The Real Results of "Combating" Global Warming

Zoofer wrote:Solomon: Can't bear opposition

Posted: June 30, 2009, 2:35 AM by Lawrence Solomon
Lawrence Solomon, Climate change, global warming, polar bears, Arctic, IUCN
Lawrence Solomon

“Polar bear experts from all over the world have been invited by Greenland to meet at the Greenland Representation at the North Atlantic Bryggen in Copenhagen, Denmark, between 29 June and 3 July 2009,” announces the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “Under the chairmanship of Professor Andrew Derocher from University of Edmonton, Canada, the Species Survival Commission Polar Bear Specialist Group of IUCN (The International Union for Conservation of Nature) will meet to evaluate the status of the different polar bear populations in the Arctic.”

The announcement does not mention that biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor, one of the world’s foremost experts on polar bears who for 22 years was a member of the same IUCN Species Survival Commission and of the Polar Bear Specialists Group, was disinvited by an email from Professor Derocher because of “the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition.”

[...]

DuPont made a killing in the battle over CFC regulation. Now it’s poised to do it all over again with carbon dioxide. Fourth in a series.
By Lawrence Solomon

In the 1800s, DuPont’s first century as an industrial concern, it cashed in on the money to be made in explosives. In its second century, the 1900s, DuPont morphed into a money machine in chemistry and energy. In this, its third century, DuPont sees green in a new cash cow, one it projects will take it to unprecedented profitability — sustainable development.

This corporate strategy, explains chairman Chad Holliday, is both principled and fundamental: “DuPont’s sustainability commitments aren’t just good for business — they are our business.”


DuPont’s commitment to sustainability began in 1997 when it decided to abandon its membership in The Global Climate Coalition, a high-powered lobby created by the oil, gas, coal, automobile and chemical companies to counter fears of global warming. Although the coalition had been created in 1989, soon after the first meeting of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the coalition was losing the PR battle. DuPont switched sides and began to lobby for government to stop global warming.


In doing so, DuPont took a page out of its own playbook. In 1980, DuPont had spearheaded the creation of the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy, a lobby group that would successfully fight off regulation of CFCs, a chemical that many companies manufactured. Then in 1986, with patented alternatives to CFCs in hand, DuPont had a change of heart.


In a move its Alliance partners considered a betrayal, DuPont switched sides, called CFCs a danger to the planet, and lobbied the Reagan Administration to ban CFCs. So successful was DuPont that Ronald Reagan became the world’s first head of state to personally push his government to ban CFCs. DuPont’s efforts culminated in the Montreal Protocol, a treaty Reagan described as “a monumental achievement.”


Others were ambivalent about what had transpired. As put by Mostafa Tolba, the Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, “The difficulties in negotiating the Montreal Protocol had nothing whatever to do with whether the environment was damaged or not. It was all who was going to gain an edge over who; whether DuPont would have an advantage over the European companies or not.”


The advantage went to DuPont, which soon controlled the rich replacement market for CFCs. Du Pont’s Freon Division Director, Joseph Glass, laid out DuPont’s coup succinctly: “When you have $3-billion of CFCs sold worldwide and 70% of that is about to be regulated out of existence, there is a tremendous market potential.”


DuPont is now keen to duplicate its “monumental achievement” with other regulatory coups in the richest regulatory environment of all — that of global warming. To this end, it helped found the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of blue-chip business and environmental groups, to lobby the U.S. government for legislation that will suit their agenda. From DuPont’s point of view, USCAP has been another monumental achievement. Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a global warming bill — largely a USCAP product — that represents the largest transfer of wealth from U.S. consumers to corporate interests in history. As DuPont’s Holliday told the committee with evident satisfaction, “we are pleased to see that many of the ideas we have developed are reflected in this bill.”


As well he should be. The mammoth bill’s cap-and-trade system not only gives DuPont and other major emitters a windfall in free emission allowances, but also boosts a host of the technologies that DuPont specializes in. As a cherry on top, DuPont will not only receive subsidies for upgrades and other investments it would have made regardless, it could even receive subsidies for such investments made before the bill was passed.


