Cliff May begins his NRO column, “The Hunger,” by retelling an old joke about astronomers discovering a giant meteor hurtling towards Earth and the Washington Post running a headline: “World to end tomorrow: minorities and poor to suffer most.” While it is fine to make light of the media’s tendency to paint any change in market conditions as a class issue, in this case the joke doesn’t work. When we are talking about substantial food price inflation, it is the poor who suffer. Rampant food inflation also increases the number of poor people.
2008
Has there ever been a more timely natural catastrophe than climate change? I mean, here we all are worrying about the future of the American economy—too much debt, jobs and industries moving overseas, new competitors in Asia and India—when what merrily comes along is a perceived civilizational challenge whose solution will not only create a better environment but also—talk about luck!—millions of those high-paying "green-collar" jobs and innovative new industries of the future that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been talking about. As Clinton said in one presidential debate, "This issue of energy and global warming has the promise of creating millions of new jobs in America. It can be a win-win, if we do it right."
"Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously." Dr. Phil Chapman wrote in The Australian on April 23. "All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead."
Chapman neither can be caricatured as a greedy oil-company lobbyist nor dismissed as a flat-Earther. He was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology staff physicist, NASA's first Australian-born astronaut, and Apollo 14's Mission Scientist.
Some more pieces of the "How Al Gore is Going to Become Amazingly Wealthy by Selling Climate Hysteria" puzzle came together Friday when the Silicon Valley venture capital firm he's now a part of announced a $500 million investment in green technologies.
Making matters more delicious, the firm already has investments in many of the same companies Gore admitted in March he has a stake in.
To begin untangling this web, let's first take a gander at what was reported Friday by the San Francisco Chronicle (emphasis added):
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said Thursday it will invest $500 million in green technology companies that have passed their earliest stages of growth and are maturing.
The venture capital firm also will invest in green-tech startup companies as part of another investment fund it introduced Thursday, which will invest $700 million over the next three years in startups.
For those that have forgotten, this is the same VC group Gore joined last November as reported by NewsBusters.
Here's where the plot thickens. The KPCB website identified the following companies this group has already invested in: Altarock Energy Inc, Altra Biofuels, Amyris Biotechnologies, Ausra, Bloom Energy, GreatPoint Energy, Mascoma Corporation, and Miasole.
Sound familiar? Well, they should, as these are some of the same companies Gore highlighted in his speech to the TED conference in Monterey, California, which NewsBusters reported on April 11:
There are a lot of great investments you can make. If you are investing in tar sands, or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. And it is based on an old model. Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments I personally think make sense. I have a stake in these so I’ll have a disclaimer there. But geo-thermal concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency, and conservation.
As Gore spoke these words, pictures of electric cars, windmills and solar panels appeared in multiple slides on the screen with company names at the bottom such as Amyris (biofuels), Altra (biofuels), Bloom Energy (solid oxide fuel cells), Mascoma (cellulosic biofuels), GreatPoint Energy (catalytic gasification), Miasole (solar cells), Ausra (utility scale solar panels), GEM (battery operated cars), Smart (electric cars), and AltaRock Energy (geothermal power).
Starting to make some sense? Gore and this VC firm invest in the same companies, all which will benefit from the enactment of legislation requiring industry to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and then they travel the world lobbying governments to do exactly that.
Untangling the web further, one of the key partners at KPCB, legendary moneyman John Doerr, also spoke at the TED conference in March, and as can be seen in this video, bragged about how he and seven of his colleagues lobbied legislators in California for the passage of AB 32, The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.
As Doerr proudly exclaimed, this made California "the first state in this country to mandate 25 percent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2020."
Later, Doerr told the audience something that should answer everybody's questions concerning what all this climate hysteria is about:
We've got to make this economic so that all people and all nations make the right outcome, the right profitable outcome, and, therefore, the likely outcome. Energy's a $6 trillion business worldwide. It is the mother of all markets. You remember that Internet? Well, I'll tell you what: green technologies, going green is bigger than the Internet. It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.
Things becoming clearer?
Let's understand something, folks: this man and this VC firm made billions off of the dot-com boom of the '90s. Now, they're all over this green technology investment scheme.
However, unlike the Internet, their success lies first in scaring the heck of people, and then getting governments — like mine here in California — to buy into this nonsense, and enact legislation which will require businesses to purchase products from companies they already own.
