Global Warming Science: www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming
Alarmists Exaggerate and Expose Their Double Standard
[last update: 2010/11/06]
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Global warming alarmists exaggerate not only the effects of “climate change” but also their opponents’ views. They have a double standard, where lobbyists are “bad” – except when the lobbyists happen to push for legislation to limit CO2.
[2010/11/06 update: California Prop 23 Double Standard]
[2010/10/30 update: BP – The President’s Other Utility]
[2010/02/26 update: Greenpeace – Green$ for the Money] – expanded 2010/06/13
[2010/02/23 update: Jeffrey Sachs Assists Scientific American Propaganda Campaign]
[2010/02/22 update: Jeffrey Sachs and the Guardian Conduct Propaganda Campaign]
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The Exaggeration and Lobbyist Double Standard
Al Gore sent out an email from his Repower America lobby saying: “Despite the chorus of alarm bells sounding the need to address the climate crisis and stop polluting the air our families breathe and the water we drink, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski and her allies are attacking the Clean Air Act -- for the second time in six months” (emphasis added). Apparently Al Gore thinks that CO2 pollutes drinking water and affects breathing!
(Obama showed a similar “grasp” of science when he said: "At a time of great fiscal challenges, this legislation is paid for by the polluters who currently emit the dangerous carbon emissions that contaminate the water we drink and pollute the air we breathe” from “Obama urges Congress to move swiftly on climate change bill” [http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/23/obama-climate-change-congress])
Gore goes on: “And it gets worse. Last night, news broke that the original version of the amendment was literally drafted with lobbyists for the oil and coal industry”. Al Gore’s Repower America website links to the Washington Post article stating that Jeffrey Holmstead and Roger Martella Jr are the lobbyists referred to. They individually represent clients such as Southern Company, Duke Energy, Progress Energy, National Alliance of Forest Owners, etc.
Exaggeration is standard for the alarmists. For example, Trip Van Noppen writes on the Huffington Post: “Sen. Lisa Murkowski is on a mission, legislative guns blazing, to shoot holes through the Clean Air Act. In her scheme to bring down the Clean Air Act, Murkowski's script has been written by a pair of well-connected industry lobbyists whose clients include major coal-burning utilities like Duke Energy and the Southern Company. … Their alliance threatens to undermine one of the most important environmental safeguards our nation has. Sen. Murkowski and her allies want to transport us back to an era when large polluters had carte blanche to use our air as their Dumpster.” [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/trip-van-noppen/murkowski-guns-for-clean_b_422043.html] (Van Noppen is President of Earthjustice [slogan: “Because the earth needs a good lawyer”]. Earthjustice sues to stop oil drilling around the US).
Exelon – The President’s Utility
The other side of the double standard: The President’s Utility. Forbes magazine referred to Exelon as “the President’s Utility” [http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0118/americas-best-company-10-exelon-utility-tax-carbon-windfall.html] From the Forbes article:
“Ties are tight between Exelon and the Obama Administration: President Obama. Frank Clark, chief executive of Exelon's ComEd, is a big Obama fundraiser, helping him launch his run for President. Rahm Emanuel. John Rowe hired Emanuel (Obama's chief of staff, then at an investment bank) for advice on the 2000 merger that created Exelon. David Axelrod. His consulting firm helped concoct a public ComEd campaign for rate increases (before he became Obama's chief political strategist).”
