New Jersey Watchdog’s battle over the “secret” records of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative’s cap-and-trade auctions will be waged in a Trenton courtroom.
Investigative reporter Mark Lagerkvist filed suit against the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protectionin Mercer County Superior Court for “wrongfully and knowingly” denying access. Under the state Open Public Records Act (OPRA), Lagerkvist is asking the court to order NJDEP to release documents showing who bought what at RGGI’s auctions of carbon dioxide emission allowances.
In its first eight auctions, RGGI sold $662 million in CO-2 allowances, including $72 million in New Jersey permits. Those costs are eventually passed along to consumers in higher electric rates.
At the auctions, utilities competed with speculators and financial heavyweights like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lunch and JPMorgan Chase, as reported by New Jersey Watchdog last month in an investigative report – “The Secrets Ten States & Wall Street Don’t Want You to Know.” Authorities have refused to identify auction winners and how many permits each purchased.
New Jersey Watchdog initially sought the records from RGGI, but the New York-based regional non-profit cooperative contends it is not a public agency subject to OPRA. The next request went to NJDEP, the agency that supervises New Jersey’s participation in RGGI.
If you want to know what tyranny is like, look around.
The national government — specifically the executive branch — can do pretty much what it wants. It could bomb Iran tomorrow without a declaration of war from Congress. It can — and does — conduct secret wars and covert operations against countries that have done nothing to us. Of course, they are secret only to the ignorant taxpayers who must finance them and perhaps suffer when the provoked retaliation occurs. It can have men behind PlayStation consoles in Nevada fire Hellfire missiles from aerial drones on people in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
This tyrannical government can send any foreigner picked up anywhere in the world to third countries known for torturing prisoners. It can hold people accused of nothing indefinitely in prisons in Cuba and Afghanistan and torture them into making false confessions. It can conduct a war crimes trial in a military kangaroo court for a man, Omar Khadr, held captive for eight years after he was picked up at the age of 15 during a U.S. assault on villagers near Kabul. His torture-induced “confessions” will be admissible. All this is in violation of commitments under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict not to treat children in war as though they were adults.
It can assassinate even American citizens abroad without a scent of due process.
It is a government that can write its own warrants without judicial review — and call them national security letters — in order to conduct fishing expeditions in anyone’s electronic records. But that isn’t enough power for the present Progressive administration, which wants the freedom to examine our browser histories and email correspondents’ names. The Bill of Rights, like the Geneva Convention, has become “quaint” and obsolete.
Like any self-respecting tyranny, it tries to keep the truth from its subjects. Comforting words camouflage the 50,000 armed and combat-ready troops that will remain in Iraq after “withdrawal.” Their “primary” mission is to train an army whose own general says won’t be ready for years. This gross deception follows on the heralded “surge,” which supposedly turned things around in Iraq. What “worked,” however, was not U.S. military prowess or Gen. David Petraeus’s brilliance, but the spreading of American taxpayers’ cash to buy off Sunni insurgents and the denouement of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.
And, again, like any self-respecting tyranny, it bridles at leaks of classified documents that tell the people the truth. Solemn administration officials condemn Wikileaks and its sources for supposedly jeopardizing U.S. troops and Afghan collaborators, while adding that nothing new had been revealed. With no sense of irony, the same officials find blood on the hands of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, ignoring the rivers of blood their policies and weapons have produced in the Middle East and South Central Asia. Without those policies, there would be nothing to leak. Some call for the assassination of Assange, and for all we know he is on President Obama’s kill list. Meanwhile a courageous young soldier, Bradley Manning, who apparently leaked video of American troops committing cold-blooded murder in Baghdad, faces 52 years in prison.
Now we are being softened up for the next war, against Iran. As in 2002 with Iraq’s phantom WMDs, the empire advance men tell us Iran is building nuclear weapons, and Obama and Secretary of State Clinton say “all options are on the table,” which phrase includes hydrogen bombs. Once again a Big Lie is repeated without proof. The reason is simple: all evidence runs the other way. The government’s own intelligence agencies say Iran has no nuclear-weapons program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency is on the scene. But no matter. If it suits the tyrannical administration or its partner in empire, Israel, bombs of some kind will fall. The consequences all around will be horrible.
Can it really be tyranny if we get to vote? Yes. Thomas Jefferson warned of “elective despotism.” How valuable is your one vote when the government manipulates and distorts the flow of information, when Congress capitulates, and when the “adversarial” mainstream media act like government press agents, if not adoring lapdogs. The ugly truth is out there, but you have to want to know it.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a controversial “oil spill budget” Aug. 2 estimating that a large part of the oil released into the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon spill was gone. But in a hearing on Capitol Hill, a NOAA official conceded that three-fourths of the pollutants from the 4.1 million barrels spewed into the gulf are still lingering in the environment.
Bill Lehr, senior scientist with NOAA’s Office of Restoration and Response, said booming and burning probably cleaned up only about 10% of the spilled oil. Much of the oil has evaporated or dispersed, but remains a source of hydrocarbons in the ecosystem, he said.
“This is a continuing operation,” Lehr emphasized. “The spill is far from over. We’re beginning a new phase, and NOAA and all the other agencies will be involved in this.”
“We have seen some premature celebration,” said Rep.Edward Markey, (D-Mass.), who convened the House Energy and Environment subcommittee hearing. “What we have learned today is that the oil is not gone. The oil remaining in the Gulf waters or washed up on the shore is equivalent to 10 Exxon Valdez spills, and could be much more.”
The report released recently by NOAA and the Department of Interior — in which the agencies said the “vast majority” of the oil had been either recovered, dispersed or evaporated – rendered more optimistic figures because it counted as recovered the 800,000 barrels of oil captured directly by ships, Lehr conceded under questioning by Markey.
He said agency scientists also have not tallied the significant quantities of methane gas and heavy metals released into the gulf as a result of the spill.
If only 10% of the spilled oil was actually recovered, that is equivalent to the 10% to 15% recoveries scientists estimated were possible from a major spill at the time of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, Markey noted. “So it seems to me that BP comes in only at the low end of what was possible 20 years ago…. I think it’s important that even using a 21-year-old grading system, that BP has done a very poor job in cleaning up the gulf.”
“They make a desolation and call it peace.” -Tacitus
Was Alan Greenspan really as dumb as he looks in creating the late housing bubble that threatens to bring the entire Western debt-based economy crashing down?
Was something as easy to foresee as this really the trigger for a meltdown that could destroy the world’s financial system? Or was it done, perhaps, “accidentally on purpose”?
And if so, why?
Let’s turn to the U.S. personage that conspiracy theorists most often mention as being at the epicenter of whatever elite plan is reputed to exist. This would be David Rockefeller, the 92-year-old multibillionaire godfather of the world’s financial elite.
The lengthy Wikipedia article on Rockefeller provides the following version of a celebrated statement he allegedly made in an opening speech at the Bilderberg conference in Baden-Baden, Germany, in June 1991:
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war, but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in the past centuries.”
This speech was made 17 years ago. It came at the beginning in the U.S. of the Bill Clinton administration. Rockefeller speaks of an “us.” This “us,” he says, has been having meetings for almost 40 years. If you add the 17 years since he gave the speech it was 57 years ago—two full generations.
Not only has “us” developed a “plan for the world,” but the attempt to “develop” the plan has evidently been successful, at least in Rockefeller’s mind. The ultimate goal of “us” is to create “the supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers.” This will lead, he says, toward a “world government which will never again know war.”
Just as an intellectual exercise, let’s assume that David Rockefeller is as important and powerful a person as he seems to think he is. Let’s give the man some credit and assume that he and “us” have in fact succeeded to a degree. This would mean that the major decisions and events since Rockefeller gave the speech in 1991 have probably also been part of the plan or that they have at least represented its features and intent.
Therefore by examining these decisions and events we can determine whether in fact Rockefeller is being truthful in his assessment that the Utopia he has in mind is on its way or has at least come closer to being realized. In no particular order, some of these decisions and events are as follows:
The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement by the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations has led to the elimination of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs as well as the destruction of U.S. family farming in favor of global agribusiness.
Similar free trade agreements, including those under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, have led to export of millions of additional manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere.
Average family income in the U.S. has steadily eroded while the share of the nation’s wealth held by the richest income brackets has soared. Some Wall Street hedge fund managers are making $1 billion a year while the number of homeless, including war veterans, pushes a million.
The housing bubble has led to a huge inflation of real estate prices in the U.S. Millions of homes are falling into the hands of the bankers through foreclosure. The cost of land and rentals has further decimated family agriculture as well as small business. Rising property taxes based on inflated land assessments have forced millions of lower-and middle-income people and elderly out of their homes.
The fact that bankers now control national monetary systems in their entirety, under laws where money is introduced only through lending at interest, has resulted in a massive debt pyramid that is teetering on collapse. This “monetarist” system was pioneered by Rockefeller-family funded economists at the University of Chicago. The rub is that when the pyramid comes down and everyone goes bankrupt the banks which have been creating money “out of thin air” will then be able to seize valuable assets for pennies on the dollar, as J.P. Morgan Chase is preparing to do with the businesses owned by Carlyle Capital. Meaningful regulation of the financial industry has been abandoned by government, and any politician that stands in the way, such as Eliot Spitzer, is destroyed.
The total tax burden on Americans from federal, state, and local governments now exceeds forty percent of income and is rising. Today, with a recession starting, the Democratic-controlled Congress, while supporting the minuscule “stimulus” rebate, is hypocritically raising taxes further, even for middle-income earners. Back taxes, along with student loans, can no longer be eliminated by bankruptcy protection.
Gasoline prices are soaring even as companies like Exxon-Mobil are recording record profits. Other commodity prices are going up steadily, including food prices, with some countries starting to experience near-famine conditions. 40 million people in America are officially classified as “food insecure.”
Corporate control of water and mineral resources has removed much of what is available from the public commons, and the deregulation of energy production has led to huge increases in the costs of electricity in many areas.
The destruction of family farming in the U.S. by NAFTA (along with family farming in Mexico and Canada) has been mirrored by policies toward other nations on the part of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Around the world, due to pressure from the “Washington consensus,” local food self-sufficiency has been replaced by raising of crops primarily for export. Migration off the land has fed the population of huge slums around the cities of underdeveloped countries.
Since the 1980s the U.S. has been fighting wars throughout the world either directly or by proxy. The former Yugoslavia was dismembered by NATO. Under cover of 9/11 and by utilizing off-the-shelf plans, the U.S. is now engaged in the military conquest and permanent military occupation of the Middle East. A worldwide encirclement of Russia and China by U.S. and NATO forces is underway, and a new push to militarize space has begun. The Western powers are clearly preparing for at least the possibility of another world war.
