Finance, Business and Carbon Trading
Image from
Friends of the Earth anti carbon trading
campaign.
It is clear that energy
companies were the originators of carbon trading.
Enron persuaded Vice President Gore to sign the
Kyoto Protocol and insert emissions trading into
article 17. The biggest pressure group at
Copenhagen was The International Emissions
Trading Association whose members include :-BP,
Conoco Philips, Shell, E.ON AG (coal power
stations owner, EDF (one of the largest
participants in the global coal market), Gazprom
(Russian oil and gas) and of course, the banks.
Every corporation on earth supports global
warming, Many of the biggest political promoters
of global warming are connected to the oil and
gas industry. Margaret Thatcher ( her husband was
a director of Burmah Oil), Kenneth Lay (Enron),
Lord Browne (BP), Al Gore (100% owned and
operated by Occidental Oil - his father was a
director) , Rajendra K Pachauri (director of
Indian Oil Corp.even during his time as head of
the IPCC ).
There is no suggeition that
either the oil companies or banks created global
warming in some grand conspiracy. Enron
discovered a way to make money from AGW in 1997,
and the corporate world has been supporting it
ever since. Naturally every government in the
world and their connected science bodies (like
the Royal Society) have followed suit in addition
to every media outlet on earth spreading
propaganda on a huge scale. The argument promoted
below is simply that big oil, the banks and the
mainstream corporatee media will promote AGW
irrespective of the science because it is in
their interests. It isn't a conspiracy, just
business.
Carbon Trading /
Cap and Trade
Kyoto
Carbon trading
began in response to the Kyoto Protocol, signed
by 180 countries in 1997. The Kyoto Protocol,
signed by 180 countries in 1997, called for 37
industrialized countries to reduce their
greenhouse gas emissions between the years 2008
to 2012 to levels that are 5% lower than those of
1990.[1]
Article 17 of the Kyoto Protocol established
emissions trading by allowing countries that have
emission units to spare (emissions permitted to
them but unused) to sell this excess capacity to
countries that are over their emissions limits.
In effect, this created a new commodity in the
form of emissions and created a carbon market.
Since CO2 is the principal greenhouse gas,
emissions trading effectively became carbon
trading.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Carbon_trading#History
As many people in Kyoto
suspected at the time, the reality has been very
different. At the demand of the United States,
the Kyoto rules were tweaked to allow rich
countries to buy their way out of their targets,
a move that gave birth to the multi-billion
carbon trading industry
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/10/copenhagen-climate-change-summit-2c
Enron
Also Courted Democrats Washington Post - Kyoto
According
to internal Enron documents and the recollections
of former employees, Chairman Kenneth L. Lay had
the ear of top Democrats in the 1980s and '90s.
He and his colleagues used that access to promote
the company's interests with the Clinton
administration and key congressional Democrats.
In a White
House meeting in August 1997, for example, Lay
urged President Clinton and Vice President Gore
to back a "market-based" approach to
the problem of global warming -- a strategy that
a later Enron memo makes clear would be
"good for Enron stock."
On Aug. 4, 1997, Lay and seven
other energy executives met with Clinton, Gore,
Rubin and other top officials at the White House
to discuss the U.S. position at the upcoming
conference on global warming in Kyoto, Japan.
Lay, in a memo to Enron employees, said there was
broad consensus in favor of an emissions-trading
system.
Enron officials later expressed
elation at the results of the Kyoto conference.
An internal memo said the Kyoto agreement, if
implemented, would "do more to promote
Enron's business than almost any other regulatory
initiative outside of restructuring the energy
and natural gas industries in Europe and the
United States."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A37287-2002Jan12¬Found=true
Washington Post - Kyoto 2
But some business groups --
especially those representing alternative energy
technologies -- praised the president's plan.
"This is a measured, appropriate action
plan, given what we know about global
warming," said Terry Thorn, senior vice
president of Enron Corp. of Houston.
More than a dozen senior
executives representing such companies as Nike
Inc., Bechtel Group Inc. and Mitsubishi Motor
Corp. have endorsed a newspaper ad running this
week that calls for "strong leadership"
by the United States on climate change.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/climate/stories/clim102397.htm
Enron's other secret
Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, keen to engineer an
encore, saw his opportunity when Bill Clinton and
Al Gore were inaugurated as president and
vice-president in 1993. To capitalize on Al
Gore’s interest in global warming, Enron
immediately embarked on a massive lobbying effort
to develop a trading system for carbon dioxide,
working both the Clinton administration and
Congress. Political contributions and
Enron-funded analyses flowed freely, all geared
to demonstrating a looming global catastrophe if
carbon dioxide emissions weren’t curbed. An
Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that
calamity could come of global warming, meanwhile,
was quietly buried.
To magnify the leverage of their political
lobbying, Enron also worked the environmental
groups. Between 1994 and 1996, the Enron
Foundation donated $1-million to the Nature
Conservancy and its Climate Change Project, a
leading force for global warming reform, while
Lay and other individuals associated with Enron
donated $1.5-million to environmental groups
seeking international controls on carbon dioxide.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/05/30/lawrence-solomon-enron-s-other-secret.aspx#ixzz0pYGrNDnd
A global power company
that inherited some of Enron’s coal-fired
power plants in Africa has also followed the late
energy giant in the effort to profit from climate
change legislation.
Virginia-based AES Corp. has
partnered with General Electric Co. in peddling
greenhouse gas offsets while lobbying for
policies to make those offsets valuable —
the same buy-low, lobby-hard, sell-high strategy
tried by Enron. AES simultaneous expansion of
coal-fired power in Asia, South America and
Africa, however, highlights how environmental
regulations can yield profit without necessarily
yielding environmental gains.
Before it collapsed in late
2001, Enron was the leading corporate lobbyist
for restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.
Former Chief Executive Officer Ken Lay called on
both the Clinton and Bush White Houses to ratify
the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, which one
intracompany e-mail declared would be “good
for Enron stock.” The company hoped to be
the premier dealer in emissions credits that
would be required after climate change
legislation. Further, Enron’s natural gas
pipelines would see increased demand as coal and
oil would be made more costly.
At the same time, Enron owned
coal-fired power plants in the developing world
and was building more. Third World power plants
are not covered by Kyoto, and pinching the
developed world’s use of coal would make it
cheaper to operate the coal plants in Nigeria.
When Enron died, its assets
were scattered. Two heirs — taking up both
Enron’s power generation and its climate
change entrepreneurship — were General
Electric and AES. GE got the windmills, and AES
got floating coal-fired power plants off
Nigeria’s shores.
AES is currently building a new
coal-fired power plant in India with an
accompanying coal mine. AES has also just opened
a diesel-fired plant in southern Chile, adding to
its four Chilean coal-fired plants. Last
December, Vietnam’s government announced a
joint venture with AES for a coal-fired power
project there.
But at home, AES’s joint
ventures have a greener hue. AES and GE have
formed a company called Greenhouse Gas Services.
GHGS invests in technologies aimed at reducing
the gases blamed for global warming. Some of
these products save money through energy
efficiency, but many of them have value only if
Congress passes legislation restricting emissions
— such as the Waxman-Markey bill currently
before the House.
GHGS this month registered as a
lobbying organization, working on “climate
legislation” and operating from AES
Arlington offices. AES, meanwhile, recently hired
a new lobbying firm, Lighthouse Consulting.
Lighthouse and its lead lobbyist, Merribel Ayres,
are the organizational firepower behind the U.S.
Climate Action Partnership, the business
coalition led by GE that has spearheaded the push
for cap-and-trade climate legislation
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/AES-and-GE-imitate-Enron-on-coal-and-climate-46120417.html#ixzz0qwAoHgh1
Enron’s climate change policy as
downloaded in October 2002.
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2006/05/enronclimatechange.pdf
How about funding green infrastructure? Texas, of
all places, has the strictest renewable-energy
mandate in the USA - and consequently lots of
windmills. And who can we thank? Enron. It
lobbied Governor George W Bush hard for the
measure in 1999, partly because it coveted the
chance to trade carbon credits and partly because
it needed to help out its loss-making windmill
arm, Enron Wind. Enron was showered with plaudits
from green groups for its support for alarm about
climate change.
http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2009/12/start/matt-ridley-climate-alarm?page=all
BP calls for
ratification of Kyoto Protocol
The multinational BP has challenged the
Australian Government to ratify the Kyoto
Protocol on climate change. BP's South Australia
and Australasia president, Greg Bourne, has said
that Australia's economy will suffer if the
nation doesn't commit to ratifying the protocol
which regulates greenhouse gas emissions.
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/stories/s410744.htm
BP and the
Climategate Inquiry
David Eyton, BP Group Vice President, Research
& Technology, is a member of the Muir Russell
panel. Only one submission (mine) criticized his
presence on the Muir Russell panel. There was
total radio silence from climate scientists. Why
was this perpetually outraged community so
silent? More on this later.
http://climateaudit.org/2010/05/21/bp-and-the-climategate-inquiry/
Shell Canada
The debate about climate change is over and we
need to take action," says Ertel, Shell
Canada's climate change expert.
here
International Emissions Trading
Association (IETA)
The biggest lobbying group at
Copenhagen was the International Emissions
Trading Association which was created to promote
carbon trading more than ten years ago.
Its members include :-
BP, Conoco Philips, Shell, E.ON
(coal power stations owner), EDF (one of the
largest participants in the global coal market),
Gazprom (Russian oil and gas), Goldman Sachs,
Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley..
http://www.ieta.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=19%3Adefault&id=168%3Aour-members&Itemid=82
Their aim
the objectives of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
and ultimately climate protection;
the establishment of effective
market-based trading systems for greenhouse gas
emissions by businesses that are demonstrably
fair, open, efficient, accountable and consistent
across national boundaries; and maintaining
societal equity and environmental integrity while
establishing these systems.
http://www.ieta.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=19%3Adefault&id=165%3Avision&Itemid=114
why ?
Carbon trading could be worth twice that
of oil in next decade
The
carbon market could become double the size of the
vast oil market, according to the new breed of
City players who trade greenhouse gas emissions
through the EU's emissions trading scheme.
The ETS market may see $3tn
(£1.8tn) worth of transactions a year in the
next decade or two, according to Andrew Ager,
head of emissions trading at Bache Commodities in
London, with it even being used as a hedge
against falling equities or rising inflation.
"It is still a relatively new industry with
annual trades of around €300bn every year.
But this could grow to around $3tn compared to
the $1.5tn market there is for oil," says
Ager, who used to be a foreign currencies trader.
The speed of that growth will
depend on whether the Copenhagen summit gives a
go-ahead for a low-carbon economy, but Ager says
whatever happens schemes such as the ETS will
expand around the globe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/29/carbon-trading-market-copenhagen-summit
Paven Sukhdev, a career banker
for Deutsche Bank who now works on the issue for
the UN and EU, argues that at least 65% of
reductions must be made within developed
countries. That means firms such as AEP may still
be limited in how much they can invest in
projects abroad. Firms in developing countries
may not have to buy credits at all. That has led
to worries in the City that there won't be enough
money to buy all the forest carbon. London's
financial centre is the main home to the
incipient global carbon market. Prof Heal
believes that in a decade, the trade could be
worth trillions of dollars.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8359397.stm
HSBC report:
"We believe
that any market impacts over climate science may
be nearing its floor, with the results of the
three independent reviews confirming the
integrity of the climate science," the
report said.
For the rest of this year, HSBC identified four
factors that should catalyze a revival in public
concern and market confidence.
A review on the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) will be finalized at the
end of August and governments will meet in
October to take any remedial measures.
"We believe that practical steps to
strengthen the IPCC's procedures would represent
a positive outcome from this saga. The IPCC also
has the opportunity to regain momentum with its
special report on renewables later in the
year," Robins said.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/04/climate-science-and-financial-markets.html#comment-form
Europe Can Lift UN Carbon
Market From Cancun Gridlock, Gazprom Says
Europe needs to reinvigorate
the world’s second-biggest emissions market
as global climate talks to reduce greenhouse
gases stall, the head of a carbon-trading unit of
Russia’s OAO Gazprom said.
United Nations carbon offsets
for delivery in a year fell 4 percent last week
amid signals that differences between 190
developing and industrial nations may preclude a
binding treaty at the climate meeting that
started Nov. 29 in Cancun, Mexico.
