Free Republic

President Barack Obama on Friday abruptly altered the timing of his appearance at an international climate summit in Copenhagen, hoping to capitalize on steps by India and China and an emerging plan to help developing countries mitigate impacts with $10 billion a year. The move means Obama will be at the summit on Dec. 18, considered a crucial period when more leaders will be in attendance, as opposed to his original plan to be in Denmark next Wednesday on his way to Oslo to receive his Nobel Peace Prize. It also means that Obama will be squeezing in a separate,...

Behind the scenes, large financial houses are moving in stealthily. In 2008, carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion and is projected to grow to become a $2-$10 trillion dollar market, or “The largest commodity traded world wide”. The largest. That’s bigger than oil, coal, gas, or iron.Banks want us to trade carbonJP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, BNP Paribas, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Credit Suisse are just a few financial houses calling for emissions trading schemes. (None of them seem to be calling for a tax?) Those who broker the trades are guaranteed to make money.Journalists who repeat IPCC press releases...

The Australian situation tonight: Today the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) decision was successfully delayed by questions until Monday. That’s good news, but there’s no Champers popping yet. The longer we wait, the longer the real story of the fraud has to filter through to our representatives, but this is a race to overcome two decades of propaganda in one weekend.This week will be written up in history books. Late yesterday a parliamentary mutiny occurred as opposition cabinet members abandoned their leader. Three on Monday: Mitch Fifield, Brett Mason and Mathias Cormann. Then Thursday: six more, and on Friday Concetta Fierravanti-Wells...

Manoel Silva de Cunha, leader of a group of 200,000 Brazilian forest-dwellers, was blunt about why he traveled this week from the Amazon to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Global Climate Summit. The rubber tappers, nut gatherers and fishermen who live off tropical forests want money from American corporations to help them preserve the trees that cool the planet. "These companies have polluted a lot," he said. "They have to make up for it." Many of the 1,200 delegates who crowded into Century City's Hyatt Regency this week came with similar hopes: to cash in on California's expertise, its technology and the...

congressional leaders from carbon-intensive states such as Wyoming remain adamantly opposed to the Waxman-Markey bill, insisting the real costs of curbing greenhouse gas emissions would further bankrupt the nation. “There’s nothing good about it,” said U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo. “I’m going to do everything to make sure it doesn’t pass.” U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., said the bill is “the biggest hidden tax in America.” “It’s a Ponzi scheme because we’re just going to print certificates for CO2 and not take care of any CO2,” Enzi said. “It’s just another way to make money.” The U.S. House in June...

Four Democratic senators want to put off the proposed cap & trade legislation. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad both of North Dakota are urging the Senate to delay legislation that puts caps on greenhouse gas emissions and instead, pass a narrow bill that sets requirements on the use of renewable energy. Senators Lincoln and Dorgan are up for re-election in 2010 and are from states that would be hurt economically from a cap and trade bill similar to the one passed by the House in June. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid...

...Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, keen to engineer an encore, saw his opportunity when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were inaugurated as president and vice-president in 1993. To capitalize on Al Gore’s interest in global warming, Enron immediately embarked on a massive lobbying effort to develop a trading system for carbon dioxide, working both the Clinton administration and Congress. Political contributions and Enron-funded analyses flowed freely, all geared to demonstrating a looming global catastrophe if carbon dioxide emissions weren’t curbed. An Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that calamity could come of global warming, meanwhile, was quietly buried...

The spin is that it's a program to help save the environment. The reality is that the UN-sponsored issuance and trading of carbon credits will reward the worst polluters, and will actually help many companies literally poison their neighbors and make the areas surrounding their facilities uninhabitable. Check out what's going on in Gujarat, India.

You "Gotta" love the free market place. One of Europe's solution to the perceived global warming threat is trying to regulate carbon emissions through Carbon Credits The way it works is the government sets a or cap on the total amount of a pollutant that can be emitted. Companies or other groups are issued emission permits and are required to hold an equivalent number of credits. Companies that need to increase their emission allowance must buy credits from those who pollute less. In effect, the buyer is paying a charge for polluting, while the seller is being rewarded for having...

fool’s par·a·dise: “a state of happiness that is temporary and insubstantial because it is based on illusions or unrealistic hopes” - Encarta® World English Dictionary [North American Edition] © & (P)2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. I am struck by the diversity of risk analyses being carried out by investors in today’s climate change market place.  Whether it’s ‘carbon’* market conferences and publications, ‘ethical investments’, insurance company projects or the activities of financial, legal and engineering institutions, it seems at first glance that they have it all covered.  Many financial, political, procedural, legal...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California's utilities, refineries and large factories must transform their operations to cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of a new climate plan before state regulators. On Thursday, the California Air Resources Board was expected to adopt what would be the nation's most sweeping global warming plan, outlining for the first time how individuals and businesses would meet a landmark 2006 law that made the state a leader on global climate change. It would hold California's worst polluters accountable for the heat-trapping emissions they produce _ transforming how people travel, utilities generate power and businesses use electricity. At...

