Why Cap and Trade

We will soon be seeing the Cap and Trade fiasco coming before Congress and the usual rush, rush to get it passed will be pressed by the administration with the usual contrived crisis situation for explanation at hand. This has been a contrivance of the UN and the IPCC from the day one and those who spoke against the need for such were silenced, ignored, or called kooks and were said to be in denial of the consensus of other well known scientist.

My purpose is to show just how this all began and that nothing about Cap and Trade is based on science but on MONEY and control. I began to question and to write about Cap and Trade as far back as 2007, long before I had my own blog site. I researched European news articles, Australian, New Zealand and of course the usual propaganda being put forth by the UN and swallowed and passed along as the pure Gospel by the new High Priest of Global Warming, Al Gore, former VP of the US.

Science played no part in the contrivance of Carbon Credits, at least no real part other than to use the scare tactics put forth by the IPCC and Al Gore ,it was all economic based as I will show.

The individual to blame for this convoluted mess is one Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank. He is not a scientist nor in any profession related to climatology. He paints a bleak portrait of future environmental degradation costing lives and money and ushering in a global financial catastrophe as horrible as the Great Depression. Pay very close attention to the fact that he is not saying that global warming is going to cause a great environmental catastrophe as much as he is calling it a financial catastrophe. Of course he uses the environmental situation to further preach his cure which has been accepted by the IPCC of the UN and by the orator and preacher of climate doom and gloom in the US ,Al Gore Jr., former Vice President of the US. As in anything which has become political it is always wise to follow the money trail for there is where the final battle is to be fought. Sir Nicholas brands the climate change to "market failure" while still calling for a market-based solution to fix the problem. His cure is a money making scheme, nothing more , nothing less. His solution is to "sell" or "trade" carbon shares to offset the need for money to expand technology for "curing" global warming.

Great Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown made the comment before becoming PM that GB they must get a head start in cornering the market on Carbon Credits and become the prime player in this market and controlling influence in order to control the economic climate of the world. He stated that they would be more valuable than the Pound Sterling, the Currency of GB.

Britain's Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, David Miliband, (at the time of the article) a climate change crusader and a leader of the political revolution sweeping Britain and Europe announced last week that Britain will become the world's first nation to legislate a climate change bill setting legally binding timetables for a low-carbon economy. It will put into law the target of 60 per cent emission cuts by 2050. This decision will affect every British industry, business and household. Miliband is not just environment minister, he worked in Tony Blair's office at Downing Street as a New Labour strategic thinker. Now he is recasting social democratic philosophy and practice for the coming century. Miliband's discussion paper sees the greenhouse challenge as "similar in scope to the first industrial revolution".

Since becoming Prime minister, Gordon Brown has explained this transformation in relations between state and citizen. He aims to have all new homes rated carbon zero within a decade. For existing homes he wants meters to give an energy efficiency rating that feeds into mortgage and home design policies so that energy-efficient homes have a higher market value. Miliband wants an energy performance certificate for all homes up for sale. These ministers espouse a personal carbon calculator so individuals are able to measure their own carbon footprints. What are the implications of this?

It seems that the current administration has bought into this contrivance and stated at the recent G-20 Summit that they were in agreement and would work to push through the Cap and Trade in this country in order to “save the world”. What the administration didn’t tell you is how much this is going to cost you not only in energy cost but in overall cost. What will be the cost when you also have your own personalized carbon meter so that your footprint can be measured and be sure it will be and will be taxed. Taxation is what the entire scheme is all about. A way to pay for all the rest of the socialist schemes set forth by this administration.

This administration agreed that Rich countries must commit to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 and developing nations must agree to set targets by 2020. This is the same message that Stern and Gore were preaching over a year before the G-20 Summit. The same message was repeated at the Summit and most of the Stern plan was agreed to. Stern has said the only way the world could defeat the climate crisis was by ensuring that global carbon emissions peaked within 15 years, were then halved from 1990 levels to 20 billion tons a year by 2050, and cut to 10 billion thereafter.