The $2.7 billion UN Clean
Development Mechanism is an offspring of the 1997
Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012 unless
governments decide to extend it. Carbon offsets
generated by the CDM may be used for compliance
in the European Union’s emissions-trading
system, the world’s largest cap-and-trade
program, also known as the EU ETS.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-06/europe-can-lift-un-carbon-market-from-cancun-gridlock-gazprom-says.html
Airlines 'made billions in windfall profits' from
EU carbon tax
Report states carriers earned up to €1.36bn
last year, despite claims that charge would
impose crippling costs on industry
Airlines made windfall profits
of up to £1.2bn ($1.81bn) last year from a
EU carbon tax they claimed would impose
crippling costs on industry, according to a
report into the measure's impact on the industry.
The EU backed off on plans to
charge airlines for their carbon pollution after
ferocious opposition from American, Chinese,
Russian and other airlines, which argued the
charge would cost the industry billions. Congress
passed a law last November shielding US carriers
from paying the tax. The lobby
group, Airlines for America, claimed at the
time that the EU law would cost more than $3bn by
the end of the decade.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jan/24/airline-windfall-profits-carbon-tax
James Hansen, director of the
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a
vocal advocate for action on global warming, told
an audience at a conference hosted by Columbia
University climate policy students that cap and
trade is a scheme devised by Wall Street that
will do nothing to alleviate the global warming
problem.
“Trading of rights to
pollute … introduces speculation and makes
millionaires on Wall Street,” Hansen said in
his keynote lecture at Columbia University’s
350 Climate Conference held here Saturday.
“I hope cap and trade doesn’t pass,
because we need a much more effective
approach.”
http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2009/05/04/hansen-hopes-lawmakers-cap-and-trade-approach-to-climate-will-fail/
Gordon Brown interview in which
he reveals, to the obvious extreme scepticism and
incredulity of the BBC interviewer that the so
called help for poor countries will come from
carbon trading , carefully hiding the
mechanism.that will bring that about.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pbq6r
The
European Commission disclosed that since the
Kyoto treaty targets for cutting emissions were
set in 1997, the EU has achieved a 2 per cent
reduction. This means that at its average rate of
reduction it would be impossible to achieve its
Kyoto obligations to reduce emissions by 8 per
cent by 2012
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/europe-falling-behind-in-kyoto-carbon-targets/2007/06/15/1181414548676.html
carbon markets
One lesson the current financial crisis teaches
us is: beware of the new carbon markets that
constitute today's main official response to
climate change. These markets are startlingly
similar to the financial derivatives markets that
have thrown banking systems into chaos and the
world economy into a tailspin.
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/subject/climate/
Copenhagen climate summit:
Carbon trading fraudsters in Europe pocket
€5bn
Carbon trading fraudsters may
have accounted for up to 90pc of all market
activity in some European countries, with
criminals pocketing an estimated €5bn
(£4.5bn) mainly in Britain, France, Spain,
Denmark and Holland, according to Europol, the
European law enforcement agency.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6778003/Copenhagen-climate-summit-Carbon-trading-fraudsters-in-Europe-pocket-5bn.html
Carbon
Credits
Carbon credits
bring Lakshmi Mittal £1bn bonanza
LAKSHMI MITTAL,
Britain’s richest man, stands to benefit
from a £1 billion windfall from a European
scheme to curb global warming. His company
ArcelorMittal, the steel business where he is
chairman and chief executive, will make the gain
on “carbon credits” given to it under
the European emissions trading scheme (ETS).
The scheme grants companies
permits to emit CO2 up to a specified
“cap”. Beyond this they must buy extra
permits. An investigation has revealed that
ArcelorMittal has been given far more carbon
permits than it needs. It has the largest
allocation of any organisation in Europe
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/industrials/article6945991.ece
Industries hoarding
greenhouse gas emission permits
Companies across Europe are hoarding permits to
produce greenhouse gas emissions worth hundreds
of millions of pounds, the Guardian can reveal.
The
surplus credits have been amassed from
over-allocation of permits to pollute from the
European emissions trading scheme, and by buying cheap credits
from carbon-cutting projects in developing
countries and holding on to their more expensive
official EU allowances.
The
saved permits can be used to meet future targets
to cut the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for
global warming and climate change
without actually reducing pollution, or
sold for a profit in the future.
Campaigners for tougher
emissions reductions said the saved-up allowances
discredited the argument of some industries that
much deeper cuts in future would be
"fatal" because they could no longer
afford to compete against rivals outside the EU.
However, companies involved
said the banked credits would help them pay to
develop new emission-cutting technology, and to
meet emissions targets until that became widely
available.
Industry also warned it faced
"death by a thousand cuts" as a result
of the next phase of the scheme, from 2013 and
2020, and other costly environmental legislation
planned by government. Business leaders accused
the government of being prepared to sacrifice
industry to enable other sectors such as aviation
to keep polluting and meet the UK's carbon
budgets.
One steelmaker told the
Guardian: "Officials see us as acceptable
collateral in the fight against climate change.
If we don't make anything in this country any
more, it means people could still fly to Tenerife
once a year and the UK will keep within the
carbon budget."
He said meeting targets would
require vast amounts of steel to build windfarms,
nuclear reactors and electric cars. This would
have to be imported from more-polluting
steelmakers outside Europe if the industry
disappeared in the UK.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/11/industries-greenhouse-gas-emission-permits
In a story today in ClimateWire,
the story of the Eskom coal plant went from an
illustration of the political realities of energy
access to an illustration of the farcical nature
of international climate policy:
A South African utility
company that recently won a $3.75 billion
World Bank loan to build the world's
fourth-largest coal-fired power plant now is
seeking international carbon credits for
making the plant more efficient.
If successful in qualifying for
carbon credits -- and there is little reason to
expect otherwise -- then Eskom is going to be
paid for reducing emissions by building the
world's fourth largest coal plant. This is of
course a sort of magical solution that I have written about before. Of
course a new coal plant, even if built with the
best available technology is going to
dramatically increase emissions, regardless of
the accounting tricks of offsets and emissions
trading. This alone is farcical, but it gets even
better.
The Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental
lobbying group, appears to understand the basic
problem:
If Eskom ultimately wins
CDM approval -- and potentially millions of
dollars -- for avoiding greenhouse gas
emissions by using more efficient technology,
it won't be the first company to do so. But
the move is provoking fury from
environmentalists who have fought the plant.
They insist Eskom should not be allowed to
receive both World Bank aid and carbon
credits to build a plant that will emit 25
million tons of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere annually.
"If there were a World
Cup for chutzpah, Eskom would be the bettors'
choice to win," said Jennifer Haverkamp,
managing director for international climate
policy at the Environmental Defense Fund.
"First they go after scarce
international public funds, now CDM credits.
The Medupi Plant is becoming a poster child
for how far we are from the road to a
sustainable, climate-stable path for
development."
But it is not just Eskom that
is high up on the leagues tables for chutzpah;
EDF is right up there as well. EDF is one of the main advocacy groups calling for passage of the American Power Act, the so-called Kerry-Lieberman bill in
the Senate, which along with Waxman-Markey which
passed the House, would create the ability for US
companies to get emissions offset credits for
doing things exactly like investing in the Eskom
plant.
So EDF vigorously supports the use of
international offsets as a mechanism of
"emissions reductions," but at the same
time doesn't want those mechanisms applied
exactly as they are designed. The World Cup for
chutzpah has some fierce competition.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/06/edf-to-win-world-cup-for-chutzpah.html#comment-form
Falling carbon price could result in
higher bills, energy firms warn
Electricity
bills could go up as a result of the weekend's
feeble agreement on climate change at Copenhagen,
energy
suppliers have warned.
The price of carbon – paid
by heavy polluters such as power plant operators
– plummeted yesterday by almost 10% on
Europe's emissions trading market. This was in
response to the EU scrapping a planned commitment
to cut emissions by 30% by 2020 because other
countries failed to show similar ambition.
E.ON
and Centrica
warned that they would not invest the tens of
billions of pounds to build expensive new nuclear
reactors and clean coal plants at today's carbon
price, which is supposed to penalise dirty coal
and gas plants.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/21/falling-carbon-price-higher-energy-bills
****************
Europe's climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard is
to set out the case for a unilateral 30% EU cut
in CO2.
At the end of May she will unveil research
examining the consequences to Europe's economy of
outdoing the current 20% target.
............
The commissioner admitted that she was worrying
that public scepticism about climate change is on
the rise in some countries - particularly, she
said, the UK. "The day we have 100pc
certainty it's too late to act," she said.
Commenting on the suggestion from the Hartwell
Group that the Kyoto Protocol would not
deliver and the carbon markets would not work,
she told BBC News: "Given the huge
disappointments of this year it is understandable
that some people would say we should find a
different approach.
"But I would remind people that we now have
all the world's major nations agreeing that they
bear a share of the responsibility for protecting
the climate and keeping temperature rise below 2C
- that would have been inconceivable if you had
suggested it a few years ago.
"It is too soon to kill off Kyoto. And the carbon
markets can provide us with more finance for
clean development if we can drive up the
carbon price somehow. "It's not an
accident that China is now developing trial
carbon markets with major firms."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_environment/10109088.stm
EU Emissions Trading
Triggered 'Dash for Coal'
Vindicating an
oft-repeated warning by the Breakthrough
Institute, a landmark study has just found that
the EU Emissions Trading Scheme actually led to a
'dash for coal' in Germany.
A landmark study by Michael
Pahle, recently published in Energy Policy, has found that, "despite
political activities to foster a low-carbon
energy transition," the European Emissions
Trading Scheme (ETS) actually triggered a major
'dash for coal' in nations like Germany, which
set out on the construction of dozens of new coal
plants.
According to Pahle, a
researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research, this recent
rush to build new coal plants is the result of
perverse incentives generated by the EU's
Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). In the words of
the New Scientist, "the mistake in 2005 [when the
ETS was introduced] was to allocate permits
according to demand from existing technology,
which meant coal-fired generators got the lion's
share."
If the EU had actually
auctioned the allowances or allocated them with a
preference for cleaner technologies, the Scheme
would have led to the construction of gas-fired
power plants instead. Such allocation was simply
impossible at the outset of the ETS, however, as
the Scheme's introduction unleashed a 'lobbying
free-for-all' from high-carbon industries that
proved impossible for policymakers to resist.
The outcome of this 'mistake'
is shocking. The perverse incentive provided by
the ETS led to the construction of scores of
coal-fired power plants with a combined capacity
of 12 gigawatts -- roughly a third of Germany's
peak demand -- resulting in 54 megatonnes of CO2
emissions per year. According to Pahle, this is
"roughly double what would have been emitted
if gas-fired stations had been built
instead."
http://breakthrougheurope.org/blog/2011/03/eu_emissions_trading_dash_for_coal.shtml
**************
Shell Sponsorship
Mick Kelly
(climategate) Shell
Quote:
SHELL INTERNATIONAL Mick Kelly and Aeree Kim
(CRU, ENV) met with Robert Kleiburg (Shell
International’s climate change team) on July
4th primarily to discuss access to Shell
information as part of Aeree’s PhD study
(our initiative) and broader collaboration
through postgrad. student project placements
(their initiative), but Robert was also
interested in plans for the Tyndall Centre (TC).
What ensued was necessarily a rather speculative
discussion with the following points emerging.
1. Shell International would
give serious consideration to what I referred to
in the meeting as a ‘strategic
partnership’ with the TC, broadly equivalent
to a ‘flagship alliance’ in the TC
proposal. A strategic partnership would involve
not only the provision of funding but some
(limited but genuine) role in setting the
research agenda etc.
2. Shell’s interest is not
in basic science. Any work they support must have
a clear and immediate relevance to
‘real-world’ activities. They are
particularly interested in emissions trading and
CDM.
uea-tyndall-shell-memo.doc
http://magicjava.blogspot.com/2009/11/setting-research-agenda.html
CRU Sponsorship
This list is not fully
exhaustive, but we would like to acknowledge the
support of the following funders (in alphabetical
order): British Council, British
Petroleum, Broom's Barn Sugar Beet
Research Centre, Central Electricity Generating
Board, Centre for Environment, Fisheries and
Aquaculture Science (CEFAS), Commercial Union,
Commission of European Communities (CEC, often
referred to now as EU), Council for the Central
Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC),
Department of Energy, Department of the
Environment (DETR, now DEFRA), Department of
Health, Department of Trade and Industry (DTI),
Eastern Electricity, Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Environment
Agency, Forestry Commission, Greenpeace
International, International Institute of
Environmental Development (IIED), Irish
Electricity Supply Board, KFA Germany, Leverhulme
Trust, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and
Food (MAFF), National Power, National Rivers
Authority, Natural Environmental Research Council
(NERC), Norwich Union, Nuclear Installations
Inspectorate, Overseas Development Administration
(ODA), Reinsurance Underwriters and Syndicates,
Royal Society, Scientific Consultants, Science
and Engineering Research Council (SERC), Scottish
and Northern Ireland Forum for Environmental
Research, Shell, Stockholm
Environment Agency, Sultanate of Oman, Tate and
Lyle, UK Met. Office, UK Nirex Ltd., United
Nations Environment Plan (UNEP), United States
Department of Energy, United States Environmental
Protection Agency, Wolfson Foundation and the
World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF).