The expansion of the U.S. military empire abroad is mirrored by the creation of a totalitarian system of surveillance at home, whereby the activities of private citizens are spied upon and tracked by technology and systems which have been put into place under the heading of the “War on Terror.” Human microchip implants for tracking purposes are starting to be used. The military-industrial complex has become the nation’s largest and most successful industry with tens of thousands of planners engaged in devising new and better ways, both overt and covert, to destroy both foreign and domestic “enemies.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. has the largest prison population of any country on earth. Plus everyday life for millions of people is a crushing burden of government, insurance, and financial fees, charges, and paperwork. And the simplest business transactions are burdened by rake-offs for legions of accountants, lawyers, bureaucrats, brokers, speculators, and middlemen.
Finally, the deteriorating conditions of everyday life have given rise to an extraordinary level of stress-related disease, as well as epidemic alcohol and drug addiction. Governments themselves around the world engage in drug trafficking. Instead of working to lower stress levels, public policy is skewed in favor of an enormous prescription drug industry that grows rich off the declining level of health through treatment of symptoms rather than causes. Many of these heavily-advertised medications themselves have devastating side-effects.
This list should at least give us enough to go on in order to ask a hard question. Assuming again that all these things are parts of the elitist plan which Mr. Rockefeller boasts to have been developing, isn’t it a little strange that the means which have been selected to achieve “peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity” involve so much violence, deception, oppression, exploitation, graft, and theft?
In fact it looks to me as though “our plan for the world” is one that is based on genocide, world war, police control of populations, and seizure of the world’s resources by the financial elite and their puppet politicians and military forces.
In particular, could there be a better way to accomplish all this than what appears to be a concentrated plan to remove from people everywhere in the world the ability to raise their own food? After all, genocide by starvation may be slow, but it is very effective. Especially when it can be blamed on “market forces.”
And can it be that the “us” which is doing all these things, including the great David Rockefeller himself, are just criminals who have somehow taken over the seats of power? If so, they are criminals who have done everything they can to watch their backs and cover their tracks, including a chokehold over the educational system and the monopolistic mainstream media.
One thing is certain: The voters of America have never knowingly agreed to any of this.
Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Promise of Monetary Reform is in preparation. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years.” His website is at www.richardccook.com
What the great French historian Alexis de Tocqueville would make of today’s Obama administration were he alive today is anyone’s guess. But I would wager that the author of L’Ancien Régime and Democracy in America would be less than impressed with the extravagance and arrogance on display among the White House elites that rule America as though they had been handed some divine right to govern with impunity.
It is the kind of impunity that has been highlighted on the world stage this week by Michelle Obama’s hugely costly trip to Spain, which has prompted a New York Post columnist Andrea Tantaros to dub the First Lady a contemporary Marie Antoinette. As The Telegraph reports, while the Obamas are covering their own vacation expenses such as accommodation, the trip may cost US taxpayers as much as $375,000 in terms of secret service security and flight costs on Air Force Two.
The timing of this lavish European vacation could not have come at a worse moment, when unemployment in America stands at 10 percent, and large numbers of Americans are fighting to survive financially in the wake of the global economic downturn. It sends a message of indifference, even contempt, for the millions of Americans who are struggling just to feed their families on a daily basis and pay the mortgage, while the size of the national debt balloons to Greek-style proportions.
While the liberal-dominated US mainstream media have largely ignored the story, it is all over the blogosphere and talk radio, and will undoubtedly add to the President’s free falling poll ratings. As much as the media establishment turn a blind eye to stories like this, which are major news in the international media, the American public is increasingly turning to alternative news sources, including the British press, which has a far less deferential approach towards the White House.
The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Marbella and the complete disregard for public opinion and concerns over excessive government spending is symbolic of a far wider problem with the Obama presidency – the overarching disdain for the principles of limited government, individual liberty and free enterprise that have built the United States over the course of nearly two and a half centuries into the most powerful and free nation on earth.
It is epitomised above all by the President’s relentless drive towards big government against the will of the American people, and the dramatic increases in government spending and borrowing, which threaten to leave the US hugely in debt for generations. It is also showcased by Barack Obama’s drive towards a socialised health care system, which, as I’ve noted before, is “a thinly disguised vanity project for a president who is committed to transforming the United States from the world’s most successful large-scale free enterprise economy, to a highly interventionist society with a massive role for centralized government.”
There is however a political revolution fast approaching Washington that is driven not by mob rule but by the power of ideas and principles, based upon the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. It is a distinctly conservative revolution that is sweeping America and is reflected in almost every poll ahead of this November’s mid-terms. It is based on a belief in individual liberty, limited government, and above all, political accountability from the ruling elites. The Obama administration’s mantra may well be “let them eat cake”, as it continues to gorge itself on taxpayers’ money, but it will be looking nervously over its shoulder as public unease mounts.
Harry Reid says he is dropping the insane cap and trade carbon tax legislation, but beware of an attempt to pass this favorite bill of rich elitists and Malthusian fanatics. The attempt to bootleg cap and trade into law may come during the November-December lame duck session, with the votes of 30-40 dead souls, not of Gogol but of defeated Democrats. Politicians who have lost their seats will be looking to Wall Street for jobs or to Obama for patronage, and they will vote for anything. In the meantime, the world’s first Renewable Energy Ministerial Conference took place in Washington earlier this week. This was the usual Malthusian litany of gimmicks — solar, wind, batteries, and the like. This conference of 24 nations admitted that the world needed 500 new power plants, but decided they should not be built; only windmills and solar cells should be considered, in their grotesque view. This means there will be no development, and only genocide, for Africa and south Asia. The conference was attended by “stakeholders,” in reality rent seekers. The problem with their wind and solar gadgets is that they are uneconomical and require onerous government subsidies unless the price of oil rises far above the current level. (Maybe the idea of an attack on Iran and the closing of Hormuz, which would get oil to $500 per barrel, was discussed during the closed session of the first day — like the Bilderbergers at Saltsjobaden in 1973, when they discussed a 400% increase in the oil price, which arrived soon after.) The big news at the conference was that, for the first time ever, China has surpassed the United States in energy consumption. Ten years ago China consumed half the US total, and now they are ahead by 4% as of 2009. This signals the looming energy decadence and the thermodynamic decline of the US. China is also about to surpass the US in manufacturing, with the US losing the top spot it has occupied since passing Britain in this department in the 1890s. The Chinese will build 1,000 gigawatts of electric generating capacity by 2025, an amount equal to the current total US production. This includes 21 modern nuclear plants; the US is still building none. A rational US government would respond to this emergency by commencing the construction of 100 ultra-modern HTR reactors to replace the aging US reactors. But the US delegation was led by Energy Secretary Cho, who has embraced the crackpot idea of painting roads and roofs white to promote cooling. Such schemes are no substitute for US energy modernization after 30-plus years of stagnation and decay. Obama’s energy czarina Carol Browner, an expert profiteer and lobbyist, was also on hand. The insane ban on offshore drilling is an example of her handiwork. Nor should we forget Obama science adviser John Holdren, a quackademic and charlatan whose tenure in this post is a national scandal. These Malthusian bureaucrats hate real energy production, and want the price of energy to be as high as possible. As long as these sociopaths run US energy policy, it can be assumed that the US will continue to fall behind China, since without modern energy production there can be no recovery from the current depression.
Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com
Friday, August 6, 2010
$100 Billion A Year Levy Is About Bankrolling Global Government And Lining The Pockets Of Con Artist Oil Men Soros, Strong and Gore, Has Nothing To Do With Saving The Environment
Despite the failure of last year’s Copenhagen climate summit, the United Nations is pushing ahead for a global carbon tax that will bankroll the expansion of world government as globalists attempt to make Americans pay for the evisceration of their own sovereinty and future prosperity.
“Carbon taxes, add-ons to international air fares and a levy on cross-border money movements are among ways being considered by a panel of the world’s leading economists to raise a staggering $100 billion a year to fight climate change,” reports the Associated Press.
British economist Nicholas Stern called for government regulations to pave the way for a “new industrial revolution….to move the world away from fossil fuels to low carbon growth.”
The panel will present its final proposals to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in October, a month before the next climate conference meets in Cancun, Mexico.
As was revealed during the Copenhagen negotiations, the global tax that the elite are pushing for will not even go to the UN to fight carbon dioxide, the evil life-giving gas that humans exhale and plants breathe. A leaked document obtained by the London Guardian during the summit exposed the fact that the tax will do directly to the coffers of the World Bank, and this revelation led to poorer countries refusing to sign a properly binding resolution on CO2 emissions.
The fact that Soros plays both sides of the rigged game emphasizes once again the fact that the carbon tax has nothing to do with saving the environment from the mythical threat of global warming and everything to do with industrialists who own the carbon trading systems getting filthy rich while crucifying U.S. sovereignty at the altar of global government.
The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) has direct ties to both Al Gore and Maurice Strong, two figures intimately involved with a long standing movement to use the theory of man made global warming as a mechanism for profit and social engineering. Gore’s investment company, Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offset opportunities, is the largest shareholder of CCX.
Maurice Strong, who is regularly credited as founding father of the modern environmental movement, serves on the board of directors of CCX. Strong was a leading initiate of the Earth Summit in the early 90s, where the theory of global warming caused by CO2 generated by human activity was most notably advanced.
Both Strong and Gore come from the Club of Rome clique, who in their 1991 Report, “The First Global Revolution” openly admitted how they were planning to exploit the contrived hoax of global warming in order to further their agenda.
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.,” they wrote.
Massive oil companies like British Petroleum, were amongst the founding members of the carbon trade lobby. BP has supported the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill and other so-called “green” initiatives every step of the way because, far from acting as a punishment for big polluters, they represent a financial windfall.
Transnational oil companies like British Petroleum and Exxon Mobil have been amongst the biggest promoters of man-made global warming because they are headed up by globalists who understand that the carbon tax will do nothing to help the environment but will be used to bankroll the implementation of global government while swallowing up whatever deposable income impoverished Americans have left.
A carbon tax would impact almost every aspect of Americans’ lives, from higher gas prices, to soaring utility bills, to exorbitant excesses related to the “energy efficiency” of their homes. It would be enforced by an army of environmental regulators and green police poking their noses into the private affairs of citizens.
The “green economy” is nothing more than a euphemism for an organized effort on behalf of big business and global elite to completely eviscerate the middle class and introduce levies and regulation into every area of our lives.
“The evils of global warming & climate change legislation coming to fruition…”
-F.F.
Curtis Roberts stands at his farm in Arcadia. Farmers like Roberts are concerned about the possible regulations.
By Jacqueline Sit
OKLAHOMA CITY — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering a crackdown on farm dust, so senators have signed a letter addressing their concerns on the possible regulations.
The letter dated July 23 to the EPA states, “If approved, would establish the most stringent and unparalleled regulation of dust in our nation’s history.” It further states, “We respect efforts for a clean and healthy environment, but not at the expense of common sense. These identified levels will be extremely burdensome for farmers and livestock producers to attain. Whether its livestock kicking up dust, soybeans being combined on a dry day in the fall, or driving a car down the gravel road, dust is a naturally occurring event.”
Many in the Oklahoma farming industry are opposed to the EPA’s consideration. One farmer said the possible regulations are ridiculous.
