who have been in on creating this and prior swindles all along.
Look, for example, at the who's who involved in the blatant staging of a "pro-green investment" press conference on the eve of the March 21 Gore House and Senate appearance. On March 19, the "Investors Network on Climate Risk" (INCR) held a Washington event to demand Federal action to impose mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases, claiming they represent a $4 trillion pool of funds demanding green ventures. Members of INCR, founded at the UN in 2003, include British Petroleum, Allianz Insurance, the world's largest insurance firm; DuPont, and hosts of state, labor, and church funds of various kinds, that have been herded into line. The INCR is chaired by British activist Norman Dean, who is simultaneously Director of Friends of the Earth.
Al Gore spoke at the May 2005 INCR Investors Summit at the United Nations, in his capacity as Chairman of his Generation Investment Management. He called for following the model of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, which started up in 2005. "Monetize emissions; trade them; reduce them," was Gore's mantra.
Gore again plugged green markets trading in April 2006, at Oxford University, at the annual Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship. This was held at the Skoll Centre, set up by Jeff Skoll, the E-bay billionaire, whose Participant Productions funded Gore's propaganda movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore pushed carbon swaps and other green investments, along with his co-chairman of Generation Investment Management, David Blood, formerly Chief of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
But now in Washington, the pace of lobbying Congress for carbon markets has reached a frenzy. A March 15 forum was titled "From Kyoto to Chicago," because of the theme, that no new, long-lead time successor treaty to the expiring Kyoto Protocol is required for getting world carbon markets going. Carbon trade can commence if just the United States, Europe and Japan start it up, said Jonathan Pershing, emissions trading expert for the World Resources Institute, on whose board sits Al Gore. The same point was stressed by OECD spokesman Brice LaLonde, advisor to the European Carbon Fund (ECF), and head of Friends of the Earth in France said the same. His co-advisor to the ECF, founded in 2006, is William K. Reilly, the EPA director for President George H.W. Bush, and long-time World Wildlife Fund president.
The Investors' Network for Climate Risk's prime social action affiliate, the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES; founded in 1989), released a January 2007 report entitled, "The Power to Save," which outlined a step-by-step process to put an end to all new power plant construction in Texas, the nation's second-most populous state. The concept is simple: cut emissions; then trade in the scarce emissions "allowances"!
In the current buyout bidding for TXU—the major, 62-year-old Texas electric utility, the offer by KKR and Texas Pacific would acquire TXU on condition that eight of 11 planned coal-fired generator projects be cancelled. The advisor on this so-called environmentalist deal is William K. Reilly, an official in the Texas Pacific Group.
Reilly is co-author of a recent report, "Allocating Allowances in a Greenhouse Gas Trading System"—a how-to booklet for trading in carbon—published by the National Commission on Energy Policy. Launched in November 2002, the NCEP's founding 20 members included Andrew Lundquist, the Executive Director of the 2001 Dick Cheney Energy Taskforce; R. James Woolsey, former CIA Director and long-time Al Gore neo-con advisor, William K. Reilly; John Rowe, CEO of Exelon, and other notables. Funding agencies include the MacArthur Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust and others.
In the face of this political onslaught, it is useful that so far, the House Democratic and Republican leaderships have agreed not to rush into "cap-and-trade" emissions legislation. They are saying that a go-slow approach is desirable, but the amount of top-down pressure to act now—from Wall Street and City of London speculators, cannot be underestimated. On March 15, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee said, "I'm glad to see that this week, Speaker Pelosi had indicated that any bill on global warming considered this year doesn't necessarily have to include a mandatory cap-and-trade scheme." But in reality, these emissions schemes, and their backers should be stopped cold.
***
Welcome to your weekly skeptics smorgasbord of inconvenient links and incoherent lefties. We're all going to die of something, and it might as well be while we're having fun with denial; so grab a beverage and belly up to the bar, we're going in...
Part One: Al Gore and Friends
As soon as the US election was over, the Al Gore was back on the trail, promoting his manufactured 'climate crisis' and his favorite topic, himself. Gore, the Great Profit, sees an opportunity to extend his great fortune with a Democrat in the Whitehouse and is already giving the President-elect advice:
“Now is not the time for small steps or a narrow focus. The American people are calling for bold change, and Repower America is the big solution to get our country back on track quickly. Quickly transitioning to clean energy will kick-start our economy, generate millions of new jobs and provide the foundation for long term economic growth.”
Al might not have been able to win his own election, but he's man enough to tell Barack Obama what to do with his win.
Oscar glory, A Nobel Peace prize and still the awards keep coming Al's way. This time the NAACP are honoring Big Al, presumably for being a person of green color.
Not all things are going so well for Al however. His TV enterprise, Current Media, is in trouble just one day after grabbing Canadian taxpayer cash in a partnership deal with the CBC. Current laid off 60 staff and has not launched its long delayed IPO. Al has made no statement yet, but expect one soon that fingers global warming as the cause of this catastrophe.
Goreworld
Earth is now so hot that Al had cut the sleeves off his sweater
Don't forget to get your weekly Gored but not Forgotten fix, and while you're over there at Skeptics Global Warming, check out his rebuttal of Al's NYT column. He takes Al behind the rhetorical woodshed and knocks the green out of him.
This weeks must-read post is all about the carbon trade swindle behind Al Gore. If ever the Goreacle goes to jail, this will be the reason, the cynical and dishonest trade of essentially value-less carbon credits.
Global warming muppet Jim Hansen got caught in an embarrassing lie this week after substituting faulty October data with Septembers numbers, making October 2008 look increbily warm. Corrections have been made, but this debacle goes to Hansen's faded credibility and highlights the central problem with climate models; garbage in, garbage out.