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
Mick Kelly, from the Climate
Research Unit of the University of East Anglia is
quoted as saying; “Acceptance of the carbon
trading provisions of the Kyoto Protocol
represents an article of faith, faith in the free
market and faith in the process of globalisation.
It rests on an ideological stance
http://www.spinprofiles.org/index.php/Carbon_Trading#cite_note-1
Climategate: George Monbiot,
the Guardian and Big Oil
But who is it that sponsors the
Guardian?s Environment pages and eco conferences?
Why, only that famous non-fossil-fuel company
Shell. (Though I notice their logo no longer
appears on top of the Guardian?s eco pages: has
the Guardian decided the relationship was just
too embarrassing to be, er, sustainable?)
And which company has one of
the largest carbon trading desks in London,
cashing in on industry currently worth around
$120 billion ? an industry which could not
possibly exist without pan-global governmental
CO2 emissions laws ? BP (which stands for British
Petroleum)
And how much has Indian steel
king Lakshmi Mittal made from carbon credits
thanks to Europe?s Emissions Trading Scheme? £1
billion.
And which companies were the
CRU scientists revealed cosying up to as early as
2000 in the Climategate emails? There?s a clue in
this line here: ?Had a very good meeting with
Shell yesterday.?
And how much was Phil Jones,
director of the discredited CRU, found to have
collected in grants since 1990? £13.7 million
($22.7 million)
And why does this Executive
Vice-Chairman of Rothschild?s bank sound so
enthusiastic in this (frankly terrifying) letter
about the prospects of the ?new world order? (his
phrase not mine) which result from globally
regulated carbon trading?
Or why not try this blog, in
which a German Green party MP is revealed being
given hefty donations by a solar power company?
Or how about this tiny $7o
million donation to the climate change industry
from the Rockefeller Foundation?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100019523/climategate-george-monbiot-is-in-the-pay-of-big-oil/
Climategate: peak oil, the CRU and the
Oman connection
Now, the environmental movement
is comprised mostly of followers, you can look up
‘dihydrogen monoxide’ (water), on many
occasions at environmental conferences comedians
and light news organizations have managed to get
lots of environmentalists to sign a petition to
ban dihydrogen monoxide. So apparently they do
not do a lot of independent analysis before
making a conclusion, they are mostly followers.
So if you need a large number
of followers, there is a ready supply, but you
need people, a few leaders, to tell the followers
what to think. The followers do not need to, or
perhaps even want to, know the reason or the
facts; they just need something or someone to
follow.
Now you gain control of a
climate research business, and begin the task of
demonizing CO2, you realize that it will take
years but that is OK, there are billions of
dollars waiting at the end. Slowly over time you
manage to get control of the worlds climate data
and begin adjusting it, you use what you have
been told by the marketing people to present the
information needed in as clear and scary manager
as is possible. Remember the two biggest
motivators are fear and greed, and in this case,
because of the number of followers greed will not
work. There are simply too many followers to pay
them all off.
So there we have it, a campaign
of fear, based on non-science emanating from a
few leaders that ultimately drive the followers
to do something that would just not have been
possible after Three Mile Island.
They are marching in the
streets of Copenhagen in support of nuclear
power. They do not know this of course, but that
is what the plan on the table says. Check it out,
look at exactly what are the big technologies
being pushed at the summit. I will give you a
hint, it is not windmills.
They are also marching in
Copenhagen against big business, while supporting
one of the biggest businesses possible, the World
Bank. Is it not strange that the Dutch Text looks
to have the World Bank control the trillions
being put on the table? So they are marching
against exactly what they are supporting, they
are simply followers.
Perhaps you can fill in the
blanks between the possible objectives I
mentioned earlier and where we find ourselves
today. Fill in the blanks, connect the dots and
follow the money. Look at the funders, how many
are involved in delivery, support, financing and
maintenance of the movement of liquid energy and
the generation of nuclear power.
I do not think this was ever
about the environment.
There are lots of other things
that may tie into this, like GE buying and now
selling a
TV network, they needed then but do not need it
now, a bit of a stretch perhaps but GE is a big
player in gas and nuclear power generation. Look
around, there are others.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020304/climategate-peak-oil-the-cru-and-the-oman-connection/
Rothschild
Australia and E3 International to take the lead
in the global carbon trading market
PR Newswire
Friday, March 20, 2009
Sydney, Australia –
Rothschild Australia and E3 International are set
to become key players in the international carbon
credit trading market, an emerging commodity
market that analysts estimate could be worth up
to US$150 billion by 2012.
In a move that will re-shape
the fledgling emissions trading market,
Rothschild Australia and E3 International today
announced their intention to launch the Carbon
Ring Consortium — an investment vehicle that
will provide companies in the Asia Pacific Region
with an innovative way of learning about and
understanding their risks in the new carbon
market.
The Carbon Ring Consortium is
the first of its kind in the Asia-Pacific Region,
and is the first in a series of private
investment vehicles that Carbon Ring Pty Ltd will
launch in coming years
http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=90090
Carbon Capitalists
Warming to Climate Market Using Derivatives
As a young London banker in the
early 1990s, Blythe Masters
of JPMorgan Chase
was part of JPMorgan’s team developing ideas
for transferring risk to third parties. She went
on to manage credit risk for JPMorgan’s
investment bank.
Among the credit derivatives
that grew from the bank’s early efforts was
the credit-default swap. A CDS is a contract that
functions like insurance by protecting debt
holders against default. In 2008, after U.S. home
prices plunged, the cost of protection against
subprime-mortgage bond defaults jumped. Insurer American International Group Inc., which had sold billions in CDSs, was
forced into government ownership, roiling markets
and helping trigger the worst global recession
since the 1930s.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aXRBOxU5KT5M
The $82 billion prediction
In October 2005, in the wake of
the Hurricane Katrina disaster, RMS held a
meeting in Bermuda with four hurricane
specialists, all of the alarmist persuasion, to
quiz them as to how they thought hurricane
activity was likely to be affected between 2006
and 2010, thanks to climate change, and how this
would impact on the southern United States,
notably Florida. On the basis of this meeting,
RMS advised the re-insurers that the risk of
hurricane damage over the next four years was
hugely increased. The companies found that their
reserves were $82 billion short of what they
might be expected to pay. Premiums, particularly
in Florida, accordingly rocketed upwards.
Under the heading “The $82
billion prediction”, the details of this
episode are chronicled on his blog by Dr Roger
Pielke Jr, who in 2008 advised RMS that the
methodology on which it relied was so biased that
“a group of monkeys would have arrived at
the exact same results”. Dr Pielke, an
expert in environmental impacts, recently
published a chart showing how, although the RMS
prediction for hurricane damage between 2006 and
2010 was a third higher than the historical
average, the actual cost proved to be well under
half the average figure. But, thanks to RMS, the
insurance industry had made billions from higher
premiums.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8349545/Unscientific-hype-about-the-flooding-risks-from-climate-change-will-cost-us-all-dear.html
******************
Criticism of Carbon
Trading
So BP has a representative at
the top of the Earth Institute. The European
Commission funds offices for Friends of the Earth
and the WWF. The UK government supports
climate-change research. Have the poachers turned
gamekeepers? Yes - although it might be more
precise to say that the bootleggers have become
Baptists. Everywhere, the bootleggers can be seen
walking around in black, spouting biblical
prophecies of doom - and growing ever richer in
the process (see box, page 37).
Bruce Yandle, an economist at
Clemson University in the US, coined the phrase
"bootlegger and Baptist coalitions" in
an article in Regulation magazine in
1983 that discussed cases where the economic
interests of businesses and the moral concerns of
campaigners coincide. The idea is that both the
Baptists and the bootleggers want the sale of
alcohol banned - but for different reasons:
Baptists because they consider alcohol to be
morally wrong; bootleggers because they want to
preserve their illicit enterprise.
Naturally, the Baptists would
vehemently deny that they are assisting the
bootleggers, just as Greenpeace and its partners
in the Climate Action Network would bristle at
the suggestion that they are assisting
multinationals, the nuclear industry, big oil or
even states' expansionist instincts. Yet often
this is the effect of their campaigns.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=412726&c=2
Offices raided and 21 held as
EU probe into carbon trading fraud intensifies
Denmark criticised for slow reaction
after apparently being targeted in alleged
'carousel' scam
British tax authorities have
arrested 21 people after raiding homes and
offices across Europe as part of a crackdown on
alleged carbon-trading fraud, HM Revenue &
Customs confirmed today .
Some 450 staff took part in
raids on Wednesday as tax authorities across the
continent intensified an ongoing investigation
into alleged carbon-trading fraud, which is
estimated to have cost €5bn in unpaid taxes.
Deutsche Bank
and energy company RWE were among 230 offices and
homes raided this week by German authorities.
Four arrests followed, including one in the UK
under a European arrest warrant.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/01/europe-carbon-trading-alleged-fraud
WWF hopes to find $60 billion
growing on trees
The carbon credits scheme
would make WWF and its partners much richer, but
with no lowering of overall CO2 emissions, writes
Christopher Booker .
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7488629/WWF-hopes-to-find-60-billion-growing-on-trees.html
The
integrity of the EU's emissions trading scheme could be badly undermined unless
governments resist the temptation to sell on
"recycled" certified emission reduction
(CERs) credits that have already been surrendered
by businesses.
That
is the stark warning from the International
Emissions Trading Association (IETA), after the Hungarian government
last week agreed to sell on two million
"recycled" CERs to an undisclosed
intermediary.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/17/carbon-traders-recycled-credits
Michelle Chan,
a senior policy analyst in San Francisco for Friends of the Earth, isn’t convinced.
“Should we really create a
new $2 trillion market when we haven’t yet
finished the job of revamping and testing new
financial regulation?” she asks. Chan says
that, given their recent history, the banks’
ability to turn climate change into a new
commodities market should be curbed.
“What we have just been
woken up to in the credit crisis -- to a jarring
and shocking degree -- is what happens in the
real world,” she says.
Even George Soros,
the billionaire hedge fund operator, says money
managers would find ways to manipulate
cap-and-trade markets. “The system can be
gamed,” Soros, 79, remarked at a London School of Economics seminar in July. “That’s why
financial types like me like it -- because there
are financial opportunities.”
Masters says U.S. carbon
markets should be transparent and regulated by
the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Standardized derivatives contracts -- securities
that can be bought and sold by anyone -- should
be traded on exchanges or centrally cleared, she
says. The British-born Masters, who has an
economics degree from Cambridge University, took over JPMorgan’s commodities
business in 2007
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aXRBOxU5KT5M
JAMES HANSEN: Cap and trade, they attempt
to put a cap on different sources of carbon
dioxide emissions. They say there’s a limit
on how much a given industry in a country can
emit. But the problem is that the emissions just
go someplace else. That’s what happened
after Kyoto, and that’s what would happen
again, if—as long as fossil fuels are the
cheapest energy, they will be burned someplace.
You know, the Europeans thought they actually
reduced their emissions after Kyoto, but what
happened was the products that had been made in
their countries began to be made in other
countries, which were burning the cheapest form
of fossil fuel, so the total emissions actually
increased.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/22/leading_climate_scientist_james_hansen_on
James Hansen
A carbon fee is the only realistic path to global
action. China and India will not accept caps, but
they need a carbon fee to spur clean energy and
avoid fossil fuel addiction.
Governments today, instead,
talk of "cap-and-trade with offsets", a
system rigged by big banks and fossil
fuel interests. Cap-and-trade invites
corruption. Worse, it is ineffectual, assuring
continued fossil fuel addiction to the last drop
and environmental catastrophe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/aug/26/james-hansen-climate-change?showallcomments=true#end-of-comments
Hurray! We’re Going Backwards!