“It’s plain common sense, we don’t want to do anything detrimental,” said farmer Curtis Roberts. “If the dust is detrimental to us, it’s going to be to everybody. We’re not going to do anything to hurt ourselves or our farm.”
Roberts, a fourth generation farmer and rancher in Arcadia, said regulating dust in rural areas will hurt farmers’ harvest, cultivation and livelihood.
“Anytime you work ground, you’re going to have dust. I don’t know how they’ll regulate it,” Roberts said. “The regulations are going to put us down and keep us from doing things we need to be doing because of the EPA.”
Oklahoma Farm Bureau President Mike Spradling said the rules could be detrimental to farmers across the Sooner State.
“We as an organization do not feel dust is a pollutant,” Spradling said. “It would almost be impossible to comply with what’s being addressed now from the EPA as in agriculture. We’re doing everything we possibly can.”
“It’s just common sense, we don’t like dust in the morning but it’s something we got to live with,” Roberts said.
The latest version of the CLEAR Act is slated for a floor vote in the House this week as Democrats look for ways to use the Gulf oil spill as a means to pass elements of their unpopular energy agenda.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) stripped out authorization for an independent investigation into the Gulf disaster.
The Natural Resources Committee unanimously passed the amendment in committee markup July 14 offered by Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that would establish a bipartisan, independent, National Commission on Outer Continental Shelf Oil Spill Prevention.
Unlike the commission set up by President Obama — packed only with environmental activists and no petroleum engineers — the commission unanimously approved by the Natural Resources committee would be comprised of technical experts to study the actual events leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Not a single member of the committee voiced opposition at the bill’s markup. The Senate has also approved an independent commission.
“To investigate what went wrong and keep it from happening again, the commission must include members who have expertise in petroleum engineering. The President’s Commission has none,” Cassidy, the amendment’s author, told HUMAN EVENTS after the announcement. “It defies common sense that this amendment passed unanimously in committee, only to be deleted in the Speaker’s office.”
Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), top Republican on the Natural Resources Committee said the Obama’s administration’s commission was set up to protect the President.
“By deleting the bipartisan, independent oil spill commission that’s received bipartisan support in both House and Senate committees, Democrats have shown they are more interested in protecting the President than getting independent answers to what caused this tragic Gulf spill. Some of the biggest failures that contributed to the Gulf disaster are the direct responsibility of the federal government and by deleting this bipartisan, independent commission, Democrats ensure that only the President’s hand-picked commission will be digging into any failures of his own Interior Department appointees. There is widespread agreement that no member of the President’s commission possesses technical expertise in oil drilling, and several are on the record in opposition to offshore drilling and support a moratorium that will cost thousands of jobs,” Hastings said.
The bill also sets up myriad regulations and new standards and laws for drilling that have nothing to do with offshore drilling.
“Even more outrageous is this bill’s attempt to use the oil spill tragedy as leverage to enact totally unrelated policies and increase federal spending on unrelated programs by billions of dollars. What does a solar panel in Nevada, a wind turbine in Montana, uranium for nuclear power, or a ban on fish farming have to do with the Gulf spill? Nothing — but the spill is a good excuse to try and pass otherwise stalled or unpopular new laws,” Hastings said.
Another member of the committee, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), pointed out the hand-picked Obama commission is just getting underway with no findings or recommendations made.
“This ‘fix it’ bill is being rammed through without an accurate and full understanding of what actually went wrong. The Presidential Commission is just barely beginning its work, no investigations are yet concluded, and the failed [blowout preventer] still on the ocean floor, yet we are voting on a bill without knowing what went wrong,” Fleming said.
“Furthermore, at a time when Washington should be focused on creating jobs, this bill will do just the opposite by hampering future energy development and stifling job creation along the Gulf Coast,” Fleming added. “This knee-jerk legislation — coupled with the Administration’s damaging Moratorium on offshore drilling — will worsen, not help, the situation.”
Yet the House is poised to vote this week on the CLEAR Act, likely Friday.
“This bill has less to do with preventing another spill than it does preventing domestic energy production,” Cassidy said.
UPDATE: House Republicans released bullets on the CLEAR Act this morning breaking down some of the measures included in the bill, including:
- Imposes job-killing changes and higher taxes for onshore natural gas and oil production. It fundamentally changes leasing onshore by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, which affects not just leasing for natural gas and oil, but also for renewable energy including wind and solar. Forest Service and BLM leasing are shoved into the three new agencies that are replacing the former Minerals Management Service (MMS).
- Creates over $30 billion in new mandatory spending for two programs that have nothing to do with the oil spill (the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Historic Preservation Fund). In the version of the bill headed to the House floor, Democrats added brand new language that expressly allows this $30 billion to be earmarked by the Appropriations Committee.
- Raises taxes by over $22 billion in ten years – with the taxes eventually climbing to nearly $3 billion per year. This is a direct tax on natural gas and oil that will raise energy prices for American families and businesses, hurt domestic jobs, and increase our dependence on foreign oil. This tax only applies to U.S. oil and gas production on federal leases – giving an advantage to foreign oil and hurting American energy jobs.
- Requires the federal takeover of state authority to permit in state waters, which reverses sixty years of precedent. The mismanagement, corruption and oversight failures of the federal government are being used as justification to expand federal control by seizing management from the states.
- Allows 10% of all offshore revenues – an amount possibly as high as $500 million per year – to be spent on a new fund controlled by the Interior Secretary to issue ocean research grants (ORCA fund). There is no requirement that the fund is used for the Gulf region or anything related to oil spills or offshore drilling. These funds can be earmarked.
Last week’s meeting of 700+ scientists, policymakers, and concerned citizens in Chicago to discuss the science and economics of global warming at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change was a huge success as measured by the intent of its sponsors: to establish once and for all that the climate realist position is increasingly the accepted conclusion among thinking people in the three categories noted above. That position is this: manmade global warming is not a crisis.
Yes, all parties at the conference pretty much agreed that there was a good deal of warming in the 1980s and 1990s, and that the trend stopped and reversed in the current decade. Global temperatures have been falling in recent years, even though the weather stations and other data chosen to represent the official temperature records are in fact skewed to show higher and more-rising temperatures than are actually occurring.
The predictions of a steady, horrifying increase in temperatures have proven false, which should have been a great embarrassment to the climate alarmists who made the claims and set them as the basis for their extravagant power grabs such as emissions limits and cap and trade.
Yet the embarrassment has not been forthcoming from those proven to be wrong, because they are shameless.
One speaker at the conference, whom I was privileged to see, was James Delingpole, a non-scientist and a writer (a novelist, even!), who wowed the crowd with great common sense and a powerful insight into what’s really been behind the global warming scare all along. As Delingpole wrote in the Spectator after conference:
[T]he Anthropogenic Global Warming scare is not about science and never was. As Climategate proved (but as some of us suspected long before), AGW is the invention of a cabal of activists, all working towards more or less the same ecofascist agenda: Mother Gaia is suffering; it’s mostly our fault; the only way to atone for our sins is to destroy Western industrial civilisation and shackle ourselves with a form of One World government run by ‘experts’ and bureaucrats over whom we have no democratic control. It is a battle against a tyranny every bit as great as we faced in the second world war or the Cold War. All what’s different about this enemy is that instead of jackboots it wears long hair, a warm, caring smile and drives a VW Combi with an ‘Atomkraft Nein Danke’ sticker.
That’s something we climate realists have known all along and had been trying in vain to convince people of for some years: that global warming never was about saving the planet but always just a pretext for progressive elitists to take ever-greater control over your life and mine.
In fact, Delingpole notes, even if global warming were to occur, it would be a good thing. Warm periods have tended to coincide with human thriving, and cold periods are associated with war, famine, and economic stagnation. And the sad fact is that we are far more likely to be heading toward uncomfortable cold than comfortable warmth, Delingpole notes:
[W]hile there has been no global warming since 1998, the general view among those who really know is that we could now be entering a lengthy period — 20 or 30 years (most of the rest of your and my life buggered) — of global cooling.
All the auguries are there. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which works in roughly 30-year cycles, has now begun its cooling phase (such as we last had in the chilly years between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s). We’re about to enter a La Niña phase in the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, which means at the very least we’re due for a winter every bit as harsh as the most recent one. Worse still, low sunspot activity suggests we might be entering a solar minimum period, such as the Maunder Minimum (1645 to 1715) when those ice fairs were held on the Thames, or the Dalton Minimum (1790 to 1830) which gave us both Napoleon’s frozen retreat from Moscow and the terrible ‘Year Without a Summer’ (1816). Periods of cooling such as this are much more greatly to be feared, of course, than periods of warming — which historically have coincided with abundance, relative peacefulness, economic growth and cultural flourishing.
Or, if you want to be really depressed, there’s always the possibility that we’re on the brink of another ice age. Warm ‘interglacial’ periods such as the one we’re in now last about 10,000 years. And we’re already past the 10,000th year.
And it isn’t hysterical alarmists saying this stuff. Climate realists don’t really do hysterical alarmism.
Delingpole is right: the attendees at the conference were remarkably good-natured and cheerful, and the discussion was strong on real science and economics and without any interesting infighting.
As was noted more than once at the conference, organizer James Taylor of The Heartland Institute invited countless well-known global warming alarmists to attend, and only two chose to do so. And none of the prominent ones deigned to step forward for a real discussion of the science and economic facts behind the matter.
That’s been the attitude of the alarmists from the start: to claim “the science is settled” and insist that we all pay no attention to the repulsively obese ex-vice president behind the curtain and move on to changing our lifestyles to suit their vile fancies regarding the limits that should be placed on the energy and other resource consumption of ordinary people—while alarmists such as Al Gore notoriously live in a manner King Midas would have been ashamed to contemplate.
The fact is, the big money—including the corporate money, despite hysterical claims to the contrary—is all on the alarmist side. Climate change realists are continually being pushed out of jobs and their scientific papers rejected simply because they dare to question the phony consensus of big-government elitists. As Delingpole notes:
It’s no wonder that the bit of my speech that got the biggest laugh was when I asked: ‘How many of you here are in the pay of Big Oil?’ No hands were raised. ‘And how many of you would like to be in the pay of Big Oil?’ Up shot 150 arms. ‘Guess we picked the wrong side of the debate to be on,’ I said, hardly needing to explain that companies like Shell and BP pump far, far more money into eco-nonsense like carbon trading and green posturing than they do into sceptical science.
That’s the problem with being an Evil Climate Change Denier. The tide is turning in our favour. History will vindicate us. But until then the only perks of the job are the joy of one another’s company and the smug satisfaction of knowing that one day we’ll be able to look at the wreckage of disasters like cap and trade, David Cameron’s wind farms and the IPCC’s junk science predictions and say: ‘I told you so.’
There is one thing and one thing only behind the global warming scare, and it is not science. It is greed for power. The truth is slowly coming out, however, and as Delingpole says, the alarmists will ultimately be pushed back.
In the meantime, however, we are in great danger of instituting a catastrophically enormous waste of money and human toil by enacting cap and trade and other such outrages. Being right would be meager solace under those circumstances.
PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup’s 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll finds Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year. Eleven percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress, down from 17% in 2009 and a percentage point lower than the previous low for Congress, recorded in 2008.
The Gallup poll was conducted July 8-11, shortly before Congress passed a major financial regulatory reform bill, which President Obama signed into law this week.
Underscoring Congress’ image problem, half of Americans now say they have “very little” or “no” confidence in Congress, up from 38% in 2009 — and the highest for any institution since Gallup first asked this question in 1973. Previous near-50% readings include 48% found for the presidency in 2008, and 49% for the criminal justice system in 1994.
This year’s poll also finds a 15-point drop in high confidence in the presidency, to 36% from 51% in June 2009. Over the same period, President Barack Obama’s approval rating fell by 11 points, from 58% to 47%. However, confidence in the presidency remains higher than in 2008 — the last year of George W. Bush’s term — when the figure was 26%.
Survey Methods
Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted July 8-11, 2010, with a random sample of 1,020 adults, aged 18 and older, living in the continental U.S., selected using random-digit-dial sampling.
For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones (for respondents with a landline telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell phone-only). Each sample includes a minimum quota of 150 cell phone-only respondents and 850 landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas among landline respondents for gender within region. Landline respondents are chosen at random within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday.
Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, education, region, and phone lines. Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2009 Current Population Survey figures for the aged 18 and older non-institutionalized population living in continental U.S. telephone households. All reported margins of sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting and sample design.
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
This is the first of a Shadow Elite series, investigating the game-changing effects of government contracting on the most vital government functions.
It’s one of those ideas that might seem sensible at first-glance: retired military officers hired to serve as “senior mentors” to the armed forces. Only on closer inspectionare the potential conflicts of interest revealed: the retired officers were paid by contractors, advising on military services even as they were consulting for companies seeking to sell military products, as reported by USA Today. When news of the program came to light, Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered changes, but the paper reported Tuesday that “senior mentors will not have to disclose their business ties or finances to the public, under a [July 8 Defense] directive…That falls below what [Defense Secretary Gates] initially called for….”
This Pentagon program is not simply an isolated conflict of interest story, or “coincidence of interest”–where players craft roles across organizations to serve their own agendas, instead of those of the organizations for which they supposedly work. It illustrates the perils of a governing landscape that has transformed in recent years: where once federal employees executed most government work, today more than 75 percent of that work, measured in terms of jobs, is contracted out and many of these jobs involve government functions. Many contractors are integrally involved in formulating and influencing policy on issues ranging from defense (as seen in the mentoring program), to the economy and energy to homeland security and intelligence. Even when many, if not most, of these contractors perform admirably, whether contractors always have the public interest at heart, or whether, beholden to shareholders, they might have their own, is a crucial question.
The Washington Postreported this week on the influence of contractors and the unmanageable growth of the intelligence community since 9/11. I also studied this development (in the area of intelligence and beyond) as part of my research for my bookShadow Elite and in a follow-on study (supported by the Ford Foundation), Selling Out Uncle Sam: How the Myth of Small Government Undermines National Security, soon to be released. In addition to interviews with government and contractor officials, I poured through piles of Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports, inspectors general audits,and congressional testimony evaluating the role of contractors in federal agencies. And a key finding that emerges is that information that once was or should be in official hands is being privatized, ceded to government contractors, at a time when government oversight is increasingly overwhelmed and undercut.
When information that is supposedly of and for government is in private hands, it is not just that government often isn’t kept in the loop. The information, and the power that goes with it, can be used to serve private agendas with the risk of corporate and private players influencing policy to suit those agendas. This is far more insidious than simply hiring a contractor to provide food service or even contracting security assistance in a war-zone like Iraq. Contractors are now routinely carrying out what’s known as “inherently governmental functions,” the work so fundamental to the public interest that only federal workers should conduct. The privatization of information is especially dangerous when these core functions are outsourced.
Take the case of the Pentagon senior mentors. Under that program, the selection of mentors, the identity of their defense clients, and the mentors’ pay levels were locked in a black box beyond government and public scrutiny. The latest news suggests that mentors won’t have to disclose financial interests, but even if that changes, and the officers eventually adhere to new ethics regulations, or are hired directly by the Pentagon as part-timers, this will only chip away at the margins of the information deficit. The fact is that, while contributing their invaluable experience, these officers also glean invaluable inside information. It is hard to imagine that they erase what they learn as mentors when they conduct their work as defense industry executives or consultants, and vice-versa.
In the area of the economy, contractors manage – and more – taxpayer stimulus and bailout money, giving them access to should-be government information. With regard to the $700 billion so-called TARP money, the Treasury Department hired several contractors to set up a process to disburse the bailout funds. The government also enlisted money manager BlackRock to help advise and manage the Bear Stearns and AIG rescues. BlackRock also won a bid to help the Federal Reserve evaluate hard-to-price assets of Freddie Mac and Morgan Stanley. The Wall Street Journal said:
BlackRock’s multiple hats put it in the enviable position of having influence on setting the prices of both the assets it is buying and selling.
Another big area of concern is in the outsourcing of information technologies. An estimated upwards of three-quarters of governmental IT was outsourced even before the major Iraq war-related push to contract out. While outsourcing certain IT functions, such as computer network services, may be unproblematic or even desirable, IT often can’t be separated from other mission-critical operations. Contractors often control crucial databases. For instance, in a 2004 Homeland Security mega-contract, Accenture LLP was granted up to $10 billion to supervise and enlarge a mammoth government project to track foreign citizens entering and exiting the U.S.
How did private and corporate interests seize the upper hand from government? A key reason for the information deficit is the sharp decline in the number of government oversight officials, relative to contractors. In theory, contracts and contractors are overseen by government employees. But the number of civil servants who could potentially oversee contractors fell during the Clinton administration and continued to drop during the Bush years. The contracting business boomed under Bush, while what is commonly called the “acquisition work force”–government workers charged with the conceptualization, design, awarding, use, or quality control of contracts and contractors–has remained virtually constant.
The paucity of oversight is the reason large procurement operations are identified by the GAO as “high risk” due to “their greater susceptibility to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” It also leaves government officials dangerously in the dark about what’s going on, since contractors frequently control the information. Government officials are often reliant on what the contractors report and recommend, especially when a sole contractor carries out a given program or project (as is often the case).
As a top GAO official, Katherine Schinasi reported that, in many cases, government deciders scarcely supervise the companies on their payrolls. (And routinely, contractors are also hiring and overseeing other contractors.) Nearly a year before the 2003 Iraq combat began, the army reported to Congress that its best guess was that it directly or indirectly employed between 124,000 and 605,000 service contract workers–a discrepancy of half a million workers. And, as the GAO’s director of acquisition and sourcing management reported,
At this point, DOD [the Defense Department] does not know how well its services acquisition processes are working, which part of its mission can best be met through buying services, and whether it is obtaining the services it needs while protecting DOD’s and the taxpayers’ interests.
When contractors have superior information, they have the edge over their government overseers. Disincentives for contractors to share unbiased information are many, ranging from extra work required to the possibility that the information could become available to potential competitors or that it could lead to discovery of contractor activities that might be disapproved. And when officials receive incomplete or skewed information, the public interest easily can be compromised. Even when government officials approve projects and decisions, they sometimes may be merely rubber stamping the work of contractors.
With regard to many arenas of government, government investigators have raised questions about who drives policy–government or contractors?–and whether government has the information, expertise, institutional memory, and personnel to manage contractors. Or is it the other way around?
A few years ago, the Wall Street Journal asked in a headline whether the U.S. government was “outsourcing its brain.” With contractors able to hoard public information, influence policy, and put blinders on government supervision, the unavoidable answer to that question appears to be “yes’. Government that literally doesn’t know what it is doing can scarcely be operating effectively. Moreover, it is vulnerable on all fronts.
On 140 acres of unused land on Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., 70,000 solar panels are part of a solar photovoltaic array that will generate 15 megawatts of solar power for the base. (U.S. Air Force photo/Airman 1st Class Nadine Y. Barclay)
During his weekly address to the nation over the Fourth of July weekend, President Obama announced that the Department of Energy was awarding $2 billion in loan guarantees to two energy companies — Abengoa Solar and Abound Solar Manufacturing.
The plan, Obama said, is for the companies to use the money to construct solar plants and panels to power thousands of homes — and create 5,000 jobs in the process. Only about 1,600 of those jobs are slated to be permanent, though, meaning that the total cost to the taxpayer for each permanent job would exceed $1 million.
But over the past week, observers have questioned whether even that high figure accurately represents the total cost of the president’s plan.
Loan guarantees, unlike outright grants, are essentially promises to pay for the debt obligation of a borrower. Because they typically do not appear in the federal budget until after the government has to pay for them, and because they often attract companies with limited assets, critics charge that the guarantees obscure risks to the taxpayer and divert funds that could have been used more efficiently.
John McCormick at the Weekly Standard asks the $2 billion question: “Why did the government decide to bet hundreds of millions of dollars [on the solar plants]?”
“We’re fighting to speed up this recovery and keep the economy growing by all means possible,” the president said in his July 3 address. Clean energy, he said, has the potential to “create whole new industries and hundreds of thousands of new jobs in America.”
By all accounts, the president is starting small. Abengoa Solar, which received $1.45 billion from the Department of Energy, admits on its website that it will use the money to build a plant in Arizona that will create only 85 permanent jobs.
The company appeared to attempt to soften the news by estimating that “98 percent of the jobs…will be American jobs.” So, too, did the president: “After years of watching companies build things and create jobs overseas, its good news that we’ve attracted a company to our shores to build a plant and create jobs here in America,” he said.
But years of watching a certain executive at Abound Solar Manufacturing, the company that received the other loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, have been less than encouraging:
Russell Kanjorski, the vice president for marketing at Abound Solar, was one of the principals in another energy company in northeast Pennsylvania, called Cornerstone Technologies LLC, which attracted $9 million in federal grants before it halted operations in 2003 and later filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. As reported by the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, “Cornerstone reported $14,100 in assets compared with $1.34 million in debt” in its bankruptcy filing. The $9 million in federal grants to Cornerstone were earmarked by Kanjorski’s uncle, Representative Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government Sponsored Enterprises.
The incident does not appear to have dampened Kanjorski’s enthusiasm for clean energy loans like the ones awarded by the president earlier this month.
“Paul supported legislation that passed the House in December to authorize billions of dollars for research into sustainable energy sources such as wind energy, biofuels, and solar energy,” the congressman’s website reads.
There are so many variables ignored, underreported or simply not understood in climate science and especially in the computer models that purport to simulate global climate, that they destroy any pretence we know or understand weather and climate. But don’t take my word for it. Consider the comments from proponents of anthropogenic global warming including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In the 2001 report they said, “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate state is not possible.” James Lovelock, Gaia hypothesis speculator said, “It’s almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think that we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it’s wrong to do it.” Kevin Trenberth, IPCC author and CRU associate said, “It’s very clear we do not have a climate observing system… This may be a shock to many people who assume that we do know adequately what’s going on with the climate, but we don’t.”