“There is a real hurry for this. The developed world must lead by example,” Professor Stern told a meeting to publish his latest work on global warming, Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change. The Chief Occupier also picked up on this same rhetoric and we have heard the very same words come form this own mouth via the Teleprompter.

He said the global carbon market had to be expanded and improved, there had to be massive investment in research and development in low carbon technologies, and rich nations had to bear the brunt and help the poorer world leapfrog into a low carbon era.

Professor Stern, and more recently the Chief Occupier has said” the developing world, where emissions are booming as economies grow, should be given time to prepare to sign up to caps and cuts but that time should have a strict limit and by 2020 they too should be reducing emissions.”

The emission target was based on the goal of halting the temperature rise to 2C above pre-industrial levels.

That in turn meant achieving global average carbon emissions of just two tons per head - 20 billion tons divided by the anticipated world population of nine billion people - from the current average of seven tons per head according to Stern’s formula. “Everything flows from the figures. That is the simplicity of the argument. If you buy into stabilization at 500 parts per million (atmospheric carbon - equivalent to two degrees rise) the rest is arithmetic,” Professor Stern told an audience at the London School of Economics.

As emissions in the US already stood at 20 tons per head, with those in Europe and Japan between 10 and 12 tons, that meant the bulk of the efforts had to come from the rich world.

But even China, whose economy is growing at 10 per cent a year and which is building a coal-fired power station a week, was already emitting 5 tons of carbon a head and India was close to 2 tons and would soon exceed that.

That meant that they too would have to slow, halt and reverse their emissions.

Of course these figures have been used by this administration to sell this scam but the numbers don’t really tell the truth and have been skewed to create the crisis. Based on population it is not the rich nations that are at fault but those who are not going to take part in the scam and sit by laughing at those who do.

China population 1.3 billion people (1,321,851,888

India Population 1.13 billion

US population 300 million people (303,500,000 in early 2008)

Regardless of all the hype and the fact that numbers and facts do not support the need for Cap and Trade it will be forced upon this country in order that we may become like other nations.

Just an added note: You might consider questioning the underlying assumption that CO2 is a problem and hence whether an ETS(aka Cap and Trade) is necessary at all, a common knowledge consensus that is rapidly unraveling when exposed to proper scrutiny. The big oil companies love an ETS because they have the financial muscle to make money out of trading credits. The big oil companies also love an ETS because they have a virtual monopoly on subsurface geological and geophysical expertise so can make zillions out of carbon capture and storage projects. The merchant banks love an ETS because they see an opportunity to quietly make massive money on an opaque derivatives style market that nobody understands. The governments love an ETS because they can tell the electorate that they are "doing something" about climate change. The greenies love an ETS because it acknowledges their end is nigh, doom laden paradigm as the truth. Only problem is that the whole concept of carbon reduction in the name of climate control is starting to look like utter hogwash when viewed from a disinterested scientific perspective. So in the end, all pain, no gain... and us poor consumers get to pay the bill for all this folly.

We Call It Religious Freedom Others Call It 'Silly Prejudice'

Once again I am referring to an article written by Chuck Colsen. I have been following some of his writings as of late and found this one to have presented a valid question. It certainly does give one pause for thought on this issue. What say you?



It seems one man’s religious freedom is another man’s “ridiculous prejudice.”

One government official fumed that Catholic doctors were refusing to perform abortions—abortions that were perfectly legal. He wrote in a memo: “After all, these scruples are in most cases nothing but ridiculous prejudices . . . One is tempted to ask: where does state authority come in these cases, or else, is the state, perhaps, not anxious to assert its authority in this particular instance?”

Well, Nazi Germany was seldom hesitant to assert its authority, even over religion and individual conscience. As described in the June/July issue of First Things, the government official I just quoted was a Nazi bureaucrat who was none-too-happy that doctors in Italy’s Lake District—a heavily Catholic region—wouldn’t perform abortions. The Nazis, you see, had legalized abortions “in countries occupied by the Germany army.” Refusal to participate in government-sanctioned procedures drew his ire.

Fast forward to today, where there is heavy debate over whether medical professionals can be exempted from performing services that violate their religious beliefs.