Before Kyoto, the other
negotiators flatly rejected Gore’s proposals
for emissions trading. So his team threatened to
sink the talks. The other nations capitulated,
but the US still held out on technicalities until
the very last moment, when it suddenly appeared
to concede. In 1997 and in 2007 it got the best
of both worlds: it wrecked the treaty and was
praised for saving it.
Hilary Benn is an idiot. Our
diplomats are suckers. United States negotiators
have pulled the same trick twice and for the
second time our governments have fallen for it.
There are still two years to
go, but so far the new agreement is even worse
than the Kyoto Protocol. It contains no targets
and no dates. A new set of guidelines also agreed
at Bali extend and strengthen the worst of Al
Gore’s trading scams, the clean development
mechanism(6). Benn and the other dupes are
cheering and waving their hats as the train
leaves the station at last, having failed to
notice that it is travelling in the wrong
direction.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/12/17/hurray-were-going-backwards/
Cold in the dark prospects
(Washington Times)
Federal energy policies spell
shortages, rising prices
The government, through the
Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation, aims to
save us from global warming by imposing arbitrary
limits on domestic carbon emissions. This regime
would enable its proponents' Wall Street allies
to trade and swap the allowances and offsets --
the new currency under this system -- among
themselves. Think Bernard Madoff.
In doing so, the federal
government would seize control of our energy use,
rationing it to ensure it is both more expensive
and less plentiful. The certain loss of
manufacturing jobs to China and India that would
result from this scheme
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/10/cold-in-the-dark-prospects/
The great American
bubble machine
By Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone
Magazine
The new carbon-credit market is
a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino
that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one
delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward
as expected, the rise in prices will be
government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to
rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.
Here's how it works: If the bill passes; there
will be limits for coal plants, utilities,
natural-gas distributors and numerous other
industries on the amount of carbon emissions
(a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per
year. If the companies go over their allotment,
they will be able to buy "allocations"
or credits from other companies that have managed
to produce fewer emissions. President Obama
conservatively estimates that about $646 billions
worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the
first seven years; one of his top economic aides
speculates that the real number might be twice or
even three times that amount.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405?page=7
Even if we put in place a
better regulatory structure, as long as financial
regulation is just a conversation between
friends, it will not be serious. Last year,
Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi described
Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire
squid wrapped around the face of humanity,
relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into
anything that smells like money".
It turns out that Mr Taibbi was far too generous
in his assessment of the huge investment bank. We
need to kill the Goldman vampire squid along with
the rest of the species, only when we have
reduced these monsters to a manageable size can
we be confident that they will be effectively
regulated.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/apr/19/goldman-sachs-big-banks-regulation
Octopus
http://vulgararmy.com/post/386432882/octopus-as-an-anti-semitic-symbol-in-april-20071
Copenhagen accord keeps Big Carbon in
business
Copenhagen was not about global
warming but money. The cash that Hillary Clinton
so dramatically plonked on the table, rising to
$100 billion by 2020, which includes the £1.5
billion offered by Gordon Brown (money which of
course he hasn't got) and which like a crazed
gambler he last week upped to £6 billion (even
more money he hasn't got), was merely a
"sweetener" to persuade the developing
countries to maintain the money-machine set in
motion by Kyoto.
This is the new global industry
based on buying and selling the right to emit
CO2, estimated soon to be worth trillions of
dollars a year, which through schemes such as the
UN's Clean Development Mechanism and the EU's
Emissions Trading System is making a small
minority of people, including Al Gore, extremely
rich.
The only really concrete
achievement of Copenhagen was to win agreement to
the perpetuating of those Kyoto rules that have
created this vast industry, which has two main
beneficiaries. On one hand are that small number
of people in China and India who have learnt how
to work this system to their huge advantage. On
the other are all those Western entrepreneurs who
have piled into what has become the
fastest-growing commodity market in the world.
The part played at Copenhagen
by all the tree-huggers, abetted by the BBC and
their media allies, was to keep hysteria over
warming at fever pitch while the politicians
haggled over the real prize, to keep the Kyoto
system in place.
The only tree they were
concerned with hugging was the money tree and all
the vast political apparatus that now supports
it, allowing governments to tax and regulate us
into handing over ever more of our money, largely
without realising it, every time we drive a car,
fly in a plane, pay our electricity bill or carry
out any of a vast range of activities that
involve the emission of CO2. Compared with these
sums, even the billions we all unwittingly spend
on subsidies to the developers of useless wind
turbines are chicken feed.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6845686/Copenhagen-accord-keeps-Big-Carbon-in-business.html
Friends of the Earth attacks
carbon trading
An FoE reports says 'cap and trade'
carbon markets have done little to reduce
emissions but have been plagued by corruption and
inefficiency
The world's carbon trading
markets growing complexity threatens another
"sub-prime" style financial crisis that
could again destabilise the global economy,
campaigners warn today.
In a new report, Friends of the
Earth says that to date "cap and trade"
carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce
emissions but have been plagued by inefficiency
and corruption that render them unfit for
purpose.
As the world heads towards the
Copenhagen climate summit, Britain and other
developed countries want to see carbon trading
expanded worldwide. The carbon market, mainly
based in Europe, was worth $126bn in 2008 and is
predicted to mushroom to $3.1tn by 2020 if a
global carbon market takes off
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/05/friends-of-the-earth-attacks-carbon-trading
Greenpeace Market
Poison and Carbon Trading
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/groups/berkshire/blog/market-poison-and-carbon-trading
Could
Cap and Trade Cause Another Market Meltdown?
You've heard of credit default
swaps and subprime mortgages. Are carbon default
swaps and subprime offsets next? If the Waxman-Markey
climate bill is signed
into law, it will generate, almost as an
afterthought, a new market for carbon
derivatives. That market will be vast,
complicated, and dauntingly difficult to monitor.
And if Washington doesn't get the rules right, it
will be vulnerable to speculation and
manipulation by the very same players who brought
us the financial meltdown.
Cap and trade would create what
Commodity Futures Trading commissioner Bart
Chilton anticipates as a $2 trillion market,
"the biggest of any [commodities]
derivatives product in the next five years."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/06/could-cap-and-trade-cause-another-market-meltdown?page=1
The EU's carbon trading
scheme has increased electricity bills, given a
windfall to power companies and failed to cut
greenhouse gases, it is claimed
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/file_on_4/6720119.stm
At the moment over 90% of the
licences to produce CO2 are given away to the
biggest polluters. Some of these companies have
made billions by passing on the nominal costs of
the licences to their customers, even though they
didn't have to pay anything themselves
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/12/greenpolitics-poznan
Reasons to Oppose Cap
and Trade
1.) It will destroy
1.15 million jobs. The Heritage
Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis found
that, for the average year over the 2012-2035
timeline, job loss will be 1.1 million greater
than the baseline assumptions. By 2035, there is a projected 2.5
million fewer jobs than without a cap-and-trade
bill. But Heritage isn’t alone in these
estimates. The Brookings Institute, a supporter
of a carbon tax, projects that cap and trade will
increase unemployment would by 0.5% in the first decade below
the baseline. Using U.S. Census population
projection estimates, that’s equivalent to
about 1.7 million fewer jobs than without cap and
trade. A study done by Charles River Associates
prepared for the National Black Chamber of
Congress projects higher
unemployment of 2.3-2.7 million jobs in each year
of the policy through 2030–after accounting
for “green job” creation.
2.) It will reduce
economic growth. All three
aforementioned studies found significant losses
in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), our primary
measure of economic activity. Heritage found the average GDP lost is $393
billion, hitting a high
of $662 billion in 2035. From 2012 to 2035, the
accumulated GDP lost is $9.4 trillion (in 2009
dollars). Brookings predicts GDP
in the United States would be lower by 2.5
percent in 2050 and the National Black Chamber estimates that
in GDP will be 1.3 percent ($350 billon) below
the baseline in 2030 and 1.5 percent ($730
billion) below the baseline in 2050.
3.) It will increase
your energy bills. Since 85 percent of
America’s energy needs come from carbon
emitting fossil fuels, cap and trade would be
massive tax on energy consumption. The carbon
dioxide reduction targets are still the same at
the end of the day, and the way they will be met
is by raising the price of energy high enough so
people use less. Heritage’s CDA found that by
2035 gasoline prices would increase 58 percent,
natural gas prices would increase 55 percent,
home heating oil would increase 56 percent, and
worst of all, electricity prices would jump 90
percent. CRA’s and the Black Chamber’s
study found that relative to the baseline,
natural gas prices would rise by an estimated
16%, electricity prices go up by 22% and gasoline
increases by 23 center per gallon, all in the
year 2030.
4.) It hits low-income
households hardest. Cap and trade is an
energy tax that falls disproportionately on the
poor. Although upper income families tend to use
more energy (and thus emit more carbon per
household), since low-income households spend a
larger percentage of their income on energy, the
poor suffer most. Proponents of a carbon cap
acknowledge this, saying,
“Relative to total expenditure, however, the
poor pay more […]. This means that carbon
emission-reduction policies have a regressive
impact on income distribution – unless
coupled with revenue-recycling policies that
protect the real incomes of the poor and middle
classes.” Policymakers sought to protect
consumers, especially the poor, from higher
energy prices by handing out rebate checks or tax
cuts. If only a small portion (15 percent) of the
energy tax revenue is given back to the consumer,
the burden on the poor obviously becomes heavier.
Rebates or not, the higher energy prices would
reduce economic activity by forcing businesses to
cut costs elsewhere, by reducing their workforce
for example, and thus doing damage that no check
would cover.
http://www.climatechangefraud.com/the-money-trail/4663-a-bakers-dozen-of-reasons-to-oppose-cap-and-trade
Angry Mermaid page on
IETA
Background
The International Emissions
Trading Association (IETA) describes itself as a “non profit business
organisation” created to “establish
a… framework for trading in greenhouse gas
emission reductions”. Formed in 1999, it has
168 member companies, including big energy (BP,
Shell, Vattenfall); banks (BNP Parisbas, Goldman
Sachs); lawyers (Clifford Chance, Norton Rose,);
and carbon trading companies (including
EcoSecurities). It works in partnership with
bodies like the World Bank to develop “an active, global greenhouse gas
market.”
A lobbying powerhouse in
climate talks
In just over ten years, IETA
has become a lobbying powerhouse at the UN
climate change talks. At two of the most
important recent UN meetings on climate change
– held in Bali and Poznan – IETA had
the largest accredited non-governmental
delegation (lobby groups are accredited as
non-governmental organisations, or NGOs),
dwarfing the presence of established NGOs such as
Greenpeace.
In Bali, for
example, with some 336 representatives including
lawyers, financiers, consultants, certifiers and
emissions trading experts, IETA made up 7.5% of
the 4,483 NGO delegates at the UN climate talks.
The sheer size of IETA’s presence worried
environmental and development groups at the
conference. Peter Hardstaff, from the World
Development Movement commented: “The fact that the IETA is the
biggest NGO in Bali is indicative of the
influence it will extend over the outcome of the
talks.”
In Poznan,
IETA once again had the biggest NGO presence with
over 250 lobbyists. The lobby group had hired a
whole building where it was holding up to 12
events per day, described by one delegate as a
“real parallel conference”. IETA is
already gearing up for a large lobbying presence
at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen with some 66 events scheduled.
Promoting the CDM
IETA uses these events to
promote the idea of a totally global market in
greenhouse gases, a mechanism which allows
corporations and governments to buy and sell the
right to pollute. Key to this market is the Clean
Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows
governments and industry in developed countries
to claim to be making carbon reductions by
investing in supposed “clean
developments” in the developing world. This
is also known as offsetting.
The CDM has been severely criticised because it allows rich countries to
avoid making emissions cuts at home. There is
also strong evidence that some of its projects
are creating serious social and environmental
problems in developing countries. According to David Victor, a leading carbon trading analyst at
Stanford University, two-thirds of the supposed
emission reduction credits being produced by the
CDM are not backed by real reductions in
pollution.
Some even argue that the CDM
increases pollution. In 2008, at an IETA lobbying
event at the European Parliament, a participant from the Öko-Institut
commented that by
giving credit to what is effectively business as
usual, the CDM “results in a global increase
of greenhouse gas emissions.”
