I've Had Enough of the UN Running This Country!

Wall Street Journal
OPINION MAY 22, 2009
The Climate-Industrial Complex:
Some businesses see nothing but profits in the green movement.

By BJORN LOMBORG
Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers -- the Copenhagen Climate Council -- hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.

The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.

Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."

The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.

Even companies that are not heavily engaged in green business stand to gain. European energy companies made tens of billions of euros in the first years of the European Trading System when they received free carbon emission allocations.

American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.

U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities -- including Duke -- spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.

The massive transfer of wealth that many businesses seek is not necessarily good for the rest of the economy. Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created.

The cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, an internal memo was sent within Enron that stated, "If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory business."

The World Business Summit will hear from "science and public policy leaders" seemingly selected for their scary views of global warming. They include James Lovelock, who believes that much of Europe will be Saharan and London will be underwater within 30 years; Sir Crispin Tickell, who believes that the United Kingdom's population needs to be cut by two-thirds so the country can cope with global warming; and Timothy Flannery, who warns of sea level rises as high as "an eight-story building."

Free speech is important. But these visions of catastrophe are a long way outside of mainstream scientific opinion, and they go much further than the careful findings of the United Nations panel of climate change scientists. When it comes to sea-level rise, for example, the United Nations expects a rise of between seven and 23 inches by 2100 -- considerably less than a one-story building.

There would be an outcry -- and rightfully so -- if big oil organized a climate change conference and invited only climate-change deniers.

The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else.

Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, and author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" (Knopf, 2007).

It's Getting Hot in Here; Let's Take Off All Our Clothes

Why aren't I famous? Why haven't I taken my clothes off in some magazine? Or vomited out some semblance of a melody and called it popular music? Or starved myself into some mundane and pithy role in a vacuous liberal hollywood bullshit fest? Then maybe I could bleet continuously about the issue du jour of global warming. The social elite of this country stand on thier pedastals and patronizingly call out, "if you love me and want to see more of me in the Enquirer and People Magazine you will listen to me and preach my message of the catastrophe that is global warming! Oh and be sure to see me in my new movie, 'I'm Vapid and Ignorant but Look at Me Making More Money Than You for Doing None of the Work'. You may have seen me in my previous movie, 'Shillin' for a Ticket to the Inaugaration'."

For all of the sheep who are buying into the message of their favorite "Twitter Twit", do you really know all of the facts behind global warming or are you just going to let the liberal intelligentsia and career political elites of this world murder the middle class?


IPCC Too Blinkered and Corrupt to Save
Financial Post 2007
Dr. Gray is one of the 2,000 to 2,500 top scientists from around the world whom the IPCC often cites as forming the basis of its findings. But Dr. Gray, who knows as much about the IPCC's review processes as anyone, has been troubled by what he sees as an appalling absence of scientific rigour in the IPCC's review process.
"The whole process is a swindle," he states, in large part because the IPCC has a blinkered mandate that excludes natural causes of global warming.

Japan's Society of Energy and Resources Disses the IPCC
Watts Up with That 2009
Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission. Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN’s IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. The scientists contend that recent climate change is driven by natural cycles, not human industrial activity, as political activists argue.

IPCC Report Criticized by a Lead Author
Energy & Environment 2007
Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the world's leading atmospheric scientists, says that the IPCC process is driven by politics rather than science. His paper Taking Greenhouse Warming Seriously illustrates that serious and persistent doubts remain concerning the danger of anthropogenic global warming despite the frequent claims that ‘the science is settled.’

The Sun Drives Our Climate
EIR Science 2008
Many scientists, engineers, farmers, and others around the world have sound reasons to believe that global climate change has natural causes, but there is little learned discussion. The reason is that climate change has now become a political and economic issue, and is no longer a scientifc issue.
The major driving forces causing climatic variations on Earth are the variations in the full spectrum of radiation of the Sun, the variations in the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the varying gravitational infuence of the larger planets on the Sun, and the infuence of cosmic radiation on both the Sun and the Earth. The oceans have a major infuence in helping to regulate climate on Earth.
The recent observations of a quieter Sun, together with the much colder weather in the Northern Hemisphere Winter, suggest that it is probable that there will be continued global cooling.

No Consensus on IPCC's Level of Ignorance
BBC 2007
A view from a leading researcher into climate change tells us while most IPCC participants are scientists and bring the aura of objectivity, there are two things to note:
To some extent the IPCC reports are a result of a political process
Climate scientists are mere mortals casting their gaze on a system so complex they cannot precisely predict its future state even five days ahead

I Don't C.A.I.R About Your Protests

Can I just say that I loathe the Council on American Islamic Relations with a white-hot passion the depth of which overwhelms my capacity for rational speech? So I apologize to everyone who gets this and says, “Gina is normally so eloquent and logical in her arguments”…the whole lot of them are poopy faced little cry babies who can just go back to the rotten hovels that they crawled out of. If you don’t want to be thought of as murderous tyrannical women hating beheaders with complete disregard for human life, then don’t f#$&ing act like murderous tyrannical women hating beheaders with complete disregard for human life! I’ve always said this about any group that publically whines about how they are “stereotyped” and shout their impotent little mews of general discontent about everything from how the media portrays them to their need for special kid gloves and we all need to be “re-indoctrinated” into a warm fuzzy feeling about them. GET OVER YOURSELVES! Instead of pounding your little fists on the floor crying about being so misunderstood, how about doing something about those idiot members of your “culture” who propagate the stereotype? I don’t hate you ‘cause you are different; I hate you because you think your difference is more important than mine.