The bill, though endorsed by environmental groups happy with the grand bargain being made, is not without controversy. Greenpeace opposes the bill on numerous grounds, not least because of its corporate giveaways and because it would spur a new generation of coal and nuclear power plants. Other environmentalists deplore its boost to biofuels, and the effect that carbon offsets can have on the Third World’s environment. But though the bill’s environmental benefits are in doubt, there are no doubts as to its effect on DuPont’s bottom line.


After it helped found USCAP two years ago, DuPont predicted that by 2015 it would be able to grow its annual greenhouse-gas related revenues by at least $2-billion a year, and that its sales of renewable materials that displace fossil fuels would double to $8-billion. If the bill does indeed become law, DuPont’s estimates will look awfully sustainable. As will those of the legions of other corporations whose lobbying has made climate change the world’s largest industry with the world’s largest payoffs for those skilled at gaming the system.

calmage wrote:Republicans are raising questions about why the EPA apparently dismissed an analyst's report questioning the science behind global warming.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/29/gop-senator-calls-inquiry-supressed-climate-change-report/


Maybe they suppressed the report cause it doesn't jive with Obama's green plan..??

Leaders of the world's eight foremost industrialized economies have established an aggressive new marker in the battle against climate change: holding the global temperature to a two-degree-Celsius increase.

Even journalists are beginning to revolt at tactics the government is now using to spin the Global Warming myth.


Controversy erupted this week at the World Conference of Science Journalists over the National Science Foundation's "underwriting" of media projects. It turns out that the NSF, which is heavily invested in propagating the Global Warming party line, has been quietly producing content for news outlets, content which the casual observer might not recognize for the propaganda it is.


According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the NSF's Jeff Nesbit was met with "consternation" at the London conference for "attempting to 'disguise' publicity as objective reporting."


As stated earlier, the NSF is a major player in the Global Warming cult, having funded studies which claim that, despite cooling temperatures, warming is inevitable this century, and that it will impact everything from vintners who produce Pinot Noir to the world's largest freshwater lake in Siberia.


The NSF provides about twenty percent of all federal funding for scientific research. It is now also providing media outlets with content, such as the below from U.S. News & Report:



NSF Releases Comprehensive Report on Global Impacts of Climate Change


Agency proposes to double climate research portfolio in 2010

[...]

It should be pointed out that the journalists who objected at the London conference -- many of whom are Global Warming true believers -- were not complaining about the NSF's promotion of Global Warming, but rather, as the CJR reported, "that the NSF is dangerously blurring the lines between journalism and PR."


But it still could be a step in the right direction.


The late Michael Crichton, in an appendix to his novel, State of Fear, compared the 'science' behind man-made Global Warming to the similarly questionable research behind eugenics, the specious theory floated a little over a century ago that the human gene pool was being weakened by supposedly inferior peoples, leading eventually to a supposedly-scientific basis for Adolf Hitler's evils. Crichton pointed out that eugenics was once supported by the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council and that opponents of this "pseudoscience" were called reactionary and shouted down.


Crichton quoted Ute Deichman's Biologists Under Hitler:


"Scientists, including those who were not members of the (Nazi) party, helped to get funding for their work through their modified behavior and direct cooperation with the state."


In other words, in order to get funding, scientists played along voluntarily.


Another theory advanced by the Nazis was the Big Lie:


"(T)he broad masses ... more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods"


A big part of telling the Big Lie was using propaganda.


Neither Crichton meant then -- nor I mean now -- to imply that supporters of Global Warming are racist, or totalitarian, or even evil. Rather, Crichton intended his analysis, based on three years of research, as a warning of the dangers of mis-using science as a crutch to prop up political ambitions.


My warning is similar. Just as scientists were wrong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to jettison scientific principles for a popular theory. Journalists, and journalistic organizations, are now wrong to sacrifice ethics for the current hot scientific craze. Pun intended.