A key area of controversy is
the ‘additional’ nature of CDM
projects: that is where projects that qualify for
CDM credits must be able to show that the
emission reductions would not have happened
anyway, even without the CDM funding: ie they are
“additional” to what would have
happened. But even IETA concedes that proving
‘additionality’ is “an almost
impossible task” and one EU Commission official estimated in
Poznan that 40% of CDM
projects are not additional to what would have
happened without CDM funding.
IETA knows the issue of
‘additionality’ will be an issue in
Copenhagen. One of its events is called “Sustainability instead of
additionality?”
where it concedes that “During the
negotiations, many Parties highlighted the fact
that the CDM to date is being perceived to have
contributed little to sustainable
development.”
Although the CDM has failed to reduce global
emissions, IETA still
claims it has been a success. Its lobbying documents argue that the CDM “has demonstrated
that market-based mechanisms spark new, keen
interest in clean development activities in
countries whose emissions must be addressed if
the international community is to meet its
climate change objectives. The invaluable
momentum that the CDM has created must be
preserved and built upon.”
IETA goes further and argues that what is needed now is
“a new CDM with more flexible
mechanisms”, including an expansion and
broader standards for project approval, including
sector-specific standards, allowing different
rules for polluting industries – creating
the potential for those industries to escape
tough standards.
High level access to
decision-makers
IETA secures valuable access to
decision-makers through its staff and members.
Its President is Henry Derwent,
a former Director for International Climate
Change in the UK government. It also secures
access through its members, such as Ecosecurities,
a leading emissions trading company recently
taken over by JP Morgan.
Ecosecurities develops CDM projects, sells carbon credits and provides
consultancy services to business as well as the
European Commission and UN Framework Convention
on Climate Change. Ecosecurities has set up a
body called the Project Developers’ Forum to
lobby for more CDM projects to be approved. In
Poznan, Ecosecurities had 16 lobbyists, 15 of
whom were operating under the umbrella of
business associations, including the Business
Council for Sustainable Energy, the Carbon
Markets and Investors Association, and as IETA
lobbyists.
In response to being told IETA
had been nominated, Henry Derwent said: “We
will be honoured to accept this recognition of
the work we have been doing over more than 10
years. During that time we have been delighted to
see that the principle of emissions trading has
been more and more widely accepted across the
world.”
http://www.angrymermaid.org/ieta
Cap and Trade WSJ
Politicians love cap and trade because
they can claim to be taxing
"polluters," not workers. Hardly. Once
the government creates a scarce new commodity --
in this case the right to emit carbon -- and then
mandates that businesses buy it, the costs would
inevitably be passed on to all consumers in the
form of higher prices. Stating the obvious, Peter
Orszag -- now Mr. Obama's budget director -- told
Congress last year that "Those price
increases are essential to the success of a
cap-and-trade program."
Hit hardest would be the
"95% of working families" Mr. Obama
keeps mentioning, usually omitting that his
no-new-taxes pledge comes with the caveat
"unless you use energy." Putting a
price on carbon is regressive by definition
because poor and middle-income households spend
more of their paychecks on things like gas to
drive to work, groceries or home heating.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123655590609066021.html
Cap-and-Trade:
All Cost, No Benefit
The proposed legislation would
have a trivially small effect on global warming
while imposing substantial costs on all American
households. And to get political support in key
states, the legislation would abandon the
auctioning of permits in favor of giving permits
to selected corporations.
The leading legislative
proposal, the Waxman-Markey bill that was recently passed out of the House Energy and Commerce
Committee, would reduce allowable CO2 emissions
to 83 percent of the 2005 level by 2020, then
gradually decrease the amount further. Under the
cap-and-trade system, the federal government
would limit the total volume of CO2 that U.S.
companies can emit each year and would issue
permits that companies would be required to have
for each ton of CO2 emitted. Once issued, these
permits would be tradable and could be bought and
sold, establishing a market price reflecting the
targeted CO2 reduction, with a tougher CO2
standard and fewer available permits leading to
higher prices.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/31/AR2009053102077.html
UN suspends
carbon-trading auditor
THE validity of the Kyoto
Protocol’s $100 billion (£67 billion)
carbon-trading scheme has been called into
question after the United Nations suspended the
world’s largest auditor of clean-energy
projects.
Norway’s DNV, which claims
to have approved half of the world’s
carbon-credit ventures, had its accreditation
suspended last month after it was unable to prove
that its agents had properly vetted projects that
it then approved for the carbon-trading scheme
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article5375493.ece
Treasury acts on carbon-credit
fraud fears
By Vanessa Houlder
Published: July 30 2009 20:53 |
Last updated: July 30 2009 20:53
Drastic action to stop a
potential multi-billion-pound fraud was taken by
the UK Treasury on Thursday when it imposed a
zero rate of value added tax on carbon credits
– the allowances issued as part of a scheme
to help curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Losses to the exchequer so far
are unlikely to have exceeded a few hundred
millions pounds, but the Treasury said in a
statement that “there now exists a
substantiated and increasing risk of the UK
becoming a major target for the fraudsters during
the next few months”.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7fba19c8-7d40-11de-b8ee-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
Environment Agency
preps carbon police force Source: Jul.
6, 2009
The Environment Agency is to
launch a dedicated unit to ensure that the
government's imminent Carbon Reduction Commitment
(CRC) legislation is properly enforced.
According to The Sunday Times,
around 50 auditors and inspectors will be given
wide-ranging powers, including the right to
search company premises, view energy meters and
seize records.
Ed Mitchell, head of business
performance and regulation at the agency, told
the newspaper that the new unit would have the
necessary teeth to catch firms failing to provide
accurate energy use data. 'The inspectors will
carry warrant cards giving them powers of entry
to collect evidence,' he said. 'We will also have
access to company accounts with suppliers.'
Under the CRC, around 6,000
businesses and public-sector organisations will
be required to report on annual energy use and
carbon emissions from their facilities
http://water.environmental-expert.com/resultEachPressRelease.aspx?cid=31242&codi=54965&lr=1
Copenhagen's Hidden Agenda: The
Multibillion Trade in Carbon Derivatives
Architect of Credit Default Swaps behind the
Development of "Carbon Derivatives"
As I have previously shown,
speculative derivatives (especially credit default swaps) are a primary cause of the
economic crisis.
And I have pointed out that (1) the giant banks will make a
killing on carbon trading, (2) while the leading
scientist crusading against global warming says
it won't work, and (3) there is a very high
probability of massive fraud and insider trading
in the carbon trading markets.
Now, Bloomberg notes that the carbon trading scheme will be centered
around derivatives:
The banks are preparing to
do with carbon what they’ve done before:
design and market derivatives contracts that
will help client companies hedge their price
risk over the long term. They’re also
ready to sell carbon-related financial
products to outside investors.
[Blythe] Masters says banks
must be allowed to lead the way if a
mandatory carbon-trading system is going to
help save the planet at the lowest possible
cost. And derivatives related to carbon must
be part of the mix, she says. Derivatives are
securities whose value is derived from the
value of an underlying commodity -- in this
case, CO2 and other greenhouse gases...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16449
**********************************
Carbon trading surges
in London
The carbon trading business is
ramping up in London, as more European countries
commit to policies to reduce emissions. The
New York Times notes that many top
banks, like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, are
staffing up quickly. In the Mayfair area, some
boutiques are sprouting up to generate carbon
emissions reductions via allowances among other
things. Some think the market could rival credit
derivatives in growth
http://www.fiercefinance.com/story/carbon-trading-surges-in-london/2007-07-06
Cap and trade not
enough to cut carbon -Goldman Sachs
NEW YORK, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Capping and trading
carbon emissions will not be enough to fight
output of the gases blamed for warming the
planet, the managing director of Goldman Sachs'
U.S. carbon emissions desk said on Thursday.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKN1724371820080117
Prospects Good for Carbon Trading
How hot is the idea of trading
carbon emissions to limit global warming? Hot
enough that Goldman Sachs purchased 10
percent of the Chicago Climate Exchange.
The Exchange (CCX)
is a voluntary greenhouse gas emission trading
system where companies promise to reduce
emissions, and they can buy or sell credits. If a
company reduces more emissions then it pledged,
it can sell the surplus to other organizations.
Goldman acquired shares in CCX
as well as ownership of its European counterpart,
which is part of a mandatory carbon trading
system. I'm guessing Goldman thinks that the
Exchange, or the technology used for trading
shares, could be used if the U.S. ever mandates
emissions trading.
http://www.matternetwork.com/2006/9/prospects-good-for-carbon-trading.cfm
Goldman Sachs Buys Into Carbon Offsets
Goldman Sachs has recently
bought pieces of two carbon-offset companies, in
the latest sign of investment banks’
interest in the area.
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/goldman-sachs-buys-into-carbon-offsets/
McKinsey Guardian report
The total up-front financing would be €530
billion by 2020 – less than the cost of the
current US financial-sector bailout plan –
and €810 billion by 2030, which is well
within range of what financial markets can
handle.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/apr/25/climate-copenhagen-carbon-emissions?plckFindCommentKey=CommentKey:3b5a0383-2a16-4179-b9e1-fe8a211cd4c8
JP Morgan Climate Care
ClimateCare has provided high quality carbon offsets since the solution began. We help
people have an impact, lowering business
emissions and individual carbon footprints
through carefully sourced carbon
reduction projects, because we all want to tackle climate
change today
http://www.jpmorganclimatecare.com/
***************************************
****************************************************
The New
Environmental Lobby
Here are some environmental organisations (with
annual incomes of hundreds of millions of
dollars) which are supported and controlled by
the biggest banks and multi national corporations
on earth. The Environmental Defense
Fund claims to be the world's wealthiest
environmental pressure group.
Environmental
Defense Fund
Board of Trustees
Carl Ferenbach
Chair
Managing Director, Berkshire Partners, LLC
Arthur P. Cooley*
Secretary
Naturalist and former Expedition Leader, Lindblad
Expeditions
G. Leonard Baker, Jr.
Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures
Rod Beckstrom
President and CEO, ICANN
James W. B. Benkard
Senior Counsel, Davis Polk & Wardwell
Sally G. Bingham, M.Div.
President, The Regeneration Project
Shelby W. Bonnie
Co-founder, CNET Networks
William K. Bowes, Jr.
Founding Partner, U.S. Venture Partners
Lewis B. Cullman
Chairman Emeritus, Chess-in-the-Schools
Ann Doerr
Philanthropist
Stanley Druckenmiller
Chairman and CEO, Duquesne Capital Management
Roger Enrico
Chairman, DreamWorks Animation, SKG; former
Chairman and CEO, PepsiCo, Inc.
Kirsten J. Feldman
Former Managing Director, Morgan Stanley
Jeanne Donovan Fisher
True Love Productions
Lynn R. Goldman, M.D.,
M.P.H.
Pediatrician; Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Charles J. Hamilton, Jr.
Partner, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker,
LLP (retired)
The Honorable Thomas H. Kean
Chairman, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Arthur Kern
Investor
Sarah Liao Sau-tung, Ph.D.
Former Secretary for the Environment, Transport
and Works, Hong Kong SAR Government
Frank Loy
Former Under Secretary of State for Global
Affairs
Susan Mandel
Community Advocate
Kathryn Murdoch
Director of Strategy and Communications, Clinton
Climate Initiative
N. J. Nicholas, Jr.
Investor
David O'Connor
Managing Partner, Creative Artists Agency
Signe Ostby
Advisor, Center for Brand and Product Management,
University of Wisconsin at Madison; Director, The
Intuit Scholarship Foundation
Stephen W. Pacala, Ph.D.
Petrie Professor of Biology in the Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology Department, Princeton
University; Director of the Princeton
Environmental Institute
Robert M. Perkowitz
Managing Partner, VivaTerra, LLC; President,
ecoAmerica
Julian H. Robertson, Jr.
Founder and Chairman, Tiger Management, LLC
E. John Rosenwald, Jr.
Vice Chairman Emeritus, J.P. Morgan
Peggy M. Shepard
Co-founder and Executive Director, WE ACT for
Environmental Justice
Douglas W. Shorenstein
Chair and CEO, Shorenstein Properties, LLC
Sam Rawlings Walton
Boatman, Philanthropist, Entrepreneur
Paul Junger Witt
Partner, Witt Thomas Productions
Joanne Woodward
Actress, Director, Producer
Charles F. Wurster, Ph.D.*
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences,
Marine Sciences Research Center, State University
of New York at Stony Brook
HONORARY TRUSTEES
Roland C. Clement
Gene E. Likens, Ph.D.
