Many of the biggest political promoters of global warming like Gore, Thatcher and IPCC chief, Pachauri are closely connected to the oil and gas industry. Al Gore spent his entire career fronting for Occidental Oil - (his father was a director) Margaret Thatcher ( her husband was a director of Burmah Oil), Kenneth Lay (Enron), Rajendra K Pachauri (director of Indian Oil Corp.even during his time as head of the IPCC ).
BBC - Gore is political front for Occidental
This dispute is threatening Al Gore's reputation as an environmentalist. He has close ties and a large financial stake in Occidental Petroleum, despite its poor environmental image. His father, Al Gore senior, was on Occidental's board for three decades. As vice president of the United States, his son helped the company win drilling concessions. The one company that has helped make him financially whole and has helped him politically is Occidental Petroleum. Charles Lewis, Center for Public Integrity
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/677105.stm
Al Gore: The Other Oil Candidate
Gore senior first met long-time Occidental CEO Armand Hammer at a cattle auction in the 1940s. When zinc ore was discovered on some of Gore's land, Hammer and Oxy bought it for twice the amount of the only other bid. Hammer then sold the land back to Gore while retaining the mineral rights. The elder Gore then sold the land to his son, Al Jr., who has received $20,000 yearly in mineral royalties from Occidental ever since. Two years after Gore Sr. was defeated in a bid for re-election to the Senate, he joined Occidental as a member of its board of directors and was rewarded with a $500,000 a year job working for an Oxy subsidiary.
Throughout his political life, Al
Gore Jr. has received the favor the patronage of Occidental and
Hammer's successor, CEO Ray Irani.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=468
Meanwhile, sitting on the board of another virtuous-sounding group - the Alliance for Climate Protection (ACP) - is one of the world's most famous green champions, Al Gore, the former Democratic vice-president, who founded the organisation in 2006. Alongside him sits Theodore Roosevelt IV. An "active conservationist", Theodore the Fourth is a member of the Wilderness Society's governing council, chair of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a trustee for the World Resources Institute - and a managing director of Barclays Capital.
Consider another environmental-economics powerhouse, Generation Investment Management (GIM). Yes, Gore founded it, too, but this time with the aid of David Blood - chief executive of Goldman Sachs Asset Management from 1999 to 2003. Blood's personal mission is to make businesses more "ethical and sustainable", and to this end he has dedicated the company to "long-term investing and sustainability research". GIM focuses on "environmental degradation, poverty and development". Oh yes, one other thing: it is now valued at $2.2 billion (£1.5 billion).
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=412726&c=2
Al Gore could become world's first carbon billionaire
Gore worth $100 million
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3281925
But while the average US household consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy, the Gore home used nearly 221,000 kWh, more than 20 times the national average. Since the film's release, his home's energy consumption has increased from about 16,200 kWh per month in 2005 to 18,400 kWh per month last year.
Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore left the White House with less than $2 million US in assets, including a Virginia home and the family farm in Tennessee.
http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/story.html?id=f5eda7b7-fc8b-4d97-9652-b148247cbe89
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher was the first senior politician to get involved in the global warming debate. At the time she was closing the British coal industry, fighting a battle with the miner's unions, attempting to expand nuclear energy and reducing Britain's manufacturing base to rubble. She also introduced 'big bang', a massive deregulation of the City of London financial centre which went on to become became the biggest in the world. . She established the Hadley Centre which is arguably the most influential climate data centre in the world. Her husband was a director of Burmah Oil and her government was dominated by the oil industry.
On November 8 1989, Margaret Thatcher shocked the UN with a speech on global warming
Two days before she delivered the speech, the UK blocked a proposal at a conference in the Netherlands for a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2005. On the day after the speech, the energy secretary, John Wakeham, told the House of Commons that he had been forced to abandon the government's insane plan to privatise nuclear power. It was Thatcher who insisted that "nothing can stop the great car economy" and her ministers who announced "the biggest roadbuilding programme since the Romans".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2005/jun/30/climatechange.climatechangeenvironment1
Digging up the roots of the IPCC
By the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher,
then prime minister of the UK, was eager to demonstrate the
seriousness with which she took environmental issues in general
and climate issues in particular. In September 1988, she gave a
much-publicised speech to the Royal Society in which, citing
concerns over global warming, the ozone layer and acid
depositions
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3540/
History of the Met Office Hadley Centre
The Met Office Hadley Centre was opened in 1990, by the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, when the Met Office was at its previous headquarters in Bracknell.