James DelingpoleWednesday, 8th July 2009
James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book

[A] remarkable drama has been unfolding in Australia, where the new Labor government has belatedly joined the "consensus'' bandwagon by introducing a bill for an emissions-curbing "cap and trade'' scheme, which would devastate Australia's economy, it being 80 per cent dependent on coal. The bill still has to pass the Senate, which is so precisely divided that the decisive vote next month may be cast by an independent Senator, Stephen Fielding. So crucial is his vote that the climate change minister, Penny Wong, agreed to see him with his four advisers, all leading Australian scientists.

Fielding put to the minister three questions. How, since temperatures have been dropping, can CO2 be blamed for them rising? What, if CO2 was the cause of recent warming, was the cause of temperatures rising higher in the past? Why, since the official computer models have been proved wrong, should we rely on them for future projections?

The written answers produced by the minister's own scientific advisers proved so woolly and full of elementary errors that Fielding's team have now published a 50-page, fully-referenced "Due Diligence'' paper tearing them apart. In light of the inadequacy of the Government's reply, the Senator has announced that he will be voting against the bill.

The wider significance of this episode is that it is the first time a Western government has allowed itself to be drawn into debating the science behind the global warming scare with expert scientists representing the "counter consensus" – and the "consensus" lost hands down.


[...]

We still have a long way to go before that Copenhagen treaty is agreed in December, and with China, India and 128 other countries still demanding trillions of dollars as the price of their co-operation, the prospect of anything but a hopelessly fudged agreement looks slim. But even a compromise could inflict devastating damage on our own economic future – all for a theory now shot so full of holes that its supporters are having to suppress free speech to defend it

Almost 250 children under the age of five have died in a wave of intensely cold weather in Peru.

Children die from pneumonia and other respiratory infections every year during the winter months particularly in Peru's southern Andes.

But this year freezing temperatures arrived almost three months earlier than usual.

Experts blame climate change for the early arrival of intense cold which began in March.

Winter in the region does not usually begin until June.

The extreme cold, which has brought snow, hail, freezing temperatures and strong winds, has killed more children than recorded annually for the past four years.

A total of 246 under the age of five have died so far, only half way through the winter months.

One third of the deaths were registered in the southern region of Puno, much of which is covered by a high plateau known as the altiplano which extends into neighbouring Bolivia.

Aid workers say prolonged exposure to the cold is causing hypothermia and deadly respiratory infections such as pneumonia.

Children, who are often malnourished, are more vulnerable to the extreme cold.

Poverty is widespread in Peru's southern highlands and there is a lack of healthcare and basic services.

The government has declared a state of emergency in the affected areas but critics say the cold snaps are predictable and the annual deaths preventable.

Many have blamed government inefficiency for the deaths.

But Peru's Health Minister, Oscar Ugarte, has said regional officials have not effectively distributed government resources.

Meanwhile in the capital, Lima, it has become an annual ritual for businesses and ordinary citizens to donate blankets, clothes and food for the victims of the cold weather in the south of the country.

Zoofer wrote:The jerks passed it with the help of 8 useless GOP idiots.

http://kevinmccullough.townhall.com/blog/g/09ec450b-8c7a-4929-afa5-89074de16253

219-212 on the Global Hoax Bill... and 8 GOP'ers were the margin????
Posted by: Kevin McCullough at 12:32 AM
"Duh!!!!!!!!"

Friendly fire is a hard thing to swallow particularly when the odds are stacked so definitively against you in pure numbers. And tonight eight Republican congressman for absolutely no good reason, voted in favor of the worst tax increase in American history, as well as the biggest regulatory penalties to ever hit the private business sector of the economy and thusly the most impacting legislation towards job reduction, recession inducing, personally bankrupting, not to mention wasteful to have ever been put forward for the vote.

That vote ended up being 219-212 in favor of passing this horrendous wreck of a bill that the congress had not even read.
Mark Kirk of Illinois, and Chris Smith of New Jersey were two of the eight.
What is particularly damning is that they evidently do not have sound reasons for doing so.

I've interviewed both men. Both have stood for traditional smaller government conservatism in the past.
Now Kirk is postulating a run for the United States Senate seat vacated by Obama's election to Presidency.

Kiss it goodbye Kirk. You're hopes for higher office right now are in the proverbial toilet and not looking good.
Disappointing... is vastly understating the feelings towards these eight horrific cowards.

