I earned my Nobel Peace Prize by making the United Nations fix a deliberate error in its latest climate assessment. After the scientists had finalized the draft, UN bureaucrats inserted a new table, but with four decimal points right-shifted. The bureaucrats had multiplied tenfold the true contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise. Were they trying to support Al Gore’s fantasy that these two ice-sheets would imminently cause sea level to rise 20ft, displacing tens of millions worldwide?
Iain Murray, CEI, posted on National Review Online
There are strong suggestions circulating that the Administration is being firmly lobbied to announce a cap-and-trade scheme for electricity utilities in the State of the Union address as a 'legacy' item and in a futile attempt to bind the hands of an incoming President. This would be a disaster.
At a time when the Fed and the rest of the Administration is doing its best to avoid recession, what Mike Huckabee might call the "Wall Street Lobby" within the White House is doing its best to counteract all that effort. Given that the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that household energy prices rose by a staggering 17.4 percent in 2007, but electricity prices rose only 3.4 percent. Cap and trade will push up those electricity prices too. It is the last thing we need at present.
Moreover, cap and trade just doesn't work. The Europeans have had a system in place for a couple of years now and it has worked so badly that the EU President – supposedly a friend of America – is threatening a carbon trade war because, he claims, "There is no point these industries cutting emissions in Europe if they lose business to countries with more lax rules on carbon emissions." In other words, an American cap and trade scheme will be the perfect economic stimulus package – for China and India.
It appears that the people who are pushing this within the White House are exactly the same people who, together with Enron's Ken Lay and Environmental Defense's Fred Krupp, snuck a cap and trade promise into the Bush campaign's August 2000 energy plan without the knowledge of the campaign's energy advisory committee. They're all very well connected with the rent-seeking companies and the Wall Street banks that will make a fortune selling the permits to each other.
There are some very highly-compensated law firms out there currently lobbying for this at rates that pro-free-market groups simply (and ironically) can't afford and they are hiring Bush advisers by the troughload. Yesterday's Greenwire (subscription required), for instance, identified 2004 campaign head and former RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, as "a Washington attorney working for corporate clients who back mandatory climate controls."
The American consumer, however, gets the shaft. If you don't want higher electric bills, it really is time to get angry.
The Group of 77 developing nations, representing about two-thirds of the world's population, said it is concerned that climate-protection laws will be used to curb their exports to rich nations.
Following in the footsteps of an earlier study, government scientists on Tuesday said warmer oceans should translate to fewer Atlantic hurricanes striking the United States.
The reason: As sea surface temperatures warm globally, sustained vertical wind shear increases. Wind shear makes it difficult for storms to form and grow.
Twenty of the 100 highest-grossing U.S. law firms have started practices advising companies on climate change, according to a Bloomberg survey of the firms' Web sites. The attorneys help clients finance clean-energy projects and lobby Congress, typically billing $500 to $700 an hour.
Five GOP state lawmakers disputing the idea that humans are the cause of global warming distributed books supporting their argument to colleagues in an effort to stop the Legislature from passing new measures intended to combat climate change.
Today the Financial Times has a little piece mentioning the gloating in the halls of Brussels over current U.S. financial controversies, with one Eurocrat after another preening that the U.S. adopted reckless policies, didn’t pay heed to Europe – and it’s projected 1.5-1.8% growth, by the way – and has only itself to blame. FT pompously passed along the call to “wake up, America!.
OK, so let’s pay attention to Europe.
* Yesterday, the European Confederation of Iron and Steel Industries pleaded with the Commission to stop the hemorrhaging from their carbon-cap-n-trade scheme which put their industry at a big competitive disadvantage compared to Chinese, Russian and U.S.
* The day before that, the European Roundtable of Industrialists begged the Commission for the same thing, saying it could destroy the competitive position of European industry. The letter was signed by the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, which had pushed the scheme.
These policies were put in place at the behest of businesses convinced that they can ride the back of the tiger of energy rationing policies and not end up on the inside; certain that if their political buddies impose a system it will be the one they design with plans to profit from – on ratepayers’ and consumers’ backs – and maintain control of.
- As a result of just three years of this experiment, yesterday the President of the European Council, Barosso, vowed to impose trade sanctions on countries that haven’t adopted Europe’s rationing scheme – in which I’ve documented they’re cheating, by the way – which is the most direct way you will ever hear them admit that the scheme is doing precisely as we warned, and killing their economy.
- Remember this when you hear it sold domestically as creating “green collar jobs”: nonsense–some brokerages have done real well, and utilities and some oil companies have been given windfall profits in the trillions, at the cost of chasing real jobs away due to high energy costs. They have even driven steel jobs HERE.
By coincidence, also this week Greenwire (password required) reported that former RNC chief Ken Mehlman is being paid by rent-seeking industry to convince the administration to adopt this scheme, as are the spinner Tucker Eskew and other former Bushies.
A Bloomberg story yesterday cited Mehlman’s firm, Akin Gump, as an example of lawyers getting $700 an hour to advocate just such things.
Finally, this week, we are also told by our few friends in the White House that there is a new urgency because the long running campaign to get the President to do this is gaining traction, this campaign that is still driven by the Goldman Sachs contingent, which is still driven by Josh Bolten with a little help from Treasury, et al. (Goldman being heavily invested in the project and in on the game since the early days when it teamed up with Enron on it).
We’re told they’ve got a pending recommendation to announce this in the President's State of the Union address. As Cyrano said about a fiscally reckless move characterized as stupid: “But what a gesture!”
Invoking executive privilege, the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday refused to provide lawmakers with a full explanation of why it rejected California's greenhouse gas regulations.
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