Prior to the opening of the dedicated centre different areas of the Met Office had been undertaking climatology research. By the late 1980s the Synoptic Climatology Branch was working closely with the Climatic Research Unit to produce an integrated global land surface air and sea surface temperature data set. This was the primary data set used to assess observed global warming by the IPCC in 1990.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/hadleycentre/
Margaret Thatcher:
Speech opening Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/Speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=108102&doctype=1
Much of the following is a series of articles revealing the British global warming agenda.
There is mounting concern over what industry observers call the "supernormal" profits being made in the North Sea amid the continuing strength of the oil price. For oil explorers, the North Sea is among the world's most benign tax regimes, not least because the first Thatcher administration abolished special royalties and upped exploration allowances.
UK looks to break climate logjam
The UK government is hoping to bridge some difficult divides
over tackling climate change at a meeting in London.
The Major Economies Forum (MEF) brings together 17 of the world's biggest greenhouse gas-emitting countries.
The meeting on Sunday and Monday will aim to make progress on protecting forests and providing finance to help poor countries adapt to climate change.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8312552.stm
*********************************
*****************
Rajendra Pachauri (another oil company front)
Pachauri was simultaneously head of the IPCC and a director of the Indian Oil Corporation
"He (Pachauri ) had been on the Board of Directors of the Indian
Oil Corporation (1999-2003), GAIL (India) Ltd. (Largest gas
transmission and marketing company in India) (2003-2004) and
National Thermal Power Corporation Ltd (includes coal and gas
generation) (2002-2005).
http://www.iddri.org/Iddri/Intervenants-auteurs/Rajendra-K.-Pachauri
Wikipedia
On 20 April 2002, Pachauri was elected Chairman of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations
panel established by the WMO and UNEP to assess information
relevant for understanding climate change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajendra_K._Pachauri
Pachauri's Conflicts of Interest
Saving carbon emissions
Another eight companies have been licensed to sell or implement
Teri’s biomass gassifiers which convert plant and wood residue
to gas that drives an alternator to produce electricity. If an
Australian government-funded project to develop a solar
biomass-based cooling system works out, this too will convert
into a series of licences. Eighty to 90 glass units in Firozabad
near Agra use Teri’s pot furnace and several brick kilns use its
vertical shaft brick kiln. According to Teri, its technologies
helped the medium- and small-scale sector save around 350,000
tonnes of carbon emissions last year.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/01/pachauris-conflicts-of-interest.html
Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri
It is one of these deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to transfer three million tonnes of steel production from its Corus plant in Redcar to a new plant in Orissa, thus gaining a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (and putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).
More than three-quarters of the world ‘carbon’ market benefits India and China in this way. India alone has 1,455 CDM projects in operation, worth $33 billion (£20 billion), many of them facilitated by Tata – and it is perhaps unsurprising that Dr Pachauri also serves on the advisory board of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the largest and most lucrative carbon-trading exchange in the world, which was also assisted by TERI in setting up India’s own carbon exchange.
But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world’s top ‘climate-change official’.
In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in ‘sustainable technologies’, where he was expected to provide the Fund with ‘access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level’
Lord Nicholas Stern / Grantham
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
Stern Review
Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta calls Stern's combination of pure rate of time preference and rate of risk aversion "patently absurd" as this would imply a savings rate of 97.5% while the observed rate is around 15% . Berkeley economist Hal Varian shares Dasgupta's critique.