“Exelon - the country's most valuable utility by market value. [John Rowe] created a generation subsidiary that sells the power produced by 17 reactors, by far the largest nuclear fleet in the nation and the third biggest in the world. Exelon's nukes turn out 130 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year and not a single metric ton of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas. That's a nice place to be now that it appears that Washington--helped along by Rowe's lobbying--is going to impose a price on carbon. Exelon needs that legislation to happen sooner rather than later. Without a carbon price of some sort, Exelon's fortunes aren't so bright” (Forbes article)
“Long before most environmental groups discovered the global warming issue, Rowe was warning of the dangers of climate change. In early 1992 — before the UN’s Maurice Strong and a U.S. senator named Al Gore launched the global warming issue at the Rio Earth Summit — Rowe was testifying in Congress about the need for carbon taxes to protect the planet. Needless to say, carbon taxes were also needed to protect the nuclear industry, which he represented.” [http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/17/the-free-luncher-exelon.aspx]
In December 2009 Exelon quit the US Chamber of Commerce because the Chamber is against cap-and trade or other CO2 regulation. “What exactly has the Chamber of Commerce done to earn so much vitriol from environmentalists and corporate defectors alike (the former now refer to the latter as “green corporations”)? Its most egregious act was to ask the Environmental Protection Agency to hold public hearings on proposed EPA regulations associated with global warming, to determine the best way to achieve health goals without harming the economy. The EPA had asked for comment on its proposed regulations, but had planned to make its decisions behind closed doors. Normally environmental organizations champion the transparency of public hearings; in this case they preferred private deliberations” http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/17/the-free-luncher-exelon.aspx]
Obama: “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket … they would have to retrofit their operations – that will cost money – they will pass that money on to consumers.” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLK-U8kggFk] (Actually the utilities will be passing the cost not the money on to consumers.)
BP – The President’s Other Utility
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/24/tea-party-climate-change-deniers]
From the Guardian article: “BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama's energy agenda … Obama and Democrats have accused corporate interests and anonymous donors of trying to hijack the midterms … "Oil companies and the other special interests are spending millions on a campaign to gut clean-air standards and clean-energy standards, jeopardising the health and prosperity of this state," Obama told a rally in California on Friday night. … BP made $25,000 in campaign donations, of which $18,000 went to senators who opposed action on climate change.”
The double standard: “Obama Biggest Recipient of BP Cash”: “BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Donations come from a mix of employees and the company’s political action committees — $2.89 million flowed to campaigns from BP-related PACs … During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.” [http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36783.html]
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See also: Climate Industrial Complex and Obama’s Government
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California Prop 23 Double Standard
The alarmists portrayed the California Proposition 23 (which would suspend the AB 32 global warming law until unemployment was reduced) as big oil versus little green energy. The truth is a different matter. The money won – but the big money was on the greeny side $31 million to $10 million.
The following is from the Los Angeles Times:
A list of the top funders of the greeny side can be found here: [http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/the-money-trail/7974-follow-the-money-whos-paying-to-defeat-californias-prop-23]
Info on Tom Steyer can be found here: [http://www.redcounty.com/content/tom-steyer-being-green-means-never-having-live-what-you-say] His Farallon has investments in Indonesia’s second largest coal company. [http://biggovernment.com/skruiser/2010/09/02/hedge-fund-manager-earns-millions-on-carbon-spends-it-financing-global-warming-initiative-campaign/]
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Jeffrey Sachs and the Guardian Conduct Propaganda Campaign
Jeffrey Sachs has joined the Guardian in promoting lies about global warming skeptics.
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/feb/19/climate-change-sceptics-science] “The fact is that the critics — who are few in number but aggressive in their attacks — are deploying tactics that they have honed for more than 25 years. During their long campaign, they have greatly exaggerated scientific disagreements in order to stop action on climate change, with special interests like Exxon Mobil footing the bill.”
For the record, I have never campaigned against controls on tobacco, or acid rain, or received payment from anyone for my research. [Special plea to ExxonMobil: I have not received my funding yet – please send it soon!]
Sachs is Director of the U.N. Millennium Project created by Kofi Annan in 2002, which was set up to “recommend a concrete action plan for the world to reverse the grinding poverty” and achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG) [http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/who/index.htm] Their report states “perhaps $1 billion is needed for greater understanding of seasonal, interannual, and long-term climate change.” And has a section called “An international strategy to mitigate climate change” which states: “primary responsibility for mitigating climate change … must lie with the countries that cause the problems. Those are the high-income and some of the rapidly growing middle-income countries.”