The comparison is fair. And disturbing. But the problem isn’t restricted to medical practice.

Just last week, the New Hampshire legislature voted down a gay “marriage” bill because the governor had the audacity to insert language that would protect clergy and religious organizations from being forced to participate in gay “marriage” ceremonies or from providing marriage-related services.

As reported in the Concord Monitor, one New Hampshire legislator opposed what he called the “totally unnecessary and harmful amendment” because it “entrenches homophobia in statute.”

So, one man’s religious freedom, it seems, is another man’s homophobia—or silly prejudice, as the Nazi official called it.

Another legislator was quoted as saying, "It is puzzling to me, why we would allow some to discriminate and others not."

Maybe he is wondering, as the Nazi official did, “where state authority comes in this case.”

As I write in the upcoming June issue of Christianity Today—which I urge you to read—totalitarianism thrives when the state succeeds in what Hannah Arendt called the “atomization of society.” Arendt, a political theorist who fled Nazi Germany, described how totalitarian states seek to create a mass of individuals isolated from the very structures that have held civilized societies together for eons. Once individuals are alienated from families or from their faith communities or civic groups, they stand alone before the power of the state.

Is the United States teetering on the edge of totalitarianism? No. (Here I would have to take issue and say that we are at the brink given the agenda of the current administration and the appointment of the recent SCOTUS judge who is basically an unknown. Ms. Sotomayor's leanings would certainly determine just how close we are to toppling over the edge.)

But, should we Christians be concerned when the government seeks to strip health care workers of their right of conscience? Should we sniff out danger when a state fails to protect the religious rights of clergy, or wedding planners, or photographers who choose not to participate in same-sex marriage ceremonies? Or when a new administration considers whether or not to force faith-based groups to cease what it considers “discriminatory” hiring practices?

Should we be concerned? Yes, we should.

The Joke's on Us

Marking his first 110 days in office, President Barack Obama ,aka, Chief Occupier, displayed his skill as a stand-up comic. "You know, it's been a whirlwind of activity these first 100 days," he jested. "We've enacted a major economic recovery package, we passed a budget and no president in history has ever named three commerce secretaries this quickly. Just last week, Car and Driver named me auto executive of the year. Something I'm very proud of."

The trouble is that the joke is at the expense of the American people, that’s you and me.

Obama has embarked on a strategy for the world to spend its way out of recession. His budget, inclusive of purchases of toxic assets, will saddle taxpayers with an additional $8.5 trillion in debt, or after interest, $200, 000 for every tax-paying family.

The underlying logic is that if the global boom following the hi-tech collapse rode on the back of the policies that created the sub-prime crisis, then a taxpayer-funded spending splurge should do the same trick.

The second step in the master plan was to go global. Luckily, a huge global stimulus package that was to be led by the Group of 20 nations has hopefully failed at least for now. Not content with bailing out defaulting banks and insurance companies with the failed management still in place and in receipt of huge bonuses, the same logic has been extended to defaulting nations. Anticipating more failures, the International Monetary Fund has received a huge funding boost, despite an abysmal track record.

The common thread underlying this administration has been to preserve failed or failing management of enterprises (and nations) at any cost.

In not too many years past, recessions once could be relied on to shake out and renew failed management in a form of creative destruction so that we could all prosper in the next boom. This is no longer the case.

Through hundreds of years the legal system has evolved to facilitate critical renewal of management. This process of putting the debt holders in charge when equity holders fail to properly monitor management has a name. We call it bankruptcy.

Because this word has ugly connotations - executives lose their jobs as well as their bonuses - Obama has attempted to abolish it. It doesn’t fit well into his more gently government concept where even terrorist are no longer called terrorist-- unless they happen to be American’s who disagree with his policies. To further clarify these new terrorist as those who cling to their “guns and Bibles”, who are against wholesale abortion, who call for border control and immigration laws to be upheld and returning military members who have given so much to rid this world of the real terrorist.