Many reports exist on the inadequacy of temperature data. Ross McKitrick askswhether a global temperature exists at all. Anthony Watts shows the serious problems with the weather stations in the US and these are supposedly the best in the world.
We also know how the record is ‘adjusted’ to support the warming theory.
However, measurement of other variables is worse simply because of the complexity of measurements. Instruments to accurately measure precipitation, especially snowfall, have always been a great challenge. Perhaps the most forgotten variable, yet critical to weather and climate, is wind speed. Ancient Greeks knew the importance of wind direction and how it determined the pattern of weather in a region. They even built a Tower of the Winds in Athens honoring the eight wind deities (Figure 1). Direction was critical for sailing as well, so mariners developed the ability to read the wind to 32 points of the compass. Speed was a different matter. Early attempts had a flat board on a spring with a pointer attached that was set against a scale. Wind pushed the board and the pointer indicated the force. The big change came with the wind cup or anemometer in 1846. While this provides an accurate measure, recording the information is important because the work the wind does requires detailed almost continuous data.
Figure 1: Tower of the winds, Athens
Source: wikipedia.org (Tower of the Winds)
The atmosphere is heated by air in contact with the ground (conduction) but also by evaporation of moisture that is then released into the atmosphere. In both cases the rate varies with wind speed. Even a small variation in wind speed results in a variation in heat exchange and distribution in the atmosphere.
Wind is created by difference in pressure that is created by difference in temperature. High temperature creates low pressure and wind then blows from the high pressure to redress the imbalance. There are general global wind patterns created by differential heating. If the Earth wasn’t rotating a simple circulation of air rising at the Equator and descending at the Poles would occur, however rotation results in generally easterly winds at the Equator and the Poles with prevailing westerly winds in the middle latitudes. Each region has different land/ water ratios so a shift in these zonal winds will affect the role of the wind in heating the atmosphere.
Figure 2 shows plots of the percentage frequency of south winds at York Factory located on the southwest shore of Hudson Bay for two decades over 100 years apart. In the early decade from 1721 to 1731, which is well within the Little Ice Age (LIA), south winds blow less than 7 percent of the time. In the decade from 1841 to 1851, which is outside of the LIA, south winds are occur over 12 percent of the time with a peak in 1842 of 27 percent.
Figure 2: Percentage of south winds at York Factory
Source; Ball (1986), Climate Change, Vol. 8 pp. 121-134.
The 2007 IPCC report acknowledges the shifts in some wind patterns and associated weather systems. Based on a variety of measurements at the surface and in the upper troposphere, it is likely that there has been an increase and a poleward shift in NH (Northern Hemisphere) winter storm-track activity over the second half of the 20th century, but there are still significant uncertainties in the magnitude of the increase due to time-dependent biases in the reanalyses. The word “likely” is defined as greater than 66% chance. The shift is not surprising because the prevailing westerly wind and accompanying storm track would move north as the Earth warms. They acknowledge the “significant uncertainties” in the validity of increased frequency. They don’t even attempt to discuss the significance for heat transfer or any other impact on global weather. We know wind causes shifts of Arctic ice to create open water or increase pack ice, but how does this affect heat exchange or evaporation? It is even worse in the Southern Hemisphere (SH). Analysed decreases in cyclone numbers over the southern extratropics and increases in mean cyclone radius and depth over much of the SH over the last two decades are subject to even larger uncertainties.
The degree to which the IPCC and their supporters have fooled the world is amazing. As Jean-Francois Revel said: “How is it possible for a theory, which is false in its component parts, to be true as a whole.” In the case of ‘official’ climate science he could add that many parts of the whole are simply omitted. He explained the mentality that has pervaded the AGW supporters when he wrote, “A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence” His book titled, The Flight from Truth: The Reign of deceit in the Age of Information”tells it all.
The Royal Society, an organisation made up of renowned eco-fascists and depopulation fanatics, is to launch a major study on human population growth and its implications for social and economic development, a study it has ludicrously branded “objective”.
“The society acknowledges it is delving into a hugely controversial area, but says a comprehensive and scientific review of the evidence is needed.” reports the BBC, along with a picture of a huge crowd of people crammed together (which is actually a rock concert of some kind).
“This is a topic that has gone to and fro in the last few decades, and appears to be moving back up the political agenda now,” said the leader of the study Sir John Sulston.
“So it seems a good moment for the Royal Society to launch a study that looks objectively (emphasis mine) at the scientific basis for changes in population, for the different regional and cultural factors that may affect that, and at the effects that population changes will have on our future in term of sustainable development.”
The manifestly obvious problem with this study, as anyone who knows anything about the Royal Society will note, is the fact that leading members of the group are obsessed with pushing a depopulation agenda.
The Royal Society is a 350 year old establishment outfit that has recently thrown its full weight behind the global warming movement, lending its absolute support for legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 80%, a process that will devastate the global economy and drastically reduce living standards everywhere.
The society has been even more vehement than national governments in its advocacy of the man-made cause of global warming, calling for such drastic CO2 cuts to be made in the short term, not even by the usual target date of 2050.
As the BBC notes in their report, one of the members of the Royal Society’s working group for this population study is Jonathon Porritt. Porritt is the former chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, one of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, who has stated thatBritain’s population must be cut in half from around 60 million to 30 million if it is to build a sustainable society.
Porritt is also a member of The Optimum Population Trust (OPT), a notorious UK-based public policy group that campaigns for a gradual decline in the global human population to what it sees as a “sustainable” level.
An OPT article on today’s news opens with the line, “The human population is far higher than any other primate at any time in history”. This outlines exactly where these people will approach the study from.
Another notable member of both the OPT and The Royal Society is Futurist and top Eco-Fascist James Lovelock.
Lovelock became a patron of the OPT in 2009. In a statement released by the trust to mark the appointment, Lovelock called on the environmental movement as a whole to “recognise the truth and speak out” on the link between rising human numbers and global warming.
Lovelock said: “Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”
He added: “How can we possibly decrease carbon emissions and land use while the number of emitters and the space they occupy remorselessly increases? When will the environmentalists who claim to be green recognise the truth and speak out?”
Lovelock also recently called for the ending of freedom in order that an overriding global power made up of “a few people with authority” can oversee the radical stemming of the planet’s human population in order to combat climate change.
So you begin to see how laughable it is to expect the Royal Society’s global population study, which will certainly be used as a reference by other leading institutions and global bodies, to be in any way “objective”.
The OPT and The Royal Society also boast, as a patron, BBC darling wildlife broadcaster and film-maker Sir David Attenborough, who has called for a one child policy like that of Communist China to be implemented in Britain. The proposal is one of the OPT’s main initiatives.Attenborough is also on theRoyal Society’s working group for this population study. Again, is this man’s influence going to result in an “objective” study on population?
Another member of the working group is Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta, also a fellow of the OPT.
Professor Malcolm Potts, another member of the working group was the first male doctor at the Marie Stopes Abortion Clinic in London, he also advised on the UK’s 1967 Abortion Act.
Marie Stopes was a prominent campaigner for the implementation of eugenics policies. In Radiant Motherhood(1920) she called for the “sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood [to] be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.” That group, according to her, included non-whites and the poor.
Stopes, an anti-Semite Nazi sympathizer, campaigned for selective breeding to achieve racial purity, a passion she shared with Adolf Hitler in adoring letters and poems that she sent the leader of the Third Reich.
Stopes also attended the Nazi congress on population science in Berlin in 1935, while calling for the “compulsory sterilization of the diseased, drunkards, or simply those of bad character.” Stopes acted on her appalling theories by concentrating her abortion clinics in poor areas so as to reduce the birth rate of the lower classes.
Stopes left most of her estate to the Eugenics Society, an organization that shared her passion for racial purity and still exists today under the new name The Galton Institute. The society has included members such as Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of the evolutionist), Julian Huxley and Margaret Sanger.
Perhaps most notably, the head of the Royal Society’s new study, John Sulston, most famously played a leading role in the Human Genome Project, the effort to identify and map the thousands of genes of the human genome. Sulston worked under James D. Watson, a notorious eugenicist who has previously argued that black people are inherently less intelligent than whites and has advocated the creation of a “super-race” of humans, where the attractive and physically strong are genetically manufactured under laboratory conditions. Watson is also affiliated with the Royal Society, indeed, in 1993 he recieved the society’s Copley Medal of honour for “outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science, and alternates between the physical sciences and the biological sciences”.
Sulston is also a leading advocate of the renowned Atheist group, The British Humanist Association.
It is clear that this organisation and these people are immersed in the science of eugenics, and that they have continued the science under the guise of environmentalism. They hate humanity and any notion that their population study will represent anything other than an establishment avocation of mass depopulation is farcical.
It is imperative that the media, places of education, government representatives and the wider public are made aware of these facts.
Alex Jones’ film End Game explains why the elite are obsessed with pushing eugenics and bizarre race hygiene philosophies. Click here for more clips.
The Royal Society has also conducted extensive research into geoengineering the planet to manipulate its climate, and continually lobbies the government to divert funding into the area. The UK government recently published a lengthy report on geoengineering, drawing heavily on Royal Society research. The report proposed methods including spraying sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere to mimic the cooling effect produced by volcanic eruptions, as well as placing mirrors in space to reflect the Sun’s rays away from the Earth, a technique known as Solar Radiation Management (SRM).
Mass sterilization, one child policies and a”Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death were all core concepts put forth by John P. Holdren, the man now in control of science policy in the United States, in his co-authored 1977 book, Ecoscience.
While you and I may think the notions of sterilization and depopulation could never be accepted by the public, those very concepts are now being embraced and popularized as the way forward for humanity.
Letting these modern day eugenicists mess with the planet would be like handing Dr. Josef Mengele control of the health care system. This group have proven themselves as total control freaks, promoting a brand of bloodthirsty eugenics even more depraved than anything Hitler proposed in his drive for a super race.
While the BBC notes in its report on The Royal Society that “The burgeoning human population is acknowledged as one of the underlying causes of environmental issues such as climate change, deforestation, depletion of water resources and loss of biodiversity.” the facts tell quite a different story.
There is a fundamental flaw in associating climate change with overpopulation.
Populations in developed countries are declining and only in third world countries are they expanding dramatically. Industrialization itself levels out population trends, and even despite this world population models routinely show that the earth’s population will level out at 9 billion in 2050 and slowly decline after that. “The population of the most developed countries will remain virtually unchanged at 1.2 billion until 2050,” states a United Nations report.
Once a country industrializes there is an average of a 1.6 child rate per household, so the western world population is actually in decline. That trend has also been witnessed in areas of Asia like Japan and South Korea. The UN has stated that the population will peak at 9 billion and then begin declining.
In addition, as highlighted by The Economist recently, global fertility rates are falling.