What does forcing the western countries to pay for CO2 have to do with the MDG? “Climate change threatens sustainable development, especially the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Unless adaptation to climate change is funded through additional channels, the growing impact of climate change is expected to consume an increasing share of development aid. Official development assistance alone amounted to $120 billion in 2008. This amount is already insufficient to reach international development goals. … It must go for mechanisms and sanctions, including a globally accepted solution on taxing CO2.” (In the GHF report - See: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/HumanImpact.htm#forum for more details on this). Sachs doesn’t really care about climate change – it’s an excuse to scam money for wealth redistribution.
The United Nations University has studied methods of increasing funding. “A global tax on carbon use of just one cent/yen per liter, levied only on high-income countries, would by itself raise the necessary additional $50 billion of annual revenue [required for the MDGs]. … A progressive carbon tax rate … would more accurately reflect the unequal distribution of world income.” [http://update.unu.edu/archive/issue34_9.htm] (See: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GWForAfrica.htm for more details).
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Jeffrey Sachs Assists the Scientific American Propaganda Campaign
Scientific American has for years now been an advocacy magazine rather than a science magazine. Jeffrey Sachs wrote the March 2010 article shown below, in which he advocates for a carbon tax.
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=breaking-the-climate-debate-logjam]
“A predictable carbon tax would be much more effective than the cumbersome and nontransparent cap-and-trade system and might win broader assent … Let’s hear more from the president’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, Nobel laureate energy secretary Steven Chu”
Sachs has previously stated: “that the United States is "neurotic" about new taxes, but said they [carbon taxes] would be the best way to fund research and development and subsidies for big low-carbon energy projects” [http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE4988X020081009]
Jeffrey Sachs is a Special Advisor to U.N. Secretary Ban Ki Moon (and formerly special advisor to Kofi Annan).
Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Earth Institute – the Chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, is on the Earth Institute External Advisory Board (as is U2’s Bono and Mr. mega-money George Soros). (The Earth Institute external advisory board page does not mention that Pachauri is head of the IPCC – only that he is head of the Tata Energy Research Institute.)
An Earth Institute news article [http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/articles/view/2577] mentions a poll from October 2009. The poll survey report states: “There has been a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. And fewer also see global warming as a very serious problem – 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.” [http://people-press.org/report/556/global-warming]
The Earth Institute article considers people to be basically stupid (“For the nonscientist, climate can seem alternately confusing, overwhelming and politically loaded”) and promotes ambiguity (“concentrating on the strong consensus that sea levels will rise in the 21st century, versus confusing readers with disagreements over exactly how much levels will rise”). In other words, they try to mislead the public.
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Greenpeace – Green$ for the Money
Although the alarmists claim that AGW skeptics are in the pay of oil companies, it is the environmentalists who are the moneyed special interests.
Donna Laframboise has investigated the oil connection [http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/06/bp-greenpeace-big-oil-jackpot.html]. Greenpeace made a website called ExxonSecrets to exposed the fact that ExxonMobil donated a total of $2.2 million over a 9-year period to a conservative think tank. The Washington Post points out that green groups received even more from “big oil” including $10 million from BP and others to the Nature Conservancy and $2 million to Conservation International. All told the oil companies have paid green groups about 300 times what it has paid to conservative “denialist” groups.
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/17/greenpeace-builds-new-rainbow-warrior]
“German and Polish shipyards will shortly start work on Greenpeace's £14m flagship, a mega-yacht that will become the third Rainbow Warrior next year. It will be one of the biggest yachts to have been commissioned in the last decade, say the designers … The cost should not be a problem for the group, which, with nearly three million supporters, is extremely wealthy. The new Rainbow Warrior will bring the Greenpeace fleet to six ocean-going ships, as big as the navies of many island states such as Madagascar, the Seychelles, the Maldives and Mauritius.”
====================================================================== Regular Guardian contributor Joss Garman is a “climate campaigner at Greenpeace UK” – so of course, he’s unbiased.