Abstract: President-elect Barack Obama said attacking global climate change is a "matter of urgency" that will create jobs as he got advice from Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the issue. Obama made clear he would adopt an aggressive approach to global warming when he takes over the White House on January 20. He and Vice President-elect Joe Biden met for nearly two hours with Gore at Obama's presidential transition office in Chicago. Obama hopes addressing climate change can create the kind of jobs that will help pull the U.S. economy out of a...

The double standards of our eco accountants Imagine an unpopular, impotent, and fragile UK Government, trying to make political capital out of a looming crisis. To avoid being embarrassed by criticism of its shallow policies, it appoints an independent panel of experts, to which it defers controversial decisions. Now imagine that the panel proposes measures from which its members and their associates will directly benefit. It couldn't happen here, you may think. Scandal and resignations would surely follow. Who could possibly allow vested interests to profit from the legislation they are instrumental in creating? This week, an independent panel of...

Obama's World View on Energy and Climate - - In a video shown at a costly, two-day "global warming" jamboree at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hosted by Governor Schwarzenegger of California in November 2008, Barack Obama said: "Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We've seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season. Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken...

OK, get your green eyeshades. I noted yesterday the “urgent” authorization of a few million to study the impact of the tax code on CO2 emissions. (Well, actually they say “carbon,” not carbon dioxide, which if taken as written means we should get a report on diamonds and pencils. Seriously.) That is, how are the taxpayers subsidizing Al Gore, who writes off his jet-setting, for example, or Laurie David’s preferential tax treatment for a bicoastal lifestyle. The very brief provision above it is also rather unique. My CPA wife is away at a tax refresher course, as luck would have...

Al Gore’s carbon trading business GIM was banked with Lehman Bros. It will be interesting to see how this will play in the future but I suspect that this increases the risk of participating in Carbon trading. Merrill Lynch, was also deeply involved in this business. Last year Lehman Brothers released a long and highly publicized report about climate change in which they preached about decarbonization, trying to make their investors keep getting high profits from the Kyoto carbon trade scheme and the support of huge public subventions. All that, of course, with the applause of the usual choir...

SYDNEY (AFP) - A top Australian politician said on Tuesday the country should introduce "meaningless" carbon trading if big polluters in the developing world do not agree to reduce emissions. Opposition leader Brendan Nelson said he was committed to introducing emissions trading by 2012, but if big polluters like China and India do not make commitments to reduce emissions it should be deliberately toothless. "Our policy has not changed, and that policy is we would implement an emissions trading scheme, cap-and-trade, no later than 2012," he told Sky News. "And obviously what you would do, if for example we haven't...

The price of European emission permits is rising so rapidly that German companies are threatening to leave the country.... And the environment may, in the end, be no better off. They sat silently through two lectures, but then they couldn't control their anger any longer. The civil servants from the Environment Ministry, the Environment Agency and the German Emissions Trading Authority made it sound easy for industry to take up carbon trading. It was just too much for the managers to tolerate. "If that's the shape the trading will take, we will simply move our cement operation to Ukraine," a...

The climate change debate is often portrayed as a stark choice between two extremes. Do we try to save the economy or do we try to save the environment? Many in established industries argue vociferously that you need to protect the former to save the latter, or that if we act to protect our environment then we might end up killing the economy. Ross Garnaut, in his much awaited draft report, seeks to turn that argument on its head: Australia has much to lose from even the mildest impacts of climate change. If we want to save our economy, then...

CNN “American Morning” took the global warming agenda to a new level in a May 29 segment. Rather than just warning of the bad things that could happen from this so-called phenomenon, the morning show had a segment featuring a carbon credit salesman who makes money from global warming alarmism. "American Morning" co-host Kyra Phillips introduced Howard Gould as a "conservationist," "green entrepreneur" and the co-founder of Equator Environmental, LLC. She interviewed him as an expert on proposals to establish a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions like what is found in the Lieberman-Warner bill (S.2191). But Phillips didn’t reveal what...