George G. Montgomery, Jr.
John H. T. Wilson
George M. Woodwell, Ph.D.*
*Founding Trustees
http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=365
Environmental Defense is the only environmental
group named among "the most
successful nonprofits in recent U.S.
history" in the new book Forces for
Good.
We also ranked first among
environmental groups — and second
overall — in the 2007 Financial
Times global study of 850 business-nonprofit
partnerships
"...the power broker
rewarding good behavior"
Time Magazine
"...one of the hottest
environmental groups around"
The Wall Street Journal
http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=381
EDF has an annual revenue of over 100
million dollars
http://edf.org/documents/8857_AR08_Financial_Comment.pdf
Profits of doom
The European Commission has
paid environmental campaigners directly to carry
out its political agenda. In 1999, at a cost of
about EUR500,000, it set up a new group, the
European Environmental Bureau, while also paying
both the Friends of the Earth and the WWF
EUR250,000 each to set up offices in Brussels. On
another occasion, the Climate Action Network was
given EUR140,000 for "capacity
building". In fact, the Commission funnels
about EUR3 million (£2.48 million) a year to
environmental groups that it favours.
But that's a drop of oil in the
Gulf of Mexico compared with the amounts that
private foundations in the US are estimated to
provide each year to environmental causes. The
sums involved run into the hundreds of millions
of dollars. One green organisation - the Tides
Foundation - had net assets of $142,007,356 in
2006. Local green groups may rely on
"flapjack and organic-soap fundraising
mornings" - but real campaigns are funded by
a very different and largely invisible mix.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=412726&c=2
Enough is enough. The
Greenpeace fraud about saving the whales must be
exposed. For years, I have been tolerating their
pretense of action and watching them rake in
tremendous profits from whaling.Greenpeace makes
more money from anti-whaling than Norway and
Iceland combined make from whaling. In both
cases, the whales die and someone profits.
...
Their success according to
Melanie will depend on YOU sending a donation
NOW. She's right, of course. The Greenpeace
campaign is not about looking for whaling ships.
Success to Greenpeace is about recruiting
memberships.
http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/editorial-061220-1.html
Greenpeace funding
Greenpeace even has a website
that "exposes" donations of Exxon/Esso
to various U.S. think-tanks. What Greenpeace does
not expose, is that its own funding comes from extremely
right-wing sources -- take a look at these
donations to Greenpeace USA and the very
conservative, reactionary people behind them.
No doubt this is why so many of
the policies and programmes of
"environmentalism" are so close to
those of neofascist political parties. As the
British National Party (British neofascists)
says, "we are the true green party
screenshot
http://bp0.blogger.com/_X93w7bCMCS8/SIs31W9yxNI/AAAAAAAAAEw/qfuD8yilzSU/s320/Greenpeace+financials.jpg
http://badecology.blogspot.com/2008/07/greenpeace-funding.html
http://www.activistcash.com/organization_financials_full.cfm/oid/131
The
Climate Group
http://www.theclimategroup.org/index.php/our_partners/supporters/
http://www.theclimategroup.org/index.php/our_partners/
Climate
Group on Sourcewatch
http://216.92.66.74/index.php?title=The_Climate_Group
NRDC (The
Natural Resources Defense Council)
NRDC is the nation's most
effective environmental action organization. We
use law, science and the support of 1.2 million
members and online activists to protect the
planet's wildlife and wild places and to ensure a
safe and healthy environment for all living
things.
Worth Magazine has named
NRDC one of America's 100 best charities, and the
Wise Giving Alliance of the Better Business
Bureau reports that NRDC meets its highest
standards for accountability and use of donor
funds.
http://www.nrdc.org/about/board.asp
The NDRC has an annual revenue of 87 million
dollars
http://www.nrdc.org/about/finances.asp
Grantham Institute for
Climate Change
In fact, it (Grantham) refers to the wealthy
chairman of GMO, a large investment management
company: Jeremy Grantham. Grantham has donated
£12million to the London School of Economics
(LSE) to fund the institute. He has also forked
out another £12million to Imperial College
London for the similarly named Grantham Institute
for Climate Change (1)
No wonder, then, that the chair of LSE, Howard
Davies – once the head of the Financial
Services Authority and a former deputy governor
of the Bank of England – was more than a
little fawning over the ‘extremely
generous’ Grantham. The new LSE institute
will be headed by Lord Nicholas Stern, author of
the UK government-commissioned report.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5799/
The Grantham is chaired by
Professor Lord Sir Nicholas Stern of Brentford,
author of a rather influential report on the
economics of climate change, and who stands to
profit admirably from institutional
environmentalism via his carbon credit reference
agency. It is no surprise that Ward and Sir
Nicholas find themselves in the same company
department, given their shared interests. Stern
is also Chair of the Centre for Climate Change
Economics and Policy (CCCEP), which is funded by
the UK government’s Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC), and which acknowledges
that ‘Generous support for the Centre’s
work is also provided by Munich Re’. Munich
Re is the insurance giant that claims to know
what the IPCC does not when it comes to the
reality of climate change in the present.
http://www.climate-resistance.org/
Jeremy Grantham
Jeremy Grantham is the Chairman of the Board of
Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, an American investor
well known among institutional investors, but
relatively unknown to retail investors. He is
regarded as a highly knowledgeable investor in
various stock bond and commodity markets.
Grantham started one of the world's first index
funds in the early 1970s and currently manages
approximately $120 billion US.[
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Grantham
Paulson plans to donate
£410m fortune to environmental causes
Henry Paulson, the US Treasury
Secretary and former head of Goldman Sachs, is
believed to be planning to give away the bulk of
his fortune to charity - up to $800m (£410m).
The move would see him follow
in the footsteps of a string of wealthy
businessmen, including Microsoft's founder Bill
Gates and investment guru Warren Buffett, who
have all announced plans to donate the vast
proportion of their wealth to good causes over
the past year.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/paulson-plans-to-donate-163410m-fortune-to-environmental-causes-432346.html
This is pure Orwellian
corporate speak
E3G is organised around a permanent
strategic conversation which identifies the
critical actions required to accelerate change,
and the political, economic, technical and
cultural conditions needed to drive it. This
combines the expertise of all E3G staff in the
development of compelling strategic insights and
narratives which shape our interventions.
http://www.e3g.org/index.php/about/What-we-do/
COIN
According to the profile on
CiF, "George Marshall is the founder and
director of projects at the Climate Outreach and
Information Network. He posts regularly to the
blog climatedenial.org"
This set me digging.I
discovered that COIN was a registered charity, so
my next port of call was the Charity Commission, to have a look at their accounts.
None have yet been filed, as
the organisation is newly registered: Mem and
Arts were incorporated on 21st December 2007 and
they were registered with the Charity Commission
on 26th March 2008 (though according to their own
website they were founded in 2004).
Its charitable objects are
listed on the Charity Commission website as "to
promote any charitable purposes at the discretion
of the trustees concerning climate change
and its impact".
Their objects look
rather more political on their "about
us" page. The contact was listed as a Mr Tim
Baster of Oxford. Additionally there are
two trustees.
Googling Mr Baster's name came
up trumps. The buggers are getting close on
£700,000 from DEFRA over two years.
According to DEFRA's press release
this is to "profoundly change the
attitude of rank and file union members;
generating visible collective reduction action,
establishing a social norm for personal action,
and creating a persuasive synergy and cross over
between personal action, work-placed programmes
such as 'Greening the workplace', and the
emissions reduction targets of employers."
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/25/whos-been-spinning-in-my-newspaper.html
****************************
Simon Linnett, Executive
Vice-Chairman of Rothschild, has called for a new
international body, the World Environment Agency,
to regulate carbon trading.
In a recently published paper, Trading Emissions,
for the Social Market Foundation, Mr Linnett
argues that the International problem of climate
change demands an international solution.
Unless governments cede some of their sovereignty
to a new world body, he says, a global carbon
trading scheme cannot be enforced and regulated.
"An urgent global
response." This was how Nicolas Stern
described the problem of carbon dioxide
emissions, in his recent review of the economics
of climate change. The sense of an impending
crisis infuses our all debates on this issue.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14294
Cooling on Global
Warming
Germany and the
rest of Europe are getting more rational on
climate change
The EU climate
deal was diluted beyond recognition. Instead of
standing by plans to cut CO2 emissions by 20%
below 1990 levels by 2020, the actual reductions
might be as trivial as 4% if all exemptions are
factored in.
Second,
disillusionment with the failed Kyoto Protocol
has turned utopian thinking into sobriety. After
all, most of the Kyoto signatories failed to
reduce their CO2 emissions during the last 10
years. There are also growing doubts about the
long-term viability of the EU's Emissions Trading
Scheme
The inclusion of a revision clause, pushed by
Italy, is particularly significant as it makes
the EU's climate targets conditional on the
outcome of international climate talks. If the
U.N.'s Copenhagen conference in 2009 fails to
seal a post-Kyoto deal, it is as good as certain
that some of the EU's targets will be further
cut. By linking its decisions to those of the
rest of the world, Europe has begun to act as a
more rational player on the stage of
international climate diplomacy.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122937766062908297.html
After watching An
Inconvenient Truth and sitting through one
of Al Gore's PowerPoint presentations, I have
just one question remaining: Why is Al Gore
pushing Enron's agenda?
Before you decide that I'm
delusional, check out my new book, The Big Ripoff
: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your
Money, and my
section called "Green: The Color of
Money." The book shows how Enron was a key
lobbyist for the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change
(the Holy Grail of Gore's Crusade), and how
almost every environmentalist policy we are being
fed by Washington is really a meal ticket for one
big business or another.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-carney/follow-the-money-in-wash_b_25017.html
Germany Plans Boom in Coal-Fired Power
Plants -- Despite High Emissions
Estimates by climate protection experts such as
Rainer Baake from German Environment Aid (DUH)
suggest the new power plants will release at
least 150 million tons of CO2 every year.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,472786,00.html
Train can be worse for climate than plane
"New rail systems should serve as links to
other transit modes, as is often the case in
Europe and Japan," he says. "We should
avoid building rail systems that are disconnected
from major population areas and require car trips
and parking to access."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17260-train-can-be-worse-for-climate-than-plane.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8089722.stm
Fox admitting to inserting
global warming propaganda into TV shows.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=47149952
This week, an independent panel
of experts called the Climate Change Committee
(CCC) published the details of its recent advice
to Parliament that the UK should reduce its CO2
emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.
There's no doubt there's money
to be made from this new legislation, which was
passed last week. A recent conference, given the
title 'Cashing in on Carbon' was, in its own words, "aimed squarely at investment
banks, investors and major compliance buyers and
is focused on how they can profit today from an
increasingly diverse range of carbon-related
investment opportunities".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/03/climate_change_committee_double_standards/
Wind Turbines in Europe Do
Nothing for Emissions-Reduction Goals
In the worst case scenario,
sustainable energy plants might even have a
detrimental effect on the climate. As more wind
turbines go online, coal plants will be able to
reduce their output. This in itself is desirable
-- but the problem is that the total number of
available CO2 emission certificates remains the
same. In other words, there will suddenly be more
certificates per kilowatt of coal energy. That
means the price per ton of CO2 emitted will fall.
That is exactly what happened
in recent trading. A certificate to emit a ton of
CO2 cost almost nothing. As a result, there was
very little incentive for big energy companies to
invest in climate friendly technologies.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,606763,00.html
‘There’s a lot of rich
people backing this cause’, says Horner.
‘Al Gore has just raised $300million. Over
the past few years, the greens continue to say we
receive Exxon Mobil support – and we do not.
But where did Al Gore get $300million, far more
than the entire sceptic community has received
ever from any source? No one seems to care. How
much of this is from George Soros? How much of it
is from his buddies at the venture capital
companies that are invested in a bunch of
dogs-with-fleas that won’t be at all
attractive until this regime is put in place? We
don’t know – and we don’t have a
curious media or state.’
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5956/
More on
Enron
The oil companies were
members of an anti global warming organisation
called the Global Change Coalition until just before
Kyoto was signed . Many jumped ship after the
Americans managed to insert cap and trade into
article 17 of the Kyoto Protocol on ther
insistence of Enron and BP, even though the
Senate was complete against it and voted 95-0
against ratification. The Global Change Coalition eventually
disbanded in 2000, four years before Kyoto was
ratified.