Richard Tol, an environmental economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute and lead author (amongst a total of over 450 lead authors) for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that "If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a Masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a 'D' for diligence; but more likely I would give him an 'F' for fail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review#Unfavorable_critical_response
********************************
Tony Blair
Blair to lead campaign on climate change
Tony Blair is to lead a new international team to tackle the intractable problem of securing a global deal on climate change which would have the backing of China and America.
The former prime minister believes he can help prepare a blueprint for an agreement to cut carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, and has the backing of the White House, the UN and Europe, including Gordon Brown.
He told the Guardian he has been working on the project with a group of climate change experts since he left office last summer, and will publish an interim report to the G8 group of industrialised nations this summer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/14/tonyblair.climatechange
Tony Blair has taken a second big job with a leading financial player, attracted by the prospect of working on its climate-change initiative.
The former Prime Minister has joined Zurich, the Swiss company, as an adviser. The appointment, thought to be worth at least £500,000 a year, comes less than three weeks after he took a similar role with J P Morgan Chase, one of the biggest investment banks on Wall Street. That was believed to be a package worth about £2 million a year.
He will assist Zurich on “developments and trends in the international political environment”. His key interest, according to friends, was in its climate initiative, announced last week, developing products and research to combat global warming.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3266329.ece
Tony Blair to earn millions as climate change adviser
Tony Blair is set to earn millions of pounds advising an American businessman on how to make money from tackling climate change.
The former prime minister will be paid at least £700,000 a year to act as a “strategic adviser” to Khosla Ventures, a venture capitalist firm founded by Indian billionaire Vinod Khosla.
The Californian company bankrolls businesses hoping to profit from technology that helps reduce global warming and carbon emissions.
Mr Blair secured the job thanks to his “influence” and high level international contacts, whom he will be expected to lean on to open doors.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is joining US venture capital firm Khosla Ventures as an adviser.
The business, started in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of technology giant Sun Microsystems, specialises in environmentally-friendly technologies.
These include solar, wind and nuclear energy projects.
Khosla also backs start-ups in sectors such as mobile phones and the internet. It has not been disclosed how much Mr Blair will be paid.
According to Khosla, which last year raised $1.3bn (£900m) from private investors, Mr Blair will provide strategic advice regarding investments in environmentally friendly or helpful technologies.
He has told friends he needs £5 million a year to fund his lifestyle.
The Institute for Public Policy Research
The IPPR, a New Labour think tank has over 400 publications on global warming
http://www.ippr.org.uk/search/?title=climate&Submit=search
Here is some professional
prepared material designed to destroy climate debate.
Figure 2 is a representation of the possible evolution of the
climate change discourse. If it is right, it suggests that there
is value in helping to ‘quieten’ the discourse, taking it out of
argumentative mode. AsFuterra has suggested, we need to ‘forget
the climate change detractors’ (Futerra Sustainability
Communications Ltd 2005: 6) and work to establish a new form of
common sense. In this new popular consensus, the
taken-for-granted nature of climate change is treated as being
beyond argument. In other words, there is no need to discuss it
– we can just get on and do what is required.
http://www.ippr.org.uk/ecomm/files/warm_words.pdf
This one consists of instructions to counteract specific arguments.
http://www.ippr.org.uk/pressreleases/?id=2240
Ed Miliband - British
government environment minister
"When you think about all the big historic movements, from the
suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the
1960s, all the big political movements had popular
mobilisation,"said Miliband.
"Maybe it's an odd thing for someone in government to say, but I
just think there's a real opportunity and a need here."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/08/ed-miliband-climate-politics-environment
*******************
Adam Curtis’s latest offering (“All watched over by machines of loving grace”, episode 2, “How the idea of the ecosystem was invented”, BBC2, 30 May 2011, 9pm) is more substantial in research depth and ideas than his earlier 1992 attack on systems analysis in Pandora’s Box: To the Brink of Eternity.
In this new episode, which gets ever better towards the end, Curtis makes an effort to attack – in a compelling way – the basic errors in mainstream political eco-evangelism. After some half hour of drivel, he gets down to business and shows that systems analyst Jay Forrester, who designed early warning radar computer analysis systems in the 1950s, was behind the Limits to Growth Club of Rome environmentalism scam in the early 1970s. Forrester claimed to include feedback loops for all possibilities in the computer model he developed for the Club of Rome, but in fact omitted all feedback loops for human responses to overpopulation and the energy crisis, such as political actions.