Since radical environmentalists are pushing to de-industrialize the world in the face of the so called carbon threat, this will reverse the trend that naturally lowers the amount of children people have. If climate change fanatics are allowed to implement their policies, global population will continue to increase and overpopulation may become a real problem – another example of how the global warming hysterics are actually harming the long term environment of the earth by preventing overpopulated countries from developing and naturally lowering their birth levels.
Even if you play devils advocate and accept that humans do cause catastrophic warming and there aretoo many of us, and if you can skip past the Nazi eugenics connotations of population control and depopulation policies, those methods are fundamentally still not a valid solution to the perceived climate change threat.
The real solution would be to pour funds into increasing the standards of living of the cripplingly poor third world, allowing those countries to industrialize, and seeing the population figures naturally level out.
Instead, the third world has seen a doubling in food prices owing to climate change policies such as turning over huge areas of agricultural land to the growth of biofuels.
We are being bombarded daily with idiotic notions that the human race and life itself is a virus that has spread all over the planet and that we must consider stemming our own progression to counter it.
Linking environmental policy to depopulation agendas opens the door to eugenics and it is no surprise that through that door have come pouring hordes of elitist filth just begging to be on the front line of the extermination policy.
The Royal Society’s study is to be launched on “World Population Day”, and is due to be completed by early 2012 – I wonder what conclusion it will reach?
While they peddle their insane proposals, backed by rampant fearmongering over climate change on behalf of our governments and the mainstream media, it is we who are charged with saving the planet and our place on it by exposing their nefarious agenda of mass depopulation before it is too late.
“This same dispersant that is banned for use in spills in BP’s home town… England. But here it’s ok. Listen they create this spill, ON PURPOSE!!! They want to create as much havoc as possible, (thats why they are delaying everything), and then our criminal toothpick leader Obama will come in with the perfect solution to fix this mess. I.E… more power to BP & our federal government. That will be after all the environmental and human suffering is opposed on us…. ON PURPOSE!!!!
Problem-Reaction-Solution.
Means To An End.
-Fred Face 7/10/10
The earlier posting referenced the adverse effects of Corexit and crude oil on plants with a link to a research document. Not too may people actually looked at the study though… So I put in the table referenced in the paper to make my point.
June 27, 2010 -- Last May 24, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson promised, “We will conduct our own tests to determine the least toxic, most effective dispersant available in the volumes necessary for a crisis of this magnitude… I am not satisfied that BP has done an extensive enough analysis of other dispersant options.”
As of today, those tests have not been completed, according to the EPA. In the meantime, BP has dumped 1.4 million gallons of Corexit on the gulf. Next week, we could have a hurricane pushing Corexit inland.
Promises… promises…
—ORIGINAL POST: June 10, 2010————
Just when you thought the damages BP could cause was limited to beaches, marshes, oceans, people’s livelihoods, birds and marine life, there’s more.
BP’s favorite dispersant Corexit 9500 is being sprayed at the oil gusher on the ocean floor. Corexit is also being air sprayed across hundreds of miles of oil slicks all across the gulf. There have been widespread reports of oil cleanup crews reporting various injuries including respiratory distress, dizziness and headaches.
Corexit 9500 is a solvent originally developed by Exxon and now manufactured by the Nalco of Naperville, Illinois (who by the way just hired some expensive lobbyists). Corexit is is four times more toxic than oil (oil is toxic at 11 ppm (parts per million), Corexit 9500 at only 2.61ppm).
COREXIT, SALT WATER AND OIL DO NOT MIX WELL TOGETHER
According to the Clark and George-Ares report, Corexit mixed with the higher gulf coast water temperatures becomes even more toxic.
The UK’s Marine Management Organization has banned Corexit so if there was a spill in the UK’s North Sea, BP is banned from using Corexit. In fact Corexit products currently being used in the Gulf were removed from a list of approved treatments for oil spills in the U.K. more than a decade ago. The Environmental Advisory Service for Oil and Chemical Spills at IVL, Swedish Environmental Institute, has, upon request of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency evaluated Corexit extensively and recommended it not be used in Swedish waters.
The Swedish study concludes: “The studies suggest that a mixture of oil and dispersant give rise to a more toxic effect on aquatic organisms than oil and dispersants do alone… The research on toxicity of oils mixed with dispersants has, however, shown high toxicity values even when the dispersant per se was not very toxic.” A report for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation Division of Spill Prevention and Response concluded that Corexit actually inhibits bacterial degradation of crude oil. It may look good on the surface but it will take longer for natural bacteria to eat up the crude oil.
Many of the region’s important organisms, such as blue fin tuna and shrimp, use the wetlands at some point in their lifetime. Adult tuna breed during the late spring and early summer. Their eggs then float to shore and the larvae grow in the wetlands, protected from predators. Any decent chemist will tell you that surfactants, which are the primary ingredient in Corexit destroy cell membranes — including larval membranes of larval tuna eggs, shrimp and any other marine life trying to develop.
BP with the EPA’s approval continues to pour Corexit into the gulf with no science to estimate the harm the gusher’s load of dispersed oil will cause the water column, because they lack sufficient and fundamental data on how dispersants affect the oil, what creatures live in deepwater ecosystems, how laboratory flask toxicity tests translate to actual conditions in the ocean, and how oil and Corexit affects organisms over time.
The real problem is not the dispersants themselves but what the chemicals do to the oil. By itself, oil is more toxic than dispersants alone, but together oil and Corexit is far more toxic. I can only assume the EPA approved Corexit because they thought diluting the dispersed oil and Corexit will mitigate its increased toxicity.
EPA’s crap shoot is that more toxic but significantly diluted dispersed oil/Corexit crap floating is better than concentrated oil slicks washing ashore. From my point of view, it’s a lazy, easy and irresponsible approach. Note Sweden does not even allow dispersants. In case of a spill in Swedish waters, only mechanical extraction and vacuum is allowed.
Lab toxicology tests (flask tests) that are the whole foundation of Corexit’s approval neglect one variable that organisms encounter out on the ocean’s surface -- sunlight. Transparent organisms such as planktons and crustaceans called copepods react to ultraviolet light from the sun. The reaction promotes photochemical degradation of aromatic compounds from oil that the creatures have absorbed or swallowed. The degradation results in oxidized molecules that are more toxic than the original oil compounds.
In tests to observe this photo-enhanced toxicity, aquatic toxicologist Carys L. Mitchelmore of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science said researchers have found that the toxicity under natural light can be up to 50,000 times greater than the toxicity seen in a lab. Neglecting real-world conditions, laboratory experiments could underestimate dispersed oil’s toxicity.
ARE U.S. WATERS MORE EXPENDABLE THAN SWEDEN OR THE UK’S WATERS?
The simple question I ask is: If the UK bans Corexit and Sweden recommends against it, why the hell are we using it on American waters?
The danger to humans can be expected. The warnings on the Corexit packaging is straightforward. In the tech world, you’ll hear the acronym RTFM- Read the Friggin’ Manual!!! Breathing in Corexit is not recommended. It’s not good for your lungs, eyes, skin or even your clothes! If you’re really geeky like me, you can read that Corexit is not good for marine life either.
VIDEO: AIR FORCE DELIVERING WIDE SPREAD AERIAL SPRAYING OF COREXIT
It seems like damage brought by the oil gusher has spread way beyond the ocean, coastal areas and beaches. Collateral damage now appears to include agricultural damage way inland Mississippi.
A mysterious “disease” has caused widespread damage to plants from weeds to farmed organic and conventionally grown crops. There is very strong suspicion that ocean winds have blown Corexit aerosol plumes or droplets and that dispersants have caused the unexplained widespread damage or “disease”.
PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO: WIDESPREAD MYSTERIOUS CROP DAMAGE IN GULF AREA
There is no other explanation for the crop damage. It’s conjecture on my part but everything points to something that has a widespread effect on plants and crops. Studies on Corexit and its effects on plants are consistent with the damage sustained in the lower Mississippi area. Check out the table on page 877 of the study. While no one precisely knows, all the signs point to BP’s use of aerosolized Corexit brought inland by the ocean winds or rain.
HERE IS AN EXTRACT OF THE PLANT STUDY TITLED I REFERENCED: Morphological changes observed in Paspalum vaginatum after treatment with Abura heavy crude oil (AC) or Oredo light crude oil (OC) and Corexit 9527/Gold crew.
University vice chancellor hopes “conspiracy theories” will now end
Steve Watson Infowars.com
Wednesday, Jul 7th, 2010
A third and final inquiry into the climategate scandal has exonerated everyone involved and declared that there is no question over the science behind manmade global warming – even though, like its predecessors, it has not investigated the science.
The so called “independent” inquiry into scientists at The University of East Anglia’s Climate research Unit found that “Their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt”.
It further noted “We did not find any evidence of behavior that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC.”
The university’s vice chancellor, Edward Acton, said the report had exonerated his staff and he hoped it would end the “conspiracy theories and untruths” that have dogged the unit, reports Reuters.
Of course this conclusion is hardly surprising given that, as we have previously reported, the so called “independent” investigation was led by Sir Muir Russell – a vehement supporter of the notion of anthropogenic global warming.
While absurdly billing himself as impartial and unconnected to climate science, Russell is intimately involved withThe Royal Society of Edinburgh.
The RSE has thrown its weight behind the global warming movement, lending its absolute support for legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 80%, a process that will devastate the global economy and living standards.
This organization has been even more vehement than national governments in its advocacy of the man-made cause of global warming, calling for such drastic CO2 cuts to be made in the short term, not even by the usual target date of 2050.
For the climategate inquiry, Russell constructed a panel of “experts” that share exactly the same views, clearly contradicting the founding principle of the inquiry – to appoint experts who do not have a “predetermined view on climate change and climate science”.
Russell has called for “a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds” to restore confidence in the CRU scientists.
Professor Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the scandal, will now be reinstated in his role at the CRU, despite the fact that the investigation concluded that some of Jones’ data was misleading and that he failed to act openly in response to questions about climate data lodged under Britain’s freedom of information laws.
“We found a tendency to answer the wrong question or to give a partial answer,” the report said.
Indeed, among the thousands of emails that were leaked from the CRU were communications from Jones specifically asking his colleagues to delete information from their computers that may have called the science behind their findings into question.
Yet, as reported in the London Guardian today, “extraordinarily, it emerged during questioning that Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this.”
The report also parroted the findings of The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee Report (PDF), released last March after just a single day of oral testimony. Like the government’s report, the “independent” inquiry found nothing sinister in Jones’ use of the words “hide the decline” and “trick” with regards to data on temperature changes obtained from tree ring research.
The independent inquiry even used the exact same wording as the government report to dismiss the notion, claiming that the use of the word “trick” may have been shorthand for a “neat mathematical approach” to ejecting erroneous data.
The STC pulled this explanation from testimony by the CRU itself, which stated:
…as for the (now notorious) word ‘trick’, so deeply appealing to the media, this has been richly misinterpreted and quoted out of context. It was used in an informal email, discussing the difficulties of statistical presentation. It does not mean a ‘ruse’ or method of deception. In context it is obvious that it is used in the informal sense of ‘the best way of doing something’. In this case it was ‘the trick or knack’ of constructing a statistical illustration which would combine the most reliable proxy and instrumental evidence of temperature trends.