Opposing
Views on Global Warming: The Corporate Climate
Coup
by Prof.
David F. Noble - York University, Toronto, Canada
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5568
Enron: The
Godfather of Kyoto - How Enron hyped global
warming for profit
As the
movement to establish the Kyoto Protocol
developed momentum, it was necessary for Ken Lay
to build up alliances with the green movement
including Greenpeace. A 1998 letter, signed by
Lay and a few other bigwigs asked President
Clinton, in essence, to harm the reputations and
credibility of scientists who argued that global
warming was an overblown issue, because these
individuals were standing in Enron’s way.
The letter, dated Sept. 1, asked the president to
shut off the public scientific debate on global
warming, which continues to this date. In
particular, it requested Clinton to moderate the
political aspects of this discussion by
appointing a bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission.
The purpose of this commission was clear –
high-level trashing of dissident scientists.
Setting up a panel to do this was simple; just
look at the recent issue of Scientific American
where four attack dogs were called out to chew up
Bjorn Lomborg. He had the audacity to publish The
Skeptic Environmentalist demonstrating that
global warming is overblown. David Bellamy, the
world’s foremost environmentalist also
stepped out of line with his widely printed
article “Global Warming? What a load of old
Poppycock.” In the same way Galileo was
forced to publicly utter that the moon had no
effect on tides, so Bellamy under pressure
backtracked on some of his claims.
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/archives/2006/03/investigate_oct_5.html
But some business groups --
especially those representing alternative energy
technologies -- praised the president's plan.
"This is a measured, appropriate action
plan, given what we know about global
warming," said Terry Thorn, senior vice
president of Enron Corp. of Houston.
More than a dozen senior
executives representing such companies as Nike
Inc., Bechtel Group Inc. and Mitsubishi Motor
Corp. have endorsed a newspaper ad running this
week that calls for "strong leadership"
by the United States on climate change.
In a White House meeting in August 1997, for
example, Lay urged President Clinton and Vice
President Gore to back a "market-based"
approach to the problem of global warming -- a
strategy that a later Enron memo makes clear
would be "good for Enron stock."
The climate-industrial
complex - Wall Street journal
The cozy corporate-climate
relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought
up renewable energy companies and credit-trading
outfits while boasting of its relationship with
green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol
was signed, an internal memo was sent within
Enron that stated, "If implemented, [the
Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron's
business than almost any other regulatory
business."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124286145192740987.html
Money and
Kyoto Protocol are the real Enron story
Enron executives worked closely
with the Clinton administration to secure support
for the Kyoto Protocol because the company
believed the treaty could provide it with a
financial windfall. An internal Enron memo
circulated immediately after the 1997 Kyoto
meeting - and first reported by The Washington
Post - shows the company believed the treaty
"would do more to promote Enron’s
business than will almost any other regulatory
initiative outside of restructuring the energy
and natural gas industries in Europe and the
United States."
So Enron philanthropists
lavished almost $1.5 million on environmental
groups that support international energy controls
to reduce so-called global warming. From 1994 to
1996, the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1
million dollars - $990,000 - to the Nature
Conservancy, whose "Climate Change"
project promotes global warming theories.
http://archive.columbiatribune.com/2002/Feb/20020226Comm007.asp
BP too
An August 4, 1997 Oval Office
meeting with Kenny Boy, (then-) Sir John Browne
of BP, and the President and Vice President of
the United States. Let that sink in. He
didn’t know the guy. But anyone who can even
spell “Beltway” can tell you that that
kind of orchestration and attention takes serious
influence. Ask Gordon Brown.
As revealed by the August 1,
1997 Kenny Boy briefing memo subsequently aired
after the unpleasantness, in this meeting Kenny
Boy was to demand that the Senate be ignored,
that the administration agree to Kyoto, and most
important that it contain a cap-and-trade scheme
http://www.globalwarming.org/2009/04/28/gores-inconvenient-enron/
Whatever its impact on the environment, the
cap-and-trade carbon scheme is sure to boost the
economic and political prospects of people and
groups that are behind it. Before the company
collapsed under the weight of financial scandal,
Enron under CEO Ken Lay was a key proponent of
the cap-and-trade idea. So was BP’s Lord
John Browne, before he resigned last May under a
cloud of personal scandal. In August 1997, Lay
and Browne met with President Bill Clinton and
Vice President Gore in the Oval Office to develop
administration positions for the Kyoto
negotiations that resulted in an international
treaty to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22663
Wall Street Extorts
Kyoto Protocol: Lehman, Enron and other
Cap-and-Trade Coincidences
When Enron’s drama
unfolded in 2001, the pressure group for
rent-seeking businesses called the Pew Center on
Global Climate Change quickly airbrushed its Web
site of praise for the company, specifically
Pew’s erstwhile poster boy for climate
“responsibility,” Ken Lay. Lay and
Enron were founders of Pew’s Business
Environmental Leadership Council, a green-tinted
coalition that was pushing the Kyoto agenda.
Lay was also a favorite and
longtime trustee at a similar outfit known as the
Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the
Environment (run by John Kerry’s wife,
Teresa Heinz). An embarrassing e-mail emerged in
which Heinz staff pleaded with Lay, “Simply
stated, your background, expertise and experience
make you uniquely qualified [to run our]
global-warming [initiative].”
This was a sufficiently serious
endeavor that soon after I left Enron in 1997,
Lay and BP boss John Browne met in the Oval
Office with President Bill Clinton and Vice
President Al Gore. Lay’s briefing memo
reveals that they clarified what Enron needed
from the treaty at the upcoming December Kyoto
negotiations. Just the week before, a unanimous
U.S. Senate had voted instructing Clinton not to
agree to the pact.
The rest is history, if often
misreported. The Clinton administration
disregarded the Senate and agreed to Kyoto on
December 11, 1997, and signed it – yes,
signed it – on November 12, 1998. Score: Lay
and Browne 1, Senate 0. However, then as now, and
every year in the interim, the Senate has refused
to bind the U.S. to such an agreement.
With that bit of history out of
the way and as Lehman Brothers lies in ruins, let
us take notice of certain coincidences. For
example, as Lehman melted down, observers spotted
the web of climate-specific similarities
connecting that company’s priorities and
activism and Enron’s. Like Enron, the bank
was a strong promoter of carbon pricing, and its
recommendations on the subject had begun to be
adopted by governments around the world. Lehman
was also the banker for Gore’s private
equity firm, Generation Investment Management.
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=1023&idli=3
While that was happening, Enron
commissioned its own internal study of global
warming science. It turned out to be largely in
agreement with the same scientists Enron was
trying to shut up. After considering all of the
inconsistencies in climate science, the report
concluded: "[T]he very real possibility that
the great climate alarm could be a false alarm.
The anthropogenic warming could well be less than
thought and favorably distributed."
One of Enron's major
consultants in that study was NASA scientists
James Hansen, who started the whole global
warming mess in 1988 with his bombastic
congressional testimony. Last month, he published
a paper in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences predicting exactly the same,
inconsequential amount of warming in the next 50
years as the scientists that Enron wanted to gag.
They were a decade ahead of NASA.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3388
Enron: The Godfather of Kyoto
In addition, Enron began to
cultivate new friends in the environmental
community. From 1994 to 1996, the Enron
Foundation gave nearly $1 million to the Nature
Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project
promoted global warming theories. Another $1.5
million was donated to other groups advocating
international controls to curb global warming,
including Greenpeace.
In 1997, Enron set about to promote an
international treaty to impose cuts in CO2
emissions while allowing emission rights trading.
Such an agreement would produce a gigantic
windfall for Enron because it would boost the
usage of natural gas at the expense of coal and
it would help Enron’s growing commodity
trading business.
As the push for a treaty gained more support
around the world, Enron CEO Ken Lay and other
business leaders wrote to President Bill Clinton
on September 1, 1998, asking him to create a
bipartisan blue ribbon commission that would
essentially shut off the scientific debate on
global warming and discredit those scientists who
opposed the treaty and did not support the global
warming theory.
Simultaneously, Enron commissioned an internal
study of global warming science, only to find the
results did not support the theory. In
conclusion, the report noted, “The very real
possibility is that the great climate alarm could
be a false alarm. The anthropogenic warming could
well be less than thought and favorably
distributed.”A primary consultant for that
study was NASA scientist James Hansen, the very
same scientist who now castigates the Bush
administration for its stance on Kyoto and who
trashes scientists who dispute global warming as
being in the hip pocket of big business. That
certainly did not keep Mr. Hansen from cashing
Enron’s check.
Ring’s investigation, as reported in
Investigate magazine, notes that
“…coal-burning utilities would have had
to pay billions for permits because they emit
more CO2 than do natural gas facilities. That
would have encouraged closing coal plants in
favor of natural gas or other kinds of power
plants, driving up prices for those alternatives.
Enron, along with other key energy companies in
the so-called Clean Power Group – El Paso
Corp., NiSource, Trigen Energy, and Calpine
– would make money both coming and going
from selling permits and then their own energy at
higher prices.”
http://www.theforgottenstreet.com/index.php?action=website-view&WebPageID=15046&WebSiteID=444
Investigate Oct 05, The Kyoto
Conspiracy - How Enron hyped global
warming for profit
Enron commissioned its own internal study of
global warming science. It turned out to be
largely in agreement with the same scientists
that Enron was trying to shut up. After
considering all of the inconsistencies in climate
science, the report concluded: “The very
real possibility is that the great climate alarm
could be a false alarm. The anthropogenic warming
could well be less than thought and favorably
distributed.” One of Enron’s major
consultants in that study was NASA scientist
James Hansen, who started the whole global
warming mess in 1988 with his bombastic
congressional testimony. Recently he published a
paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences predicting exactly the same
inconsequential amount of warming in the next 50
years as the scientists that Enron wanted to gag.
They were a decade ahead of NASA.
True to its plan, Enron never
made its own findings public, self-censoring them
while it pleaded with the Bush administration for
a cap on carbon dioxide emissions that it could
broker. That pleading continues today – the
remnant-Enron still views global warming
regulation as the straw that will raise it from
its corporate oblivion. Some greenie campaigning
in America is still directed from this source. On
July 7, 2004, Kenneth Lay was indicted by a
federal grand jury for his involvement in the
scandal.
Everyone knows that a few
hundred votes in Florida tipped the election to
George W, but few are aware that West Virginia,
normally a Democrat stronghold, went for Bush
because the coal industry in that state decided
to back him because he would not endorse Kyoto.
Without West Virginia, the vote in Florida would
have made no difference.
”Enron stood to profit millions from global
warming energy-trading schemes,” said Mike
Carey, president of the Ohio Coal Association and
American Coal Coalition. The investigation into
the collapse of Enron will reveal much more about
the intricacies of the Baptist-bootlegger
coalition which was promoting the Kyoto cause
within the Republican Party and within US
business circles. Coal-burning utilities would
have had to pay billions for permits because they
emit more CO2 than do natural gas facilities.
That would have encouraged closing coal plants in
favor of natural gas or other kinds of power
plants, driving up prices for those alternatives.
Enron, along with other key energy companies in
the so-called Clean Power Group – El Paso
Corp., NiSource, Trigen Energy, and Calpine
– would make money both coming and going
– from selling permits and then their own
energy at higher prices. If the Kyoto Protocol
were ratified and in full force, experts
estimated that Americans would lose between $100
billion and $400 billion each year. Additionally,
between 1 and 3.5 million jobs could be lost.
That means that each household could lose an
average of up to $6,000 each year. That is a lot
to ask of Americans just so large energy
companies can pocket millions from a regulatory
scheme. Moreover, a cost of $400 billion annually
makes Enron’s current one-time loss of $6
billion look like pocket change. Little wonder
Americans and the incoming Bush administration
did not want a bar of it.
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/archives/2006/03/investigate_oct_5.html
Exxon
Exxon
supports carbon tax
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/calgarybusiness/story.html?id=e8aecbbb-16c6-412d-8054-7e64e2b176ef
IPCC
The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) prepares periodic climate
assessments on science, impacts and adaptation,
and mitigation based on the contributions of
several hundred expert authors nominated by
governments. The majority of experts work in
academia and government labs, but a handful work
in business, including Haroon Kheshgi and Brian
Flannery from ExxonMobil. Over the years, they
have contributed to three IPCC assessments and
two special reports and have served as review
editors for IPCC publications. The valuable
contributions of these experts were recognized,
when the IPCC received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
http://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/energy_climate_views.aspx
There is increasing
evidence that the earth's climate has warmed on
average about 0.7 C in the last century. Many
global ecosystems, especially the polar areas,
are showing signs of warming. CO2 emissions have
increased during this same time period - and
emissions from fossil fuels and land use changes
are one source of these emissions.