In other words, the Club of Rome’s disaster predictions for overpopulation, starvation, lack of sufficient energy resources, and pollution were all based on the assumption that the world would not politically adapt to growth to compensate for them. As a result, the computer forecast led to a prediction with a false claim behind it: there will be disaster unless the world is stabilized in its present form to stop further growth. The more sensible option of naturally taking countermeasures against the undesirable effects of growth was neglected in favour of stabilizing the world in its present form. (This claim is identical to the Cold War era nuclear war propaganda “science”, which claimed that we will cease to exist if we don’t disarm, neglecting the fact that similar gas warfare lies in the 30s caused appeasement and ethnic minorities being exterminated not by bullets or bombs but by cold-blooded starvation and gas chambers in concentration camps.)
http://nige.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/adam-curtis-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace-bbc2/
Nuclear
Go-ahead for 10 nuclear stations
The government has approved 10 sites in England and
Wales for new nuclear power stations, most of them in locations
where there are already plants. It has rejected only one
proposed site - in Dungeness, Kent - as being unsuitable on
environmental grounds. A new planning commission will make
decisions on the proposals "within a year" of receiving them,
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told MPs. Nuclear was a "proven and
reliable" energy source, he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8349715.stm
Labour and the nuclear lobby
Anti-nuclear campaigners
like to portray the government as being in the pocket of the
nuclear industry.How else, they argue, do you explain the return
to favour of an industry once written-off as dirty, dangerous
and prohibitively expensive? The picture put forward by some
critics is certainly a powerful one. It suggests the image of
hapless ministers being schmoozed into submission by
smooth-talking former party grandees now in the pay of nuclear
multinationals.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5149676.stm
Ed Miliband 'too busy' to marry pregnant girlfriend
He had provided officials at the Department for Energy and Climate Change with her name, but did not publish it on the publicly available register of ministerial interests, merely reporting that his girlfriend was an “environmental lawyer.” In fact, Miss Thornton was the “preferred counsel” for E. On, which was bidding for government contracts worth more than £20 billion to build new power stations.
27 Sep 2010
Obviously a very fruitful union.
E.ON and RWE to build £20bn UK nuclear reactors
E.ON and RWE, Germany's two
largest utilities companies, are set to announce the creation of
a joint venture to build at least four nuclear reactors in the
UK at a cost of around £20 billion, The
Times has learnt.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilities/article5516458.ece
Keep It In The Family, Gordon
What makes this decision politically sensitive, is that Gordon Brown has close family connections to the nuclear industry. His younger brother Andrew Brown works for EDF Energy, the UK subsidiary of EDF, which operates nuclear power stations in France, and which is one of the leading companies pushing for a nuclear rebuild programme in the UK. Andrew Brown was appointed as EDF Energy's Head of Press on 13 September 2004.
http://www.nuclearspin.org/index.php/Gordon_Brown
EDF Energy calls for UK carbon floor price
LONDON, May 26 (Reuters) - Britain should encourage investment
in low-carbon energy like nuclear power by setting a minimum
charge that fossil fuel burning generators must pay to emit
climate-warming carbon dioxide, EDF Energy said on Tuesday.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKLQ06362720090526
EDF, the world’s leading nuclear power utility, operates
a French nuclear fleet consisting of 58 reactors spread over 19
different sites
http://www.edf.fr/accueil-fr/edf-and-power-generation/nuclear-power-122172.html
German abandonment of nuclear power
In 2000, the German government, consisting of the SPD and Alliance '90/The Greens officially announced its intention to phase out the use of nuclear power. Jürgen Trittin(from the German Greens) as the Minister of Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, reached an agreement with energy companies on the gradual shut down of the country's nineteen nuclear power plants and a cessation of civil usage of nuclear power by 2020.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
Higher cancer risk for children near nuclear power plants found in Germany
A new study on behalf of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection is the first study to show reliable results: the risk of children under 5 years of age to contract leukaemia increases the closer they live to a nuclear power plant. This is the result of an investigation of the German Childhood Cancer Registry (GCCR) in Mainz carried out on behalf of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection. The investigation concludes that in the study period from 1980 to 2003, within a radius of 5 km around the reactors, 37 children contracted leukaemia. On the statistical average, 17 cases would have to be expected. About 20 cases can thus be attributed to the fact that they live within this radius.