David Suzuki was scheduled to speak in Palm Springs this week, which means that once again I am greener than the totalitarian hippy because I didn't fly to Palm springs. Offset that, hippy!
Part Two: AGW Scaremongers and Propagandists
Old religion meets the new religion, can the inquisition be far behind? Perhaps not.
Finally, a scaremonger event that even I can get behind (NSFW).
The NYT held a drawing contest for moonbats and came up with some first-rate insights into the miniscule minds of lefties.
Moonbat art
a moonbat cannot tell nuclear waste from nuclear generation
Alan Colmes, aka 'Skeletor' of Fox News, introduced skeptic author Chris Horner as a climate criminal. Meanwhile ABC News is sending a reporter to Kilimanjaro for some balanced reporting on how the earth is about to explode into a zillion pieces, or something.
Roy Spencer is censored by two scientific publications, because science is about politics and fundraising, not facts and learned debate, dammit.
Buying offsets is hard, how is a university to know which bogus scheme to sign on with?
Wisconsin kills a new coal power plant, the blue state may be black sooner that they expect.
Copyright means nothing if alarmists can indoctrinate you faster, and there's nothing like indoctrinated kids to warm a believers heart.
More bad news for green politicians as New Zealand throws out die-hard green Prime Minister Helen Clark. She can add her failed career to Canada's Stephane Dion's on the unwanted pile of useless scaremongering politicans. Elizabeth May, leader of the greens in Canada, is resisting the inevitable and blames everyone but herself for not gaining a seat.
Who needs facts when even the head of the IPCC can just make stuff up? More here.
Greenpeace, the comedic gift that just keeps giving:
Windmills r us
Wind Farms. Greenpeace is not clear on the concept, apparently
The UK Times waits about 5 seconds after Michael Crichton's death before celebrating that his voice is gone from the climate debate, so we can all be free to be green without uppity writers challenging our beliefs.
Eco-terrorism, approved by Al Gore.
A skeptic needs a hug... it can be lonely out on the sane fringes.
Data, what data? Scientist refuses to share data with a skeptic, making everyone wonder what he's hiding. Nice play, Shakespeare.
AGW, how we know it's bunk, by those Power Line guys.
Part Three: Inconvenient Truths
What's green and full of hot air? No, not Al Gore, the green bubble. Green projects are failing all over the place, and there's more to come.
Global warming is killing amphibians. No, it's not. Is it just me or does there seem to be a trend towards debunking things that global warming was causing? Perhaps some scientists are looking to grab a modicum of credibility back before the backlash starts.
President-elect Obama has a detailed climate plan. Oh, wait, nevermind.
Did you know that alternative warming theory is valid? The Coloradoan does.
Biofuels were never a good idea, burning food for fuel is immoral in today's world. Now the problems with ethanol are acknowledged.
BP quits green projects in the UK, leaving the government in the lurch. Heh.
That crashing economy you hear? No, the other one, the carbon crash. The real economy is laready killing the green revolution.
Germany needs power, coal to the rescue, activists go under the bus along with EU climate goals.
If a picture is worth a thousand words:
Chilly
(source)
Green opportunist T Boone Pickens delays his wind farms, he's having a bad week.
Part Four: AGW in the News
The U.S. Department of Energy pulls the plug on a global warming project, and the scientists are upset. Clearly this is unfair, the scientists have adhered to all the rules of modern science by linking their research to global warming, yet they still lost funding. I can hear the trembling across campuses all over the world.
It's ski-time in Austria, Switzerland and Italy, already.
Bikiskini
global warming, I love it
The US Navy wins a war with environuts, sonar bombing runs will commence soon.
Australia's ABC News clearly has no agenda when it interviews skeptics.
The UK government passed a global warming bill while snow lay on the ground in early October for the first time in 85 years.
Change we can believe in. Oh, wait. Here's more on what the new guy might do with climate policy.
Will America's new President buy oil from Canada?
What happens if you hold a climate conference and no one shows up?
While I'm tooling around town laughing at prius drivers from my SUV, it seems some of the micro-car drivers are regretting their leap.
Smarter hummer
A Hummer with its pilot fish in a natural setting
Part Five: Real Science
More on that NASA error in the GISS data from September and the attempt by NASA to blame skeptics for their embarrassment.
Is the Sun waking up? Maybe, slowly.
Bjorn Lomborg takes time off from his hit show Mamma Mia and offers good advice to the President-elect.
Ahem. It's the Sun, stupid.
Climate control is a futile quest. Resistance is also futile, but what has that got to with anything?
Climate change knows three realities: science reality, which is what working scientists deal with every day; virtual reality, which is the wholly imaginary world inside computer climate models; and public reality, which is the socio-political system within which politicians, business people and the general citizenry work.
An embarrassingly large hole will open in the ozone layer this year, almost exactly 12 months after scientists celebrated 20 years of banning CFC's. Oops. Don't forget that many of the geniuses that missed the effect of cosmic rays on the ozone layer today claim to know what's 'wrong' with the climate.
No O zone
Hole-y cow, it's a biggie
Hmm, I don't think I mentioned that it's the Sun, stupid. Or did I?
Part Six: Global Hottie
Regular readers will know that I do (sometimes) try to provide a reason for linking to the hottie. These same readers know and understand that these links are tenuous at best. The odd reference in Part 5 about resistance and futility might have seemed odd when you read it, but now you see the wisdom of the blogger at its evil worst. It's a shameless segway to a spottie (space hottie). Deniers, please surrender to Borg beauty and this week's global hottie, Jeri Ryan.
Jeri3
(yes, I do know she's out of uniform)
That's your weekly round-up, rounded-up as it were. Happy weekending to all of you.
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