Without such legislation, this entire investment scheme collapses just as dot-com stocks did from March 2000 through March 2003.
This raises some interesting questions. After all, in the past couple of weeks, NewsBusters has reported many media outlets beginning to recognize the folly of biofuels, and how they are adding to the international food crisis.
As Gore and KPCB have invested large amounts of money in biofuel companies, when will press members make this connection, and start informing the public of this really inconvenient truth?
—Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and Associate Editor of NewsBusters.
Apparently the spin du jour on the Nature paper referenced serially, below, is that “Nature” – the Mother, not the magazine – “has given Earth a break” for (surprise!) “the next ten years” (what is it with these people and the number 10?).
So Al Gore’s Doomsday Clock has a snooze button. Who knew?
Driving around today I wondered how bad the traffic would be if humans had increased their population since 1950 nearly fivefold — as has happened over that span with the apparently soon-to-be-declared "endangered" polar bear — instead of the mere sub-threefold we've experienced.
I'm just saying. One man's population bomb, explosion, epidemic, etc. is another's threat of extinction, harkening back to P.J. O'Rourke's distillation of the population nags' philosophy as "just enough of them, way too many of you and me."
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
In North Carolina, where the John Locke Foundation (my former employer) has endeavored to expose the influence of the Center for Climate Strategies upon the state's Climate Action Plan Advisory Group, an outside group enlisted by CCS has seriously backpedaled on ludicrous claims of great economic benefits that would result from CAPAG's recommendations. My Locke colleague Roy Cordato explains:
“Six months ago, the (Appalachian State University) Energy Center trumpeted its claims that policies to cut carbon dioxide emissions in North Carolina would add more than 325,000 jobs and $20 billion to the state’s economy by 2020,” said Dr. Roy Cordato, JLF Vice President for Research and Resident Scholar. “Now the same ASU team has snuck out a new report that drops that estimate to 32,000 jobs and $2.2 billion in gross state product.”
“That’s not just a rounding error,” Cordato added. “That’s a major mistake that should call into question the researchers’ competence. No serious scholar would put out research that makes a mistake that large.”
Of course, it was the earliest boast (see "Ponder presentation") that got the greater attention of the local media, while the new, revised figures ("Ponder presentation" again) were ignored.
That CCS contracted out to the Energy Center in the first place was a recognition that they had to shore up their credibility on the economics claims they were making. Only who did they get to do the research? A fellow named David Ponder, who is a graduate assistant in the Department of Political Science at Appalachian State. Further evidence of CCS's embarrassment over economic ignorance is that they have overhauled their personnel page on their Web site to emphasize economics credentials. Amusingly updated on executive director Tom Peterson's bio are these new inclusions:
He holds a B.S. in Biology with a concentration in Economics from the College of William and Mary…
He also has a Master's degree in Environmental Management with a concentration in Natural Resource Economics and Policy from Duke University…
Meanwhile, the Beacon Hill Institute (well-qualified economists all) has produced its own analysis of CAPAG's recommendations, and not surprisingly they arrive at far different conclusions from the poli-sci grad student:
“By 2011, the state would shed more than 33,000 jobs,” according to the report from the Beacon Hill Institute, the research arm of the economics department at Boston’s Suffolk University. “Annual investment would drop by about $502.4 million, real disposable income by more than $2.2 billion, and real state Gross Domestic Product by about $4.5 billion.”
“The negative economic effects would spill over into state and local tax collections,” the report adds. “We estimate a loss of $184.6 million in revenues in 2011.”
So now the question for everyone concerned is, who do you believe?
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
A new clearing house Web site on global warming skepticism is up, called The Chilling Effect, and along with its sister site Gored Earth, says it will produce a new political cartoon that addresses the issue every week. The first two look very promising.
It is, we are told, as inevitable and inexorable as night follows day that, as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere goes up, so too does the temperature of the world. Inconveniently for this axiomatic truth, however, while carbon dioxide has continued to increase the temperature of the planet has stayed flat over the past decade and even recently dropped like a stone. Never mind: man-made global warming turns out to be the most obliging of theories because now we are told that this inexorable process of heating is now to take a ten-year pause.
More than seven in 10 voters insist that they would not be willing to pay higher taxes in order to fund projects to combat climate change, according to a new poll.
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