http://www.insnet.org/ins_headlines.rxml?id=5571&photo=
German solution:coal
The Vattenfall project in Berlin is only one example of a larger trend. Utility companies want to set up a total of 26 new coal-fired power plants in Germany during the coming years.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,472786,00.html
**************************
Aristocracy
The leaders of the environmental
movement are predominantly from upper class backgrounds,
particularly in Britain but also the financial elite in the
United States. It suggests that they are motivated by right
rather than left wing anti capitalism. There is a seperate page
on that here
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sealed/gw/aristocrats.htm
Eugenics
The arch Malthusian James Lovelock describes humans as a "pathogenic organism" and a "plague": "The human species is now so numerous as to constitute a serious planetary malady."
Dr Susan Blackmore said "there are too many people" and then said: "For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/jun/13/cameron-diaz-malthusian-population
***********************
Soros/ Stern/Stigliz/Sachs/Hansen
The Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy at CEU was opened on April 21st by George Soros,
Greenpeace
It's time to take a stand on global warming. Dr. James Hansen,
an internationally-recognized climate scientist, calls for
Americans to take part in the Capitol Climate Action on March 2
at the Capitol power plant in Washington DC -- expected to be
the largest display of civil disobedience against global warming
in US history. Dr. Hansen warns that unless we stop burning
coal, the country's largest source of global warming pollution,
young people will inherit a dramatically different world than
the one we know
http://vimeo.com/3268481?pg=embed&sec=
The Soros Threat To Democracy
NASA’s Hansen Mentioned in
Soros Foundations
How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely "NASA whistleblower" standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros' Open Society Institute , which gave him "legal and media advice"?
That's right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros' flagship "philanthropy," by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI's "politicization of science" program.
That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly "censored" spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.
Hansen even succeeded, with
public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing
NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen's
OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole
production differently. The outcome could have been different.
http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=275526219598836
Page 123 of Soros
report mentions Hansen.
http://www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/publications/annual_20070731/a_complete.pdf
Scientist Protests NASA's Censorship Attempts
James E. Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, protested attempts to silence him after officials at NASA ordered him to refer press inquiries to the public affairs office and required the presence of a public affairs representative at any interview. The Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection organization and OSI grantee, came to Hansen's defense by providing legal and media advice. The campaign on Hansen's behalf resulted in a decision by NASA to revisit its media policy.
Is the analogy between climate change and Hitler’s atrocities appropriate?
If we cannot stop the building of
more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death
trains -- no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to
crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species
http://www.grist.org/article/global-warming-and-the-holocaust/
James Hansen, the world's most famous climate scientist
recently endorsed an extreme eco
fascist book
by Keith Farnish calling for the destruction of industrial
civilisation starting with acts of terrorism.
.
Farnish writes
The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization
Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage.
Hansen's endorsement
Keith Farnish has it right: time has practically run out, and the 'system' is the problem. Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests - they will not look after our and the planet's well-being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort. --Professor James Hansen, GISS, NASA
Hansen appeared along with a man of similar extremes,
Zac Goldsmith, in a UK court to defend an 'act of of terrorism'
against Kingsnorth power station. that resulted in £30,000 of
damage .
Kingsnorth report in the Guardian
Hansen, a Nasa director who advises Al Gore, the former US
presidential candidate turned climate change campaigner, told
the court that humanity was in "grave peril". "Somebody needs to
step forward and say there has to be a moratorium, draw a line
in the sand and say no more coal-fired power stations."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/11/activists.kingsnorthclimatecamp
Tales from the climate-change crossroads
Roger Pielke, Jr1
Four books by prominent global-warming pundits illustrate that exhortation and authority are not enough to solve the climate crisis — it is time for some humility, concludes Roger Pielke Jr.
