The world's leading climate scientist James Hansen wrote this in the Guardian.
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
George Monbiot
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. 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/
The following represents pretty comprehensive proof that rather than opposing AGW, the oil companies support it and are indeed with the banks, the driving force behind it.
Kyoto
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.
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
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. 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
Fossil
fuel and finance industries
International Emissions Trading Association (IETA)
The biggest lobbying group at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference 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..
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.
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
Shell Canada
The debate about climate change is over and we need to take
action," says Ertel, Shell Canada's climate change expert.
here
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'semissions 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
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.
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
Jeremy Grantham's 2Q 2010 letter
Global warming will be the most important investment issue for the foreseeable future. But how to make money around this issue in the next few years is not yet clear to me. In a fast-moving fi eld rife with treacherous politics, there will be many failures. Marketing a “climate” fund would be much easier than outperforming with it.
http://www.gmo.com/websitecontent/JGLetter_SummerEssays_2Q10.pdf
Stern launches carbon credit ratings agency
By Fiona Harvey in London
Published: June 24 2008 20:52 | Last updated: June 24 2008 20:52
Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the UK’s Stern report on climate change, will launch a new carbon credit ratings agency on Wednesday, the first to score carbon credits on a similar basis to that used to rate debt.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/897fc1b4-4219-11dd-a5e8-0000779fd2ac.html
Putting the hippies on the payroll
Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance,
by James Heartfield
"In other words, green capitalism is not a passing fad adopted
by a few corporate bosses, too spineless to stand up to the
hippies; it expresses an essential feature of the social system.
As Heartfield reminds us, the origins of modern environmentalism
lie in the 1970s when the elite industrialists of the Club of
Rome commissioned The Limits to Growth report. As the long
post-war boom ended, arguing that the world was running out of
resources was another way of saying that there was nothing left
to redistribute, and that trade unions must settle for lower
wages (p27). (Needless to say, the Club of Rome’s predictions
about the exhaustion of natural resources were all confounded
[p13]).
http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2008-03/heartfield.htm
Amory Lovins' negawatt revolution in California was
Enron's wet dream.
Having shut down its own generation capacity, PG&E was at the
mercy of Enron's market manipulation. Buying surplus electricity
on the open market PG&E was royally fleeced, losing US$12
billion. Utility bills rose by nine times between May 2000 and
May 2001. Enron took advantage of the restricted market and cut
electricity to California. They even invented reasons to take
power plants offline while California was blacked out. Enron
officials joked that they were stealing one million dollars a
day from California.[6] The PG&E that Lovins held up as a model
went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the State of
California.
James Heartfield
http://curezone.com/forums/fmp.asp?i=1691985
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/
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
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
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
Carbon Credit fraud
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
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
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
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.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/11/industries-greenhouse-gas-emission-permits
#
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
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
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
****************
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
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
CRU Sponsorship
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
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?
******************
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
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/
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
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
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
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
****************************************************
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 fromextremely 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://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
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.
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
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.
http://www.pewclimate.org/companies_leading_the_way_belc/company_profiles/bp_amoco/browne.cfm
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.
http://www.pewclimate.org/companies_leading_the_way_belc/company_profiles/bp_amoco/browne.cfm
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 Companyfounder 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
British Gas
Business in the Community
Church of England
Coca-Cola
Man Group
MORE TH>N
MySpace
National Express
O2
Sky
Tesco
The Energy Saving Trust
The Government's Act on CO2 Campaign
The HSBC Climate Partnership The Mayor of London
The National Trust
Warner Bros
WRAP
WWF
Your M&S
BT
Dow
DuPont
General Motors
Holcim
IBM
IKEA
Interface
Johnson & Johnson
Michelin
Nike
Staple
Tetra Pak
Unilever
Vodafone
Wal-Mart
US
Dell
Chase
ClimateCounts
Climate Savers
City of Boston
City of Chicago
City of Las Vegas
City of Los Angeles
City of Miami
City of New York
City of Seattle
Global Footprint Network
ICLEI
Lenovo
MTv
MercyCorps
MySpace
National Wildlife Federation
New American Dream
Nestle Water
News Corporation
Recyclebank
American Red Cross
Smart
Target
Timberland
TimeWarner
Baker & McKenzie Limited
Barclays Bank
Thor Björgólfsson
Bullitt Foundation
W. Carey Crane III, Clean Power Foundation
Stephen Dawson
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Oleg Deripaska
DOEN Foundation
Dutch Postcode Lottery
Michael Edge
Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
Garfield Weston Foundation
Goldman Sachs & Co.
HDR
HSBC Holdings plc
JP Morgan Chase Foundation
Lazard Foundation
Lifesize
Man Group plc
MSST Foundation
MWH
Oak Foundation
Paul Pheby, Lotus Asset Management
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund
Rockefeller Family Fund
Gary Ross and Allison Thomas
Schroder Foundation
Shell International Ltd
Stanley and Barbara Fink Foundation
State of Victoria
Supply Chain Consulting
Swiss Reinsurance Company
The Carbon Trust
The Energy Foundation
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The Nand and Jeet Khemka Foundation
The Robertson Foundation
UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office
United Nations Foundation
Universal City Studios
Wadham College Students Union
Webex
World Resource Institute
Zennström Philanthropies