Wind Victims Gagged and Silenced in Ontario!!

According to the land registry office in Orangeville, six homes in Dufferin County have been purchased by wind developers after legal action was threatened against them; most recently June 26th, 2009 the Ashbee home.

Before these families could escape the nightmare of their unliveable homes, they had to agree to sign strict nondisclosure contracts -in other words gag-orders to protect the wind companies.

This list of residents is not yet conclusive.

Family Name Address
Ashbee PT LT 29 CON 7, PT 1 7R742; Amaranth
Frasers 58234 County Rd 17, Melancthon
Benvenete Pt Lts 284 & 285, Con 4, Melancthon
Brownell Pt Lt 29, Con 5, Pt 1, 7R787, Amaranth
Williams 58232 County Rd, RR 6 Melancthon
Barlows Pt Lt 1, Con 5, Melancthon

Why is this happening?

Industrial Wind Turbines were allowed to be sited too close to residences. This caused severe noise and adverse health affects including cardiac arrhythmia, sleep disturbance, fatigue, increased stress levels and loss of cognitive function.

Their homes became unfit for human habitation. The purchases by the wind developer are an admission that wind turbines have created health issues that impact residents.

Hugues Leblanc has spent three years at war with a wind turbine.

His first model, an AirX horizontal-axis unit that he bought and installed in 2006, caused his ceiling to quake and filled his apartment with an alien whooping sound - "like a swirling noise, woowoow owowoow," he says.

Leblanc, an orderly at a Montreal geriatric hospital, has risked his life to make emergency repairs, climbing a steep ladder in high winds, and he fried a wattage inverter by turning on a vacuum cleaner.

Before long, the AirX's propeller blades began whipping off.

"Once on a very bad wintry night," he recounts, a blade came crashing down on his balcony.

Not to mention the violence done to his wallet: Leblanc has spent about $4,000 on turbines and parts. And for what? He saves a measly $5 or $10 a month on his electricity bill.

"I'll never recoup the money," Leblanc says, only a touch of defeat in his voice. "It's not for nothing they have those hydro dams."

[...]

Sitting in his bunker-like living room, which is laced with cables and stacked with four 60-pound batteries, Leblanc recounts his travails.

Back in 2006, he spent $400 on an AirX, but the 400-watt unit was noisy and unreliable and couldn't handle the city's turbulent wind conditions.

Today, the hobbyist uses a unit he jerry-rigged himself in combination with a trio of solar panels.

Together, they supply about 10 per cent of the electricity he uses.

"I could run the whole apartment for an hour or two, but then I'd have to re-charge," he says. "The worst is the toaster."

Leblanc says he would need another 10 turbines, 300 panels and 60 batteries to produce and store the 2,000 watts needed to power his two-bedroom pad.

[...]

New electricity meters being rolled out to millions of homes and businesses are riddled with security bugs that could bring down the power grid, according to a security researcher who plans to demonstrate several attacks at a security conference next month.

The so-called smart meters for the first time provide two-way communications between electricity users and the power plants that serve them. Prodded by billions of dollars from President Obama's economic stimulus package, utilities in Seattle, Houston, Miami, and elsewhere are racing to install them as part of a plan to make the power grid more efficient. Their counterparts throughout Europe are also spending heavily on the new technology.

There's just one problem: The newfangled meters needed to make the smart grid work are built on buggy software that's easily hacked, said Mike Davis, a senior security consultant for IOActive. The vast majority of them use no encryption and ask for no authentication before carrying out sensitive functions such as running software updates and severing customers from the power grid. The vulnerabilities, he said, are ripe for abuse.

"We can switch off hundreds of thousands of homes potentially at the same time," Davis, who has spent the past few months analyzing a half-dozen smart meters, told The Reg. "That starts providing problems that the power company may not be able to gracefully deal with."

To prove his point, Davis and his IOActive colleagues designed a worm that self-propagates across a large number of one manufacturer's smart meter. Once infected, the device is under the control of the malware developers in much the way infected PCs are under the spell of bot herders. Attackers can then send instructions that cause its software to turn power on or off and reveal power usage or sensitive system configuration settings.