In an extreme example of “public-spirited compassion” (sarcasm intended), potentially hundreds of billions have been poured into American International Group, enabling business as usual for its failed executives, including more bonuses. Its role was to provide "pretend" insurance for issuers of sub-prime loans when even the previous administration was calling for the two arms of the US Government, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, to investigate and stop the underwriting of outrageous home mortgages. General Motors will be paid billions more by taxpayers to produce more failing cars. Schemes to encourage entrepreneurial American’s to start innovative businesses are abolished to fund what amounts to a public charity located in Detroit, which is shortly likely to belong to the US Government.

Vastly higher public debt levels are no more than a revival of rising private debt levels from the sub-prime era. The difference is that the burden is being shifted to the taxpayer and higher inflationary expectations.

With economies across the world shrinking - Britain by 4 per cent, Ireland by 8 per cent - the cost of borrowing in real dollars is falling along with demand. At the same time, the American taxpayer is becoming more beholden to banks as Obama’s guarantee enables investment banks, as well as regular banks, to borrow even more billions. Yet Obama’s intervention is promoting excessive risk-taking at the expense of the taxpayer, not providing a cure. Indeed, the public is being forced to financially back the people Obama has denounced since the beginning of his campaign.

In his first 110 days president Franklin Roosevelt gave the world the New Deal, which helped to prolong the Depression until World War II. Labour monopolies with high wages were promoted along with trade restrictions that made employing more workers almost impossible.

In his first 110 days, Obama has set himself up for a failed course of action that will not only delay recovery but sow the seeds for future disasters. To make matters worse he wants to continue to increase the spending by a few more trillion dollars on a doomed Federal Health Care Program.

In all of this he seems to think it all a joke, something to be laughed at, as was demonstrated in his remarks at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. His “jokes” fall lower than supposed comedienne Wanda Sykes stating she was hoping that Rush Limbaugh’s kidneys would fail, because folks the joke is on us.

I’m not laughing.

The Real Story Behind Climate Change

It appears that the current administration has run into a slight problem with their Climate Policy and greed, errrr, need, for Cap and Trade which according to the Administration would bring in an additional $650 Billion in revenue to run their socialist agenda. If anyone ever had a doubt that the so called Global Warming, (suddenly changed to Climate Change when facts began to point out that Global Warming was a hoax, something that occurred in the past but had reversed itself, ) was indeed just a drive for a new source of revenue then this article should dispel that doubt.

THE notion that human activity has an alarming influence on climate is based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and spurious claims about a scientific consensus.

Independent scientists who question these claims are accused of being in the pay of the energy industry and of believing that the notion of man-made climate change is a conspiracy.

To the best of my knowledge, no climate conspiracy has ever existed. But another force has driven science into its present parlous state where the output of computer software is held in higher regard than observational data, where marketing spin is more important than fact and evidence, and where a trenchant defence of the notion of man-made global warming is seen as paramount.

The single, pre-eminent force driving this distortion of science originates in the once-august UN. The UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change set the tone by linking climatic variations to the air and water pollution issues that it was quite reasonably addressing at the time. It ignored recognised natural climate forces and declared that recent variations in climate were attributable to human activity. Although the IPCC, which was set up by the UNFCCC to investigate the matter, backed away from the assertion that all modern climate change is man made, it nonetheless operates under a charter that considers only the risks of "human-induced" climate change.

Raising these matters under the UN banner was a political masterstroke because it drew national governments into the process. UN bodies have a reputation for political allegiances rather than peer-group pressure but the result is much the same, and even more so when government appointees, often fervent believers in the cause, speak passionately and seem backed by UN authority.

No individual or government had the temerity to stand up to the UNFCCC or IPCC and say, "we don't agree". Some stridently endorsed the claims, and many interpreted the statement, "we don't know what else might be causing climate change, so it must be human activity" as proof positive rather than admission of incomplete knowledge.

The IPCC has now delivered four scientific assessment reports, each accompanied by an increasingly urgent call to action regarding climate change driven by greenhouse gases. National governments, which are signatories to the UNFCCC, have almost without exception bought into the alarm, modulating it only to accord better with their own political philosophies. This, combined with the allocation research funding according to policy relevance, means governments now attempt to predetermine the findings of scientific research.

