The chief executive of General Electric has emerged as one of the most outspoken advocates of government caps on carbon emissions. But it’s not that visions of saving the planet are filling his “Ecomagination,” nor has he given up on Hayek. In transforming one of the world’s biggest companies into a clean-tech juggernaut, he just smells the chance to make a lot of money—if the U.S. doesn’t miss the train altogether.
2008
Despite next year’s projected $8 billion budget deficit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is so intent on implementing costly regulations and mandates to “fight global warming” that he now wants to borrow money to pay for the crusade. This is bad policy on at least two fronts.
Even Sacramento Democrats see the danger in resorting to another ill-conceived fiscal fix by borrowing $67 million over two years from the state’s beverage container recycling fund, which is supposed to repay consumers who recycle bottles and cans. The loan would be repaid with interest.
“What if consumers could reduce carbon emissions by simply choosing one product over another at their local store? With a carbon label – similar to a nutrition label for the environment – we could all be armed with enough information to make a difference, not through regulation or taxation, but through the power of consumer choice.”
I have introduced a bill that will provide Californians with the information necessary to voluntarily reduce global warming pollution through consumer purchasing power.
A new study has found that California wildfires emit more greenhouse gases than previously believed largely through the post-fire decay of dead wood, a finding that is raising questions about how effective the state's forests are at storing carbon and slowing global warming. "No matter what anybody does in California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as long as these forests are burning, they are wasting their time," Bonnicksen said.
Yesterday, running between flights, I briefly noted how Al “Gore is traveling to Poland and India this week to meet with government officials to continue his efforts to achieve a global climate treaty”, revealing his status as self-appointed roving Climate-treaty Ambassador.
The day before, various news services reported that the man who left office worth under $3 million had just plunked $35 million into a particular “firm that selects the private funds for clients and invests in makers of environmentally friendly products”. Let us stipulate that Mr. Gore and his advisors are savvy enough to not place all of his wealth in one fund; in fact, the same sources report this wealth as “well in excess of” $100 million. It’s been a good seven years.
Mr. Gore also has a position in, and position with, a Silicon Valley “green” venture capital outfit – another group of people investing money in companies who would be worth real money under different circumstances – and of course sells carbon “offsets”, which are a bit of window dressing at present but which would be assigned artificial value through artificial (state-created) scarcity under different circumstances.
At this point I want to remind all of the skeptics, who clearly need no reminding, that one’s financial interests dictate or at minimum pollute one’s opinions. As a certain gentleman recently said, people who disagree with him on this issue do so “because they are locked in a coalition with rich and powerful people who take advantage of the poor for economic profit”.
Like, say, increasing their energy costs? Exporting pollution to countries with lower environmental and other standards, and therefore exporting jobs? Here we see the trouble with this line of argument, that it is not possible to cherry-pick such things, assigning venality to just one side: one cannot logically fault the skeptics’ credibility on the grounds that they receive income related to their advocacy without also faulting Gore’s credibility and that of their heavily compensated rock star alarmists like James Hansen, the “responsible” businesses aiding in the campaign in order to sell windmills, carbon offsets or the like, and so on.
So, in sum, we see the former vice-president traveling the world – though, no doubt, “the planes were going there anyway” – to encourage people in positions of responsibility to whom he has unique access to agree to something that, if they agree, will do for his wealth what the alarmism he has fostered since leaving office has already done, but several times over.
Now imagine the outcry and arguments in the event an oil company’s CEO or emissary assumed this role.
That was a trick, of course. Several oil companies have been doing this for more than a decade. It didn’t work out in time for Enron, though others have picked up where they left off, a story that you never hear. Maybe Mr. Gore has now made the issue safe for substantive debate without the ritual claims of corruption – or else has begged full disclosure of who is meeting with whom advocating what and with what interests at stake.
Leaders from more than a dozen U.S. environmental groups stood beside Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in solidarity Wednesday when she announced that the Senate will have a good chance in June to strengthen and pass a landmark bill to slash greenhouse-gas emissions.
Criticisms of Environment Minister John Baird for the vagueness of the moves announced this week to force oilsands to sequester CO2, and prevent construction of "dirty" coal plants reflects the Alice in Wonderland quality of the climate-change non-debate. Opposition parties brayed that he had not been "tough" enough. Media headlines suggested that big emitters had "won."
Until his Damascus moment, Miklos Zagoni, a physicist and environmental researcher, had been touted as his nation's "most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol." But then this activist saw the work of a fellow Hungarian scientist. His world was rocked. "I fell in love" with the theory, he told DailyTech.com.
Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist at NASA's Langley Research Center with three decades of experience, had found that researchers have been repeating a mistake when calculating the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on temperatures.
The world's top greenhouse gas polluters will try to work out ways to curb carbon emissions from industries and fund cleaner energy projects for poorer nations when they gather in Japan from Friday.
The G20, ranging from top polluters the United States and China to Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa, emit about 80 percent of mankind's greenhouse gases.
European politicians at a carbon conference today in Copenhagen had an 800-pound gorilla on stage with them.
Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Denmark’s Minister for Climate and Energy Connia Hedegaard both hail from Scandinavian countries that have taken aggressive measures to fight climate change. They both made passionate pleas for the world to join together to cut emissions. But the gorilla remains—how to get developing countries and major emitters like India and China to join in?
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