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/feb/15/climate-science-ipcc-sceptics]
“Obama knew if he signed up to something that would truly deliver significant cuts in global warming pollution, he'd suffer a serious blow from this movement's army of activists and its allies in the Senate. This movement's ability to make Democrats pay a serious political price – just see what they helped to do in Massachusetts where the Democrat candidate lost a recent election – shows what raw activism can look like. The name of this world-changing movement? It's the Tea Party movement, coupled with its sophisticated echo chamber of right-wing shock jocks, culture-war keyboard commandos, and allies at Fox News, all pushing the scepticism line on climate change. Over the last few years as climate campaigners such as myself have tried to mount a good rational argument, theirs has mounted a powerful disinformation campaign. In the last few weeks we have witnessed that effective campaign gain momentum and turn into a sort of global asymmetrical warfare, with criticism of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for its claims about the speed with which Himalayan glaciers are melting, personal attacks against its chairman Rajendra Pachauri and a persistent hounding of climate scientists and those reviewing the scientists. … The most zealous deniers, a subculture of outlandish paranoid conspiracy theorists, claim to speak for independent thinking when in truth they're the shock troops for a choking and insidious form of censorship, blotting out the truth with the ideology and interests of the world's most powerful Big Carbon corporates.”
[For the record, I have never been part of the Tea Party movement. (And I will never promote censorship – choking and insidious, or other forms.)]
Garman, a regular Guardian contributor, is a climate campaigner at Greenpeace UK – a group who has received large amounts of money promoting the AGW scare. He has “been arrested more than 20 times, honored by The Guardian as one of “50 People Who Could Save the Planet”” [http://earthfirst.com/whos-who-in-green-joss-garman/]. It seems he is now trying his hand at comedy (or perhaps deliberately lying).
Similar to Greenpeace, The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has greatly increased its revenues since global warming became its main focus (“The common denominator in everything we do is climate change. This Annual Report features a special section on climate change and our approaches to taming what has become the greatest environmental crisis ever faced.” – from the WWF 2008 Annual Report [www.worldwildlife.org/who/financialinfo/2008AR/index.html])
WWF in 2008 had operating revenue of $196.5 million – a 30% increase over 2006. WWF was started in 1961 as the funding arm for the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature – “the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network”). The IUCN/WWF under the auspices of Maurice Strong organized the Rio “Earth Summit” NGO Forum.
See also: http://www.climate-resistance.org/2010/01/wwf-wtf.html exposing the lie of who is benefiting. They show Greenpeace’s budget at close to 200 million Euros / year. Selling global warming alarm is Big-Business.
[For the record: I was a member of Greenpeace in the early 1980s. Now I despise their disregard for science. In this regard, I join Patrick Moore, Co-founder of Greenpeace, now Chairman and Chief Scientist of Greenspirit Strategies: “The environmental movement has lost its way, favoring political correctness over factual accuracy, stooping to scare tactics to garner support. Many campaigns now waged in the name of the environment would result in increased harm to both the environment and human welfare if they were to succeed. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Greenpeace, and much of the environmental movement, made a sharp turn to the political left and began adopting extreme agendas that abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism. … The Prognosis: Environmentalism has turned into anti-globalization and anti-industry. Activists have abandoned science in favour of sensationalism. Their zero-tolerance, fear-mongering campaigns would ultimately prevent a cure for Vitamin A deficiency blindness, increase pesticide use, increase heart disease, deplete wild salmon stocks, raise the cost and reduce the safety of health care, raise construction costs, deprive developing nations of clean electricity, stop renewable wind energy, block a solution to global warming, and contribute to deforestation. How sick is that?” [http://www.greenspirit.com/logbook.cfm?msid=83]]
WWF and Greenpeace buy the IPCC and insert their publications as references: [http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-dodgy-citations-in-nobel-winning.html]
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Murkowski Tries to Delay EPA’s Regulation of CO2
[update 2010/06/11]: The senate voted 53-47 against it.
Senator Lisa Murkowski (R. Alaska) is pushing a disapproval resolution to overturn EPA’s regulation of CO2 under the Clean Air Act – as she says “so that we can focus on more responsible approaches to dealing with global climate change”. [http://murkowski.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=InNews&ContentRecord_id=36dca7e5-b766-4311-86ee-b3850c0db6ed] Originally proposed as an amendment to a bill in Sep. 2009, it has been revised following the EPA’s endangerment finding in Dec 2009 that greenhouse gases pose a danger threatening public health and welfare.
Details of Murkowski’s resolutions can be found here:
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