“Contrary to [the University of East Anglia's] claims, there is no valid statistical procedure supporting the substitution of tree ring proxy,”
“This is absurd.” McIntyre added, “The trick was not a “neat” way of handling data, nor a recognized form of statistical analysis. The trick was a clever way of tricking the readers of the IPCC 2001 graphic into receiving a false rhetorical impression of the coherency of proxies – a point understood at the beginning by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, but now misunderstood due to continued disinformation.”
McIntyre points out that at no time did even the CRU itself contend that any of its data was erroneous, so to conclude that it had to dispose of such data is ludicrous:
In addition, their suggestion that Jones and others were doing nothing more than “discarding data known to be erroneous” is simply absurd. There was no testimony to the Committee (nor has it ever been suggested) that the tree ring data was measured incorrectly or that the data was “erroneous” – the data is what it is. The tree ring data goes down instead of up – but that doesn’t make it “erroneous”. It only means that the data is a bad proxy – something that was concealed from IPCC readers.
McIntyre submitted notes to the Science and Technology Committee on this very detail of the matter, however, his detailed description was either completely ignored or disregarded.
This information was leaked along with the inflammatory emails referring to it and provides the real smoking gun. However, predictably, there has been no mention of the coding in the any of the inquiries.
The Russell review said it was not misleading to omit part of the tree ring temperature series but the process should have been made plain in the graph which showed global temperature rises, and which was used in an influential report published in 1999 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
Again, like the parliamentary report before it, the Russell review also dismissed further allegations leveled at the CRU, including the suggestion the emails proved the scientists were actively subverting the peer review process and operating within a culture of stonewalling dissenting evidence, theories, data and viewpoints.
The leaked emails highlighted CRU scientists routinely referring to any research offering alternate viewpoints as “disinformation“,”misinformation” or “crap” that needed to be kept out of the public domain.
As the London Guardian notes, The Russell report described such actions and descriptions by Jones and the CRU as “robust” and “typical of the debate that can go on in peer review”.
“In the event, the inquiry conducted detailed analysis of only three cases of potential abuse of peer review.” Fred Pearce writes. “And it investigated only two instances where allegations were made that CRU scientists such as director Phil Jones and deputy director Keith Briffa misused their positions as IPCC authors to sideline criticism.”
Once again it will be left to the alternative media and blogs to expose another whitewash report, given that the vast majority of the corporate mainstream media is running with headlines along the lines of “Investigation Clears Climate Scientists” and “Warming Science Vindicated”, headlines that will be repeated ad infinitum by warmists, carbon trading scam artists and eco-fascists everywhere.
Another separate “independent” inquiry, led by Lord Oxburgh, former chair of the science and technology select committee, also cleared the CRU scientists of any wrong doing in April. However, its findings have since been questioned given that Oxburgh admitted that it also “didn’t investigate the science.”
“BP was also involved with the development of The Cap & Trade Bill. Look, they lost with Global Warming… it was a total fraud. There whole world government funding was banked with the idea of Carbon Tax, Cap & Trade, Green crap, etc. There loosing their grip, people are waking up… so they blew up the fuckin oil rig. Gotta face up. Watch what they push for in the aftermath of all this death & destruction. Salted peanuts are pretty good.”
“Ya.. Obama’s not blocking press or CONGRESSMEN from viewing the spill. They aren’t purposely stalling the clean up, so, shut the fuck up about it and don’t you dare look towards our federal beaches… slaves.”
-Fred Face 6/30/10
Rep. Steve Scalise holds an Associated Press photo taken by Charlie Riedel of an oil-covered pelican, the state bird of Louisiana, as he questions BP CEO Tony Hayward during a congressional hearing June 17, 2010.
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) wanted to fly 10 lawmakers down to the Gulf of Mexico to see the damage caused by BP’s gigantic oil spill first hand.
House Democrats said no.
Scalise’s trip was rejected for a variety of bureaucratic and logistical reasons, but it has also opened a new vein of partisan squabbling over who should be allowed to arrange a trip to view the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Republicans want to be able to take trips using their office spending allowance. But Democrats have heard from the Department of Homeland Security, which has asked that Congress organize trips through committees of jurisdiction, to avoid having to cater to a ton of individual lawmakers in a disaster zone, Democratic aides say. GOP leaders say they’ve heard nothing of this.
The squabbling over who gets to travel to the Gulf on whose dime is the latest sign that congressional oversight of the oil spill oversight from Capitol Hill has been bogged down by partisanship. Congress has held upwards of 20 hearings on the disaster, often duplicative ones each week, as lawmakers struggle to grasp and fully realize the scope of BP’s giant oil spill.
Scalise, who has already been to the Gulf on another codel, wants to organize a trip so lawmakers can fully grasp the impact before they vote on oil drilling regulations. And he doesn’t want to do it through a committee, because the members don’t fit neatly into specific panels — they stretch across committee, and even partisan, lines.
About two weeks ago, Scalise requested to be able to use his Members Representational Allowance – a fund typically reserved for office expenses and travel back to the district – to go to the Gulf with a group of about 10 other lawmakers.
He sought permission from the House Administration committee, which regulates office account spending and would have to approve the trip. After a few weeks, Scalise was ping-ponged between several committees. Eventually, John Lawrence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) chief of staff, told Scalise’s chief that “it was unlikely that the request would be granted” by the House Administration Committee.
Republicans, however, say Rep. Bob Brady (D-Pa.), who chairs the committee, has approved at least a dozen such trips in 2009 alone – something Democrats don’t deny.
“Unless there is some extraordinary reason to prohibit this trip – which has yet to be communicated to us – this is an unacceptable departure from past practices,” said Rep, Dan Lungren of California, the top Republican on the administration committee. “This is an educational trip for members using their own representational budgets to see, first-hand, the devastating impact of the Gulf spill. Our travel regulations permit this type of travel in support of our official representational duties, and unfortunately, this disaster is already having environmental and economical implications for the entire country – not just those districts represented by Members sitting on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”
Republicans say that Democrats are just trying to shield lawmakers from going to see the damage in the Gulf.
“Every Member should see the result of eight years of failed Bush-Cheney energy policies that have done nothing to secure our energy future,” said Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill.
So for now, the Scalise visit remains unscheduled.
The true facts of life are that the globalist control freaks have caused environmental disasters in order to implement their solutions, which are even worse. And they get public support through lies, government regulations and our tax dollars. UN Agenda 21 Sustainable Development is the overarching blueprint for depopulation and control using the environment as the excuse.
Last month the UN announced that they were shifting their focus from global warming (which has been thoroughly discredited) to biodiversity, which is really a way to steal land by way of the Endangered Species Act. In fact, a new UN agency has been created to monitor biodiversity (Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services or IPBES), and is based on the UN’s fraudulent IPCC. The new fear that is being created is the destruction of habitats and species resulting from human activity.(1)
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”
Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia – the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.
Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.
As the federal “Cap and Trade” bill falters in Congress, and resistance to the EPA’s 18,000 page new regulation document grows, globalists are trying to bring about expanded control, using the discredited excuse of man made global warming, on a state and local level.
Californians, finally realizing the magnitude of the cost of a statewide‘Cap and Trade’ scheme, in addition to a massive increase in government control, lined up to sign a petition to freeze any action on AB 32 (Cap & Trade scheme voted into law in 2006, to be implemented in 2012). Only 435,000 signatures were needed to get the initiative to suspend AB 32 on the ballot in November, but they got over 800,000 signatures. Thanks to ‘Climategate’ and the numerous other UN science frauds that have been exposed, people are beginning to understand the overall agenda: Agenda 21 Sustainable Development (which uses environmental issues to depopulate and control the masses).
This matters to everyone across the country because the Agenda 21 battle is from global to local. It will not stop here, but will continue to be pushed in local governments, in the private sector, schools and local UN programs like ICLEI. Mayors are a major target in local governments. When people become aware of the deceit, it loses its power. Therefore, it is important to understand the game plan behind the Cap & Trade scheme, by looking at the implications of the AB 32 ‘Scoping Plan’:
The scoping plan uses scare tactics based on false science; for instance, it warns that California will lose 90% of its snowpack in the Sierras by the end of the century, due to man made global warming (pg 9).
AB 32, the Cap & Trade scheme, relies on local governments (“essential partners”), as they have broad influence and the authority to plan, zone, approve, and permit where land is developed. This will impact the following sectors: transportation, housing, industry, forestry, water, agriculture, electricity and natural gas, with rules based on man made global warming lies. One of AB 32’s top priorities is transportation – with 3 types of regulations: vehicle emissions, carbon content in fuel and, most importantly reduction in the number of miles that vehicles travel – in other words, collectivists want us out of our cars and walking, biking or using public transport, to increase their control (pg 71).
The AB 32 Scoping Plan further promotes land use planning and infrastructure projects designed to limit travel, otherwise known as“smart growth” (pg 71). The scoping plan also includes an environmental rating system for homes and commercial buildings to “encourage” costly retrofits for buildings that do not meet minimum standards of performance. AB 32 intends to “tap into” local government authority for code compliance (pg 42). Imagine the potential burden for businesses, as California’s industry has already been crushed.
The AB 32 scoping plan also dips its tentacles into water, as it suggests that a “public goods” charge could be collected on water bills, perhaps generating $100 million to $500 million in revenue, ostensibly to fund water improvements. The scoping plan justifies this by proclaiming that there would be the benefit of water supply reliability for customers (pg 66), but at what cost?
In order to accomplish the end goal of this blueprint for control, there are numerous avenues that the collectivists will pursue:
• Public-Private Partnerships (entities that couple with the government for profit)
• Education (Fran Pavley developed a climate change school curriculum for grades K – 12)
• Community and neighborhood public education
• Research will be performed by “unleashing the potential of California’s Universities and Private Sectors”
Finally, the only way to implement this nonsense, is by way of enforcement through the government, so the Air Resources Board (ARB) advocates partnering with local, State and federal agencies to carry out inspections and prosecute violators (pg 109). “To ensure compliance, ARB would administer penalties for entities that hold an insufficient quantity of allowances to cover their emissions or fail to report their greenhouse gas emissions. Missed compliance deadlines would also result in the application of stringent administrative, civil, or criminal penalties.”
Sustainable Development, another name for Agenda 21, is already in your community; awareness and action are needed to remove it. Remember, the only thing that apathy and action have in common, is you.
“This is what elite mass-murdering group Bilderberg attendees think of the rest of the population of the world that doesn’t want to go along with their hellish tyrannical plans…
(An attendee speaking about the protesters outside of the Bilderberg meetings in Spain 2010)….”If people have enough income, they can do this – it’s like a permanent threat.”
This is one of the reasons why they are systematically destroying economies across the world.”
Fred Face 6/5/10
Charlie Skelton
This is the second dispatch from Charlie Skelton’s Bilderblog. Read part one here.
“Congratulations!” grinned the man in charge of this year’s Bilderberg conference, mustering as much sarcasm as a Dutchman could muster.