The worm, which Davis will demonstrate next month at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, is able to spread quickly. It exploits an automatic update feature in the meter that runs on peer-to-peer technology that doesn't use code signing or other measures to make sure the update is authorized. It uses a routine known as interrupt hooking, which adds additional code to the device's operating system.

Government did us in,” says Dwayne Madigan, whose job will terminate when General Electric closes its factory next July.

Madigan makes a product that will soon be illegal to sell in the U.S. - a regular incandescent bulb. Two years ago, his employer, GE, lobbied in favor of the law that will outlaw the bulbs.

Madigan’s colleagues, waiting for their evening shift to begin, all know that GE is replacing the incandescents for now with compact fluorescents bulbs, which GE manufactures in China.

Last month, GE announced it will close the Winchester Bulb Plant 80 miles west of D.C. As a result, 200 men and women will lose their jobs. GE is also shuttering incandescent factories in Ohio and Kentucky, axing another 200 jobs.

GE blamed environmental regulations for the closing. The first paragraph of the company’s July 23 press release explained:

“A variety of energy regulations that establish lighting efficiency standards are being implemented in the U.S. and other countries, in some cases this year, and will soon make the familiar lighting products produced at the Winchester Plant obsolete.”

The U.S. legislation in question was a provision in the 2007 energy bill that required all bulbs sold in the U.S.—beginning in 2012 for some wattages—to meet high efficiency standards.

Given the steady death of U.S. manufacturing, this factory was going to close sooner or later, anyway. Workers tell me they were happy when they heard in June that the factory was staying open at least through mid-2011—a plan GE abandoned the next month.

But the light bulb law is clearly the main driver in closing this factory. After all, the product they make here will be contraband by 2014.
“That was the nail in the coffin,” Madigan says.

These men, waiting in the shade in front of the employees’ entrance to the plant on a hot afternoon, all know another pertinent fact about the light-bulb law that is killing their jobs: GE lobbied in favor of it.

Why did GE, founded by Thomas Edison, support a bill that killed the traditional incandescent light bulb?

The company said in 2007 it wanted to make sure it was working under a single federal efficiency standard, rather than a patchwork of state regulations. GE also touts its compact fluorescents as one of the green products in its “eco-magination” initiative.

The workers don’t buy the green arguments, pointing to the mercury gas that’s in the fluorescents. “It’s illegal to dump mercury in the river, but not in the landfill,” two of them say in unison—it’s become a dark joke at the factory.

Robert Pifer, who will also be laid off in July if he doesn’t find a new job by then, has an explanation for GE’s support of the light-bulb law and its shift to the more expensive fluorescents. “Are they not just trying to force-feed people stuff they don’t want to buy?”

So, GE gets environmentalist brownie points for selling “clean” light bulbs, and they also get to charge more for their bulbs. But there’s another advantage—they save on labor with fluorescents, because they make the fluorescents in China.

Not only are wages lower there, but so are the regulatory burdens, both environmental and labor. The Times of London recently reported, “Large numbers of Chinese workers have been poisoned by mercury, which forms part of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs.”

CFLs, however, are probably not the light bulb of the future. Right before it started lobbying for a federal light bulb law, GE announced that it would start making high-efficiency incandescent by 2010. GE doesn’t say where it will manufacturer its high-efficiency incandescent bulb, but all signs suggest it won’t be here in Winchester.

GE spokesman Peter O’Toole responded by pointing out GE has relocated its manufacturing of Hybrid Electric Heat Pump Water Heaters to Kentucky, from China. They promise 400 new “green-collar” jobs, offsetting the loss of the light-bulb jobs—but not in Winchester.

I ask the men what they plan to do when the factory closes down. Some say they’ll retire. Others can only shrug their shoulders. Pifer says he’ll just have to take a job at less than half of what he currently makes.

“I live paycheck to paycheck,” Pifer tells me. He has a son, and he owns a house nearby, he says. “So what am I going to do when I’m earning $11 an hour?”

These men are the victims of the green revolution—a revolution their employer is leading.