Hansen's complaint that leaders of
sovereign countries have not acceded to his demands implies a
criticism of democracy, also present in Schneider's book. If
science leads inexorably to particular political outcomes, then
it would seem to favour autocratic forms of governance. The
middle man — the general public — is easily ignored if heads of
state need only hear the expert voice of science. Schneider
worries that democracy finds it hard to deal with complex
issues: if only the public understood the real risks, he
explains, they would be “much more likely to send strong signals
to their representatives”. He bemoans a public debate that
includes the participation of “special interests” and that is
filtered through an inept media, a perspective echoed by Hansen.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7287/full/464352a.html
**********************
George Monbiot endorsed the actions of protesters who
sabotaged Scottish mine equipment and encouraged future similar
action.
But while the government undermines its own targets, some people
in Scotland are putting its climate change policy into effect.
The Scottish camp for climate action has declared war on
opencast coal mining. Yesterday people associated with it did
what the government should have done years ago, and cut the
conveyor belt used to carry coal from the Glentaggart pit in
Lanarkshire to the local rail terminal. Now they propose to take
on other pits, as well as Scotland's biggest coal-burning power
stations. They have chosen the right targets. Coal is the dirty
word that threatens to destroy attempts at Copenhagen in
December to prevent climate breakdown. If governments won't take
it on, we must.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/aug/07/monbiot-scotland-climate-policy
In a spirit of curiosity rather than anger, I complained to
various Scottish and British legal authorities - and got no
replies.
The Earth Institute
Prestigious Panel Of Scientists, Leaders, And Activists To Advise Ten-Year Vision For The Earth Institute
The Earth Institute at Columbia University is pleased to announce the appointment of its first External Advisory Board, which includes an impressive range of global-view leaders such as philanthropist George Soros, Harvard Professor Edward O. Wilson, and musician/activist Bono.
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/news/2003/story04-17-03.html
Under the direction of international economist Professor Jeffrey
Sachs, the Earth Institute supports pioneering projects in
the biological, engineering, social, and health sciences, while
actively encouraging interdisciplinary projects--often combining
natural and social sciences--in pursuit of solutions to real
world problems.
Sachs also serves as Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and is head of the United Nations Millennium Project. Earth Institute faculty lead several MDG task forces and are using MDG goals to shape their own research agendas.
In its work, the Earth Institute remains mindful of the staggering disparities between rich and poor nations, and the tremendous impact that global-scale problems -- such as theAIDS pandemic, climate change and extreme poverty -- have on all nations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Earth_Institute
Soros and Stern
London, 5 July: Technology
to capture the carbon dioxide emitted from coal-fired power
stations will be crucial in ensuring climate stability,
according to economist Nicholas Stern and George Soros, a
financier and philanthropist.
http://www.environmental-finance.com/onlinews/0705cap.htm
LAVISH subsidies and high
electricity prices have turned Britain’s onshore wind farms into
an extraordinary moneyspinner, with a single turbine capable of
generating £500,000 of pure profit per year.
According to new industry figures, a typical 2 megawatt (2MW)
turbine can now generate power worth £200,000 on the wholesale
markets - plus another £300,000 of subsidy from taxpayers.
Since such turbines cost around £2m to build and last for 20 or
more years, it means they can pay for themselves in just 4-5
years and then produce nothing but profit.
The lucrative outlook has led to a surge in planning
applications for new windfarms. There are already 165 wind farms
operating 1,944 turbines in Britain but another 34 are under
construction, a further 118 have planning consent and 220 are
under consideration, according to new figures from the British
Wind Energy Association.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3257728.ece
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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
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.
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
Fox admitting to inserting global warming propaganda into TV shows.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=47149952
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
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
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sealed/monbiot/deepecology.xhtml
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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
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