For many years climate researchers have understood that their proposals will only be funded if they are pitched in line with government policy. Even worse, unless some aspect of their results appears to perpetuate government thinking, renewal of their funding is unlikely. Other climatologists are acutely aware of the potential consequences for their employers and their own employment prospects should they speak out in criticism of the dominant alarmist paradigm. Scientists who have criticised the hypothesis of human-caused climate change have had their funding curtailed or employment terminated.

Climate modellers have been very aware that their expensive and powerful computing facilities would be supported only if their research produced alarmist climate predictions. This notwithstanding, these models often produced results that were not in good agreement with historical data, perhaps because they poorly replicated or even omitted variations in climate.

These deficiencies and more have been papered over by reviving outdated and inaccurate research about the warming effect of carbon dioxide. The numbers still didn't add up but the inclusion of some "positive feedbacks" masked the problem, and the models were declared "proof" of a significant human influence on climate.

The peer-review process was originally a sanity check for the editors of scientific journals but has always been open to abuse by reviewers who wish to support or suppress a particular line of argument. The recent narrow focus of climate research funding has caused an outburst of scientific papers that support the IPCC's alarmist beliefs and relatively few papers that contradict it. Reviewers with vested interests suppress contradictory papers and support the "official" line.

Vested interests now dominate climate science. Whether climatologists, their employers and other people believe the government-approved line has become irrelevant, because they all wish to retain an income stream and whatever reputations they've established. These people advise governments, which subsequently set policy and research funding regardless of any contradiction with observational data.

Climate science is no longer an impartial truth but a slave to the yoke of politics and opportunism. If this continues, society will be the inevitable loser.

John McLean is a climate data analyst and a member of the Australian Climate Science Coalition.

We are going to put an end to the notion that the American taxpayer exists to fund the federal government.

The Soros Influenza Spreads To the Pentagon

If you still haven’t figured out the connection between George Soros and the Chief Occupier this tidbit should leave no doubt. Soros, the puppet master behind “the One” continues to place his other puppets in positions of influence through out his unqualified, empty suited, sock puppets administration.

The Patriot Post did not let this slip by but rest assured that the LSM will breathe nary a word about the appointment nor the connection. The Patriot Post calls it the Soros Influenza and I concur totally. If the light bulb came on while reading this pass it along. If not wait around because be assured that more such nonsense will occur since less than half of the appointments to the Chief Occupiers cabinet and advisors have yet to be made, even after 100 days. It seems he has been too busy contriving crisis that are too good to pass up.

In other bad news from the Pentagon, "Democratic Party financier George Soros, who puts much of the blame for Islamic terrorists on America and former president George W. Bush, can celebrate his first foothold inside the Pentagon," writes columnist Rowan Scarborough. "It is in the person of Rosa Brooks, far-left former Los Angeles Times columnist." Brooks was also a lawyer for Soros' Open Societies Institute, which in turn is sugar daddy for MoveOn.org. She will now be "principal adviser" for Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, the Number 3 official and top policymaker at the Pentagon. This means that Brooks will have an influence on such things as budget, troop deployments and weapons purchases. She will also, according to the Pentagon, "develop cross-regional planning," which means she will hold sway over foreign relations.

In light of her coming role, her views on national security might be pertinent, and a look at Brooks' diatribes quickly reveals the problem. She compared President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler (how original) and called Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney "psychotics who need treatment." Perhaps most telling is this passage from a 2007 article: "[Al Qaeda] was little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. On 9/11, they got lucky -- but despite the unexpected success of their attack on the U.S., they did not pose an imminent mortal threat to the nation. Today, things are different. Thanks to U.S. policies, al Qaeda has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001." Uh, thanks to U.S. policies Rosa, al-Qa'ida has not made a successful attack on U.S. soil since 2001.

Sadly, however, the fact that a DoD undersecretary now has a total wingnut as an advisor isn't exactly earth-shattering news given the radicalism threaded throughout this administration. Barack Obama still has at least 1,359 days left.

It is strongly suggested that the full article by Rowan Scarborough be read using the link provided in order to understand the danger this presents and also shows much of the background of Soros and his desire to destroy this country.