“You are the last guests here! You should have a banner!” he whooped, punching the air, wanting us gone. It’s true – we had been dragging our heels as we left the Hotel Dolce Sitges. The folding tables were already being set up in the courtyard for participant lanyards and orientation packs. It was well past the midday “lockdown” of the hotel.
“Lockdown” at Bilderberg means that security is snapped securely shut – it means an unbreachable, Pentagon-like security cordon is tightened around this seaside hotel.
It means that hundreds (and I mean hundreds) of police, in various states of riot readiness, position themselves at every junction, every roundabout, along every road, layby and dirt track within a mile of the building. And every 15 minutes or so, ruining everyone’s poolside naps, police choppers circle in the perfect sky above.
The helicopters started yesterday. The day before, as we were checking in, a couple of tourists in microlights came buzzing over the hotel before buzzing off towards the beach. For about two seconds, I thought: “Brilliant! That’s how we’re going to get photos! From the air!” Then I thought: “CIA snipers! Not so brilliant!”.
We’ve made do with a few sneaky shots around the hotel and some hushed chats with the barstaff. We did a little undercover work. And, as a result, we can confirm the following people will definitely be attending this year’s Bilderberg conference in Sitges.
I can’t tell you how I know this. Let’s just say we ‘obtained’ this information. Step forward if you hear your name.
1. Marcus Agius: The chairman of Barclays and a senior non-executive director on the BBC’s new executive board. Married to Katherine, daughter of Edmund Leopold de Rothschild (I don’t know why I mention that. Just a bit of family trivia – the sort of thing some people find interesting).
2. Josef Ackermann: The CEO of Deutsche Bank and a non-executive director of Shell.
3. General Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the US army and on the board of the US defence conglomerate General Dynamics.
4. Juan Luis Cebrián Echarri: The CEO and co-founder of El Pais; the CEO of Grupo Prisa (Spain’s biggest publisher); on the board of directors of Le Monde.
5. Richard Holbrooke: Barack Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan and a member of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations.
6. Gustavo A Cisneros Rendiles: A Venezuelan media mogul – one of the world’s richest men.
7. Victor Halberstadt: Professor of public economics at Leiden University and international advisor to Goldman Sachs. President of the International Institute of Public Finance.
8. Roger Altman: The founder and chairman of Evercore Partners, “the most active investment banking boutique in the world” (their website says).
9. Joaquín Almunia: Senior Spanish member of the European commission.
10. W. Edmund Clark: President and CEO of the TD Bank Financial Group.
11. Jan H.M. Hommen: Chairman of the ING Group.
12. Jyrki Katainen: Minster of finance in Finland, chairman of the Finnish National Coalition party.
And they’re just the tip of the Bilderberg. More names will emerge as the weekend progresses, and the long-lens snaps have started coming in. The police have started pushing us further from the roundabouts. We’ve had the first detentions and the first angry deletions of photographs by police.
Although quite why attending Bilderberg has to remain such a mystery remains a mystery. The blackened windows of the limousines, the desperate camera-dodging of the delegates.
Tony Blair attended in 1993, but lied about it in parliament. Why lie? Why hide? If it’s a long weekend of ping-pong, why the secrecy? If it’s a long weekend of global strategising, why not simply behave like adults and talk to the press about it?
The paranoia was riding high amongst the conference organisers. A pair of them talked about the 2006 Bilderberg conference in Ottawa, where the radio host Alex Jones led the protests with his megaphone.
“They were very close to the hotel,” said one. Another looked shocked and asked: “Did they ever try to attack?” A shake of the head and the answer: “No, but it was very scary.” A third leaned in: “This is the negative side of the welfare state. People have enough income, so they can do this – it’s like a permanent threat.”
What threat? That people concerned about the unfairness of the world should drape a banner over a police cordon? That they should shout their anger at the madness of asset-grabbing transnational corporations, whose chairmen are sipping beers with our elected officials? “It’s like a permanent threat.” Don’t make me spit.
My wife, Hannah, felt the hard edge of paranoia as we left the hotel at lockdown. She decided she needed to do some last-minute printing (she suddenly felt the urge to print out a history of Sitges from the internet).
The concierge ushered her into the business centre, where she found herself in the middle of pulsing heart of Bilderberg. She sat down to print. She was spotted. A stern Dutch lady shouted coldly: “Take her to security!” and barked: “What is your name?”
Startled, Hannah remarked: “This isn’t a very friendly hotel.” The lady replied: “No, it’s not a very friendly hotel.” Not this week it isn’t.
As we left finally left the unfriendly Dolce Sitges, as the plainclothes police gathered, a pallet of watermelons was being rolled into the service entrance alongside a lighting rig. The patio lights had been covered with orange cellophane.
It’s going to be quite a show later, the opening night of Bilderberg – watermelons everywhere, greedy eyes glowing orange on the dancefloor.
“More watermelons!” shouts the CEO of Deutsche Bank. Twenty are rolled towards him in an instant. He stamps upon the first and hoots his joy into the orange air, as the DJ leans into the microphone: “And we have a request from Mr Kenneth Clarke, it’s Another One Bites the Dust!”
A happy Ken tosses his cigar over his shoulder and takes to the disco floor. Not that Ken’s been confirmed yet. He’s probably relaxing in his constituency. Maybe someone should find out.
On Tuesday night, when we were at the bar working our way through their selection of Catalan beers, we asked the barman how big he reckoned the Bilderbergers’ hotel bill would be.
He rolled his eyes and said: “You don’t want to know how much they’re paying for this!” He misunderstood. I really did.
If the cost of dinner at the Dolce is anything to go by, it’ll be a whacking great tab. My advice to David Rockefeller – avoid the ‘award winning’ trout fillets. If you’re hungry, try the black spaghetti with salmon meatballs to start.
What else…?
My top tips for Bilderberg 2010 participants:
The gazpacho is good but thin.
The righthand of the two ping-pong tables (if you’re standing with your back to the sunloungers) has a tricky camber. Better go for the left-hander.
If you’re on a budget, go to breakfast at 7am, then go again at half 10, so you can get breakfast and lunch out of the same buffet.
Don’t drink the tapwater in the bedrooms. It’s got more chlorine in it than the swimming pool.
The kiwifruit breakfast pastries are to die for.
The artichoke soup needs black pepper.
Go to the spa, have an Ayurvedic massage, and during it repeat the mantra: “It’s ok if I don’t own everything, it’s ok if I don’t own everything.” Then get drunk and throw bread rolls at the stripper.
The staff are Catalan, not Spanish. Apart from the Argentinian bellhop. He’s Argentinian.
Cancel three-quarters of your police protection. You don’t need them, and they’re costing other people money.
“Just when much of the worlds economies are imploding…(as planned by piggies)… just when our government & media have lost almost all credibility… it’s time for WWIII. The excuse these satan-cock-sucking elite globalist pigs are going to try and use to bring in Global Government. Come on people… many of us have know & bitched about these plans for years and it’s scary to see it come to light. Living in denial, (i.e. thinking any bad thing you hear about your government is a conspiracy theory), isn’t really an option in this new criminal/political landscape. But I’m probably just talking to the already converted.”
“Fuck ya! The tide be-a-changing!!!! (For the better). I’ll hold this guy & his Dad just as accountable as I would all the dumb Dem & Rep hacks that people blindingly follow because of their fake liberal rhetoric or their tired right rhetoric. This sets a big precedent! Libertarian Party ain’t fuckin’ around. He ran as a republican, like his Dad, but if you know anything about these guys… you know they don’t have much in common with your average Rep or Dem. Great news!!”
-Fred “The Big Take Over” Face 5/19/10
After trouncing his neo-con opponent comprehensively in the Kentucky Senate primary, Rand Paul savaged the man-made global warming scam for what it truly represents – an attack on the middle class and the industrialized world, as he warned President Obama and his sycophants, “we’ve come to take our government back”.
“I have a message, a message from the Tea Party – a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words – we’ve come to take our government back,” stated Paul to rapturous applause, adding that he would take on the special interests in Washington who treat the federal government as their own personal ATM.
“What you have done and what we can do can transform America,” said Paul, candidly warning that America’s greatness hinges on saving the country.
Paul added that America could be saved from its debt crisis “that is devouring our country and I think could lead to chaos.”
The victorious candidate then savaged President Obama for apologizing to Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales for the industrial revolution.
“These petty dictators say that to stop climate change it’s about ending capitalism, they are explicit, and the President by attending Copenhagen gives credibility and credence to these folks and he should not go,” said Paul.
After Paul had started attacking Obama’s “green” agenda, CNN quickly cut away from his victory speech and began to talk over him. Perhaps that’s because Paul is perhaps the first person to address the fundamental threat that the global warming scam poses to the free world during such a major victory speech. This marks a new watershed in how much the credibility of climate change alarmism has collapsed in the last six months alone.
Paul is right in citing Mugabe, Morales and Chavez as acolytes to the climate cause, but similar sentiments have been expressed far closer to home.
The agenda to use global warming fear mongering as a pretext to lower living standards in the west has openly been declared by top globalists over and over again – people like EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso, who has called for a “post-industrial revolution” in which CO2 emissions are capped.
At the 2005 Bilderberg meeting sources inside the group told reporters Daniel Estulin and Jim Tucker, who have built up a credible reputation for accurately forecasting future events based on leaks from Bilderberg conferences, that the elite wanted to consolidate by bringing down the standard of living in the US and Europe, fearing that the middle class is out of control and has been granted too much credit which must be offset by a phase of consolidation.
Two years later we witnessed the beginning of the “credit crunch” which led to the massive economic turmoil of 2008 and 2009 which is now threatening to get even worse in 2010.
The move towards a “green economy” is integral to this agenda of a “post-industrial revolution” in which living standards in the west are drastically cut. Its impact is already being severely felt in Spain, where the unemployment rate is around 18 per cent as a result of 2.2 jobs being lost for every “green” job created.
A newly leaked internal document from Spain’s Zapatero administration outlines how Spain’s “green economy initiatives” have been a financial disaster. The report suggests that the real rate of job losses as a result of “green” policies is in actual fact worse than 2.2 jobs lost for every one gained.
“Today’s leaked document reveals that even the socialist Spanish government now acknowledges the ruinous effects of green economic policy,” reports Christopher Horner.
“Despite the soft-pedaling, the document reveals exactly why electricity rates “necessarily skyrocketed” in Spain, as did the public debt needed to underwrite the disaster. This internal assessment preceded the Zapatero administration’s recent acknowledgement that the “green economy” stunt must be abandoned, lest the experiment risk Spain becoming Greece.”
President Obama has made it a foundation of his economic and environmental policy that America moves towards a similar “green economy,” which would spell disaster for the fragile U.S. economy and potentially trigger a new great depression. The fact that Rand Paul has rightly highlighted this issue as a major concern, allied with the leaked Spanish report, should act as a crushing blow to efforts on behalf of internationalists to impose such tyranny on every western nation in the form of a carbon tax on the very substance humans exhale.