Climate remains today an extraordinarily complex
area of scientific study. The risks to
society and ecosystems from increases in CO2
emissions could prove to be significant, it is
prudent to develop and implement strategies that
address the risks, keeping in mind the central
importance of energy to the economies of the
world.
This includes putting policies
in place that start us on a path to reduce
emissions, while understanding the context of
managing carbon emissions among other important
world priorities, such as economic development,
poverty eradication and public health.
While this long term objective
is pursued, near term objectives should include
supporting climate research to reduce
uncertainties while pacing policy responses;
promoting energy efficiency; deploying existing
technologies that reduce greenhouse gas
emissions; and supporting research and
development of new, low-GHG technologies.
Policymakers are considering a variety of
proposed regulatory options to mitigate GHG
emissions. In our view, assessing these options
requires an understanding of their likely
effectiveness, scale and cost, as well as their
implications for economic growth and quality of
life. Within ExxonMobil, we analyze and compare
the various policy options by evaluating the
degree to which they:
• maximize the use of
market forces
• ensure a uniform and predictable cost of
reducing CO2
• promote global participation
• minimize complexity and administrative
costs
• provide transparency to companies and
consumers
• adjust to new developments in climate
science and the economic impacts of policies
ExxonMobil scientists have undertaken climate
change research and related policy analysis for
25 years and their work has produced more than 40
papers in peer-reviewed literature. In addition,
our scientists participate in the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
and numerous related scientific bodies
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Europe-English/Citizen/Eu_VP_climate.asp
******************************************************
EDF Energy will
scale down plans to build a new generation of
nuclear reactors in the UK unless the government
fixes the price of carbon, its chief executive,
Vincent de Rivaz, has warned.
De Rivaz said that EDF's
business case to build four new reactors depended
on a carbon tax or minimum carbon price being
introduced.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/05/edf-nuclear-power-energy
The rise in price is apparently
caused by speculation due to changes in American
trading laws that permit (amongst other things)
the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), to use its
terminals to trade U.S. crude oil futures,
gasoline and heating oil contracts. Supply is
actually greater than demand but oil is being
horded (some have said by oil companies).
http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/08/enron_and_todays_oil_and_gas_p.html
Britain's dirty business
These four projects are among
the most environmentally damaging on the planet.
So why is a British government department backing
them?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3666273.ece
BP Climate
http://www.bp.com/subsection.do?categoryId=9015577&contentId=7031715
BP CEO Lord Browne's Speech
(Pew Foundation)
We’ve shown that it is
possible to reduce emissions of methane and CO2
from our own operations – by eliminating
waste and leaks and by applying technology, for
instance to eliminate the venting of methane.
Carbon's Power Brokers
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/30/AR2008053002521_pf.html
Czech
President Vaclav Klaus
We have to
repeatedly deal with the simple questions that
have been many times discussed here and
elsewhere:
1) Is there a statistically significant global
warming?
2) If so, is it man-made?
3) If we decide to stop it, is there anything a
man can do about it?
4) Should an eventual moderate temperature
increase bother us?
We have our answers to these questions and are
fortunate to have many well-known and respected
experts here who have made important
contributions in answering them. Yet, I am not
sure this is enough. People tend to blindly
believe in the IPCC’s conclusions
(especially in the easier to understand
formulations presented in the “Summaries for
Policymakers”) despite the fact that from
the very beginning, the IPCC has been a political
rather than a scientific undertaking.
http://www.klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=XpAV39wT4A32
BP gave
$500 million to UC Berkeley to develop new
sources of energy.
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml
ExxonMobil worked to
establish and is providing $100 million to
Stanford University's Global Climate and Energy
Project.
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/energy_climate_actions_gcep.aspx
addressing the risks of
climate change: ExxonMobil's views and actions
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/energy_climate_views.aspx
The Creeping Fascism of Global
Warming Hysteria (alex ones)
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2007/130207globalwarming.htm
Czech
president derogates UN global-warming panel
http://rawstory.com/news/2006/Czech_president_derogates_UN_global_02092007.html
***************************************
Pew Foundation and global
warming
http://www.pewtrusts.com/ideas/index.cfm?issue=19
This right wing piece is complaining about the
Pew Founation unaware they are owned by the
aforemention ed oil company fascists (literally).
http://www.cato.org/dailys/07-08-99.html
The story was rooted in a recent study by Tom
Wigley, introduced as "a respected
climatologist." Wigley's study was financed
by the Pew Foundation, which is running a
multi-million-dollar campaign to hype global
warming.
http://www.pewclimate.org/
The Pew family (Sun Ol)
Pew - Facing the Corporate Roots of American
Fascism
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/pew.html
Climate Change Speech
By John Browne, Group [b]Chief Executive, British
Petroleum[/b] (BP America)
http://dieoff.org/page106.htm
"But there is now an effective consensus
among the world's leading scientists and serious
and well informed people outside the scientific
community that there is a discernible human
influence on the climate, and a link between the
concentration of carbon dioxide and the increase
in temperature.
The prediction of the IPCC is that over the next
century temperatures might rise by a further 1 to
3.5 degrees centigrade, and that sea levels might
rise by between 15 and 95 centimetres. Some of
that impact is probably unavoidable, because it
results from current emissions. "
Exxon
For our part, ExxonMobil is
taking action to mitigate greenhouse gas
emissions today and to support the development of
advanced energy technologies with the potential
to significantly reduce future emissions. These
include:
http://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/campaign/energynow_savingenergy.asp
ExxonMobil is committed to
consistent, comprehensive reporting of greenhouse
gas emissions
ExxonMobil worked to establish and is providing
$100 million to Stanford University’s Global
Climate and Energy Project – the
largest-ever independent climate and energy
research.
http://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/campaign/climate_view.asp
http://www2.exxonmobil.com/corporate/Campaign/Campaign_energysaving_research.asp
Clean tech: Green energy is
the modern gold rush
Alternative
power Investors are falling over themselves to
put cash into the search for cleaner fuels
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/02/renewableenergy.carbonemissions
The EU's carbon trading scheme
has increased electricity bills, given a windfall
to power companies and failed to cut greenhouse
gases, it is claimed
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/file_on_4/6720119.stm
The rise in price is apparently
caused by speculation due to changes in American
trading laws that permit (amongst other things)
the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), to use its
terminals to trade U.S. crude oil futures,
gasoline and heating oil contracts. Supply is
actually greater than demand but oil is being
horded (some have said by oil companies).
http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/08/enron_and_todays_oil_and_gas_p.html
Britain's dirty business
These four projects are among
the most environmentally damaging on the planet.
So why is a British government department backing
them?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3666273.ece
BP Climate
http://www.bp.com/subsection.do?categoryId=9015577&contentId=7031715
BP CEO Lord Browne's Speech
(Pew Foundation)
We’ve shown that it is
possible to reduce emissions of methane and CO2
from our own operations – by eliminating
waste and leaks and by applying technology, for
instance to eliminate the venting of methane.
Carbon's Power Brokers
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/30/AR2008053002521_pf.html
Pew Center on Global Climate
Change
http://www.pewclimate.org/about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pew_Center_on_Global_Climate_Change
The Pew Charitable Trusts
http://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work.aspx?category=112
The Trusts, a single entity, is
the successor to, and sole beneficiary of, seven
charitable funds established between 1948 and
1979 by the adult children of Sun
Oil Company founder Joseph N Pew.
Joseph Pew and his heirs were
politically conservative.
The J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust had as its
mission to "acquaint the American people
with 'the evils of bureaucracy' and 'the values
of a free market' and 'to inform our people of the
struggle, persecution, hardship, sacrifice and
death by which freedom of the individual was
won.'" Joseph N. Pew, Jr. called Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, "a gigantic scheme to raze U.S
businesses to a dead level and debase the
citizenry into a mass of ballot-casting
serfs."[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pew_Charitable_Trusts
The Plot to Sieze
the White House by Jules Archer - pews
http://www.eclectica.org/v1n1/reviews/wharton_plot.html
Business Environmental
Leadership Council (BELC) Member Companies (pew)
http://www.pewclimate.org/companies_leading_the_way_belc/company_profiles/
BP gave
$500 million to UC Berkeley to develop new
sources of energy.
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml
ExxonMobil worked to
establish and is providing $100 million to
Stanford University's Global Climate and Energy
Project.
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/energy_climate_actions_gcep.aspx
addressing the risks of
climate change: ExxonMobil's views and actions
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/energy_climate_views.aspx
The Creeping Fascism of Global
Warming Hysteria (alex ones)
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2007/130207globalwarming.htm
Czech
president derogates UN global-warming panel
http://rawstory.com/news/2006/Czech_president_derogates_UN_global_02092007.html
***************************************
Pew Foundation and global
warming
http://www.pewtrusts.com/ideas/index.cfm?issue=19
This right wing piece is complaining about the
Pew Founation unaware they are owned by the
aforemention ed oil company fascists (literally).
http://www.cato.org/dailys/07-08-99.html
The story was rooted in a recent study by Tom
Wigley, introduced as "a respected
climatologist." Wigley's study was financed
by the Pew Foundation, which is running a
multi-million-dollar campaign to hype global
warming.
http://www.pewclimate.org/
The Pew family (Sun Ol)
Pew - Facing the Corporate Roots of American
Fascism
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/pew.html
Climate Change Speech
By John Browne, Group [b]Chief Executive, British
Petroleum[/b] (BP America)
http://dieoff.org/page106.htm
"But there is now an effective consensus
among the world's leading scientists and serious
and well informed people outside the scientific
community that there is a discernible human
influence on the climate, and a link between the
concentration of carbon dioxide and the increase
in temperature.
The prediction of the IPCC is that over the next
century temperatures might rise by a further 1 to
3.5 degrees centigrade, and that sea levels might
rise by between 15 and 95 centimetres. Some of
that impact is probably unavoidable, because it
results from current emissions. "
Exxon
For our part, ExxonMobil is
taking action to mitigate greenhouse gas
emissions today and to support the development of
advanced energy technologies with the potential
to significantly reduce future emissions. These
include:
http://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/campaign/energynow_savingenergy.asp
ExxonMobil is committed to
consistent, comprehensive reporting of greenhouse
gas emissions
ExxonMobil worked to establish and is providing
$100 million to Stanford University’s Global
Climate and Energy Project – the
largest-ever independent climate and energy
research.
http://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/campaign/climate_view.asp
http://www2.exxonmobil.com/corporate/Campaign/Campaign_energysaving_research.asp
Why are the massive global
corporations and banks who promote global warming
investing enormous amounts of capital in India
and China where there are no environmental
controls ? Why do they want billions Indian,
Chinese and other developing world workers to buy
cars and pour out massive amounts of CO2 into the
atmosphere. Why do they want Americans and
Europeans to save pennies a week on long life
light bulbs when the investment banks are paying
for a new coal power station every week in India
and the same in China ?
http://www.theclimategroup.org/about/members_and_partners/associates
B&Q
Barclaycard
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Business in the Community
Church of England
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Man Group
MORE TH>N
MySpace
National Express
O2
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Warner Bros
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Your M&S
BT
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Affairs
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This confirms Svensmark's research which will be
further tested at CERN in the near future.
<b>Study shows CFCs, cosmic rays major
culprits for global warming </b>
Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both
already implicated in depleting the Earth's ozone
layer, are also responsible for changes in the
global climate, a University of Waterloo
scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.
In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics
and astronomy, shows how CFCs - compounds once
widely used as refrigerants - and cosmic rays -
energy particles originating in outer space - are
mostly to blame for climate change, rather than
carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper,
derived from observations of satellite,
ground-based and balloon measurements as well as
an innovative use of an established mechanism,
was published online in the prestigious journal
Physics Reports.
"My findings do not agree with the climate
models that conventionally thought that
greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major
culprits for the global warming seen in the late
20th century," Lu said. "Instead, the
observed data show that CFCs conspiring with
cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic
ozone hole and global warming. These findings are
totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused
on studying the mechanism for the formation of
the ozone hole, rather than global warming."
<a
href="http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8012">http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8012</a>
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