Erstellt am: 16.12.2009 Autor: Edward Roby Status: Senior
Devil gas takes blame for death and taxes
Abstract: Western political leaders with a globalist agenda built around predictions of catastrophic climate warming sought the support of wary developing countries at Copenhagen’s international conference on climate. At stake was a proposed multi-trillion-dollar scheme to curb man-made carbon-dioxide emissions, trade CO2 pollution permits internationally and recruit poor countries for the plan with hefty payments and loans. But an unauthorized preemptive leak of extensive internal correspondence among key academic climate researchers has weakened the UN-endorsed theory of global warming caused mainly by humans along with the pivotal role its assigns to CO2 emissions. The published correspondence is being cited as evidence of collusion to short-circuit scientific discovery, ostracize experts with opposing views and advance special political and economic interests with compromised data. The Western blueprint for a new world financial order may ride on the outcome of this climate policy dispute.
The martial ghost of Sun Tzu seemed to haunt the political stage at Copenhagen in December. Though we may know ourselves, the master foretold, half our battles will be waged for naught unless we also know our enemy. But how can the new global Public Enemy No. 1 ever be known when it cannot be perceived by ordinary mortals? Alas, the internationalist spirit of Copenhagen conjures up just such an invincible foe for all mankind. Dare we speak its foul name? – Carbon Dioxide.
Like the elusive Al Qaeda, this stealthy adversary respects neither treaties nor national boundaries. But carbon dioxide also taints the air we breathe, the crops we plant, the cattle we raise, the productive daily work we do. Even the faithful who may fathom the infinite attributes of the Holy Ghost and the boundless depravity of Satan still struggle to comprehend the inscrutable nature of this colorless, odorless, impalpable and invisible agent of mass destruction.
The sinister substance has us surrounded on all sides. Killing us softly with trapped heat, it pollutes our lives, inevitably changing our lovely blue planet Earth into an inhospitable desert, a chorus of green experts intones. Such is the frightful bane of carbon dioxide that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now declares it a danger to human health and welfare, to be restrained – unless Congress intervenes – by pollution curbs under the 1970 Clean Air Act. An epic EPA “endangerment finding” neatly coincided with the formal opening of the Copenhagen summit of 192 UN countries, a global climate-protection war council slated to be graced by a Dec. 18 visit from President Barack Obama.
Grim is the scenario depicted by some institutional climate scientists – melting glaciers, rising seas, perfect storms, failing crops, starving masses, polar bears losing their icy habitat, teeming coastal plains inundated like Atlantis. But hope still flickers defiantly among deeply concerned Western politicians, bankers, industrialists and media commentators. Once more into the breach, they rally Earth’s despondent masses for a desperate final battle of survival.
Though this seemingly benign atmospheric gas has masqueraded as an essential life-giver for more than half a billion years, the vigilant band of Western policy-makers can’t be fooled. With the help of far-sighted scientists and think-tanks, they’ve finally unmasked its latent malignancy, the public is assured. In a heated climate of alarm, they implore humanity to embrace a strategic vision that requires above all our faith and trust in the urgency of the cause. There can be no substitute for victory in the coming global war against CO2.
With luck, all it will take is other people’s money. Lots of it. That essential political antidote to CO2 already flows in torrents on the lonely European front, where subsidized biofuels sequester billions of spare public euros, energy of all sorts is heavily taxed and regional carbon emissions trading helps reinvigorate the blighted financial scene. To be mobilized by Copenhagen for the duration is a further estimated $45 trillion regime for the global trading of rights to pollute with regulated CO2, plus compensating payments to poor countries that accept emission limits on their fledgling industries. The EU has offered to kick in €7.2 billion just for the transfer payments. For the drought-plagued continent of Australia, a mighty climate program of triple-digit billions has been envisaged.
The furious ebb and flow of serious money is supposed to mitigate the risk of damaging climate change caused by people. Blamed primarily for the greenhouse warming effect that has officially been dubbed “settled science” is the carbon dioxide routinely unleashed in transportation, industrial processes and electricity generation, especially with abundant coal.
One CO2 molecule being identical to another, it is easy to become confused about where this unseen menace is coming from. Even if we hold our breath, this particular greenhouse gas remains an ever-present trace, 0.038 percent of the air by volume. And just 5 percent of that can be traced to human activity. Will even the strictest political regime of global controls then be able to stem the dreaded warming? And what must be done about water vapor, a more potent and prevalent greenhouse agent? Just how much warmer has the modern march of industrialization already made the planet’s weather?
Or, what about the computer modelers’ rule of thumb that the reliability of his predicted outcomes varies inversely with the complexity of the system being modeled? Is not the Earth’s climate a system of inordinate complexity with an opaque interplay of many variables, even if historic data were available back through the recesses of geologic time? Not even the daily weather forecast is safe bet. And whatever became of those cold and warm ocean currents, prevailing winds, precipitation patterns, configurations of land masses, volcanic and tectonic activity, geothermal heat and the energetic cycles of the sun? Can climate research results showing a buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide to be a trailing rather than a leading indicator of periodic warming episodes so easily be dismissed?
Apparently “settled science” trumps all. The many commonplace misgivings had nearly been rendered politically incorrect by the proponents of this same greenhouse warming science – until an odd thing happened just two weeks before the assembly at Copenhagen.
E-mails of mass deception
On Nov. 20 embarrassing news from England sped around the world at cyber-speed, thanks to an initial report in London’s Daily Telegraph. A probable whistleblower at a highly influential academic climate research institute had made public on Internet the internal correspondence of several of the world’s most prominent climate scientists. These were also the experts who had supplied much of the settled science for the vaunted 2007 report on man-made climate change by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC).
In their own e-mailed words arching back more than a decade, the globally networked warming researchers discussed apparent collusion to suppress incompatible scientific findings, to discredit or exclude skeptical colleagues from peer-reviewed publishing, to delete climate data, to conceal it from peers and from Freedom of Information Act inquiries and to manipulate historic data on measured temperatures. One creative climate scientist recommended to colleagues the adjustment of research data with “Mike’s Nature trick.” Another lamented that his warming camp “can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” “Hide the decline,” another ranking scholar urged professional colleagues in a revealing admission that the most recent decade of temperature data tend, if anything, to support a case for global cooling.
The scandal’s impact was swift and devastating. The head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University in Norwich stepped down ahead of an investigation. An academic probe convened at Pennsylvania State University, where a key colleague had featured in the damaging CRU correspondence files. Numerous climate experts scurried to protect their scientific reputations by criticizing the actions and motives of the embarrassed warming gurus. One skeptical scientist called for CRU to be disbanded, while others pronounced the UN IPCC a discredited body. The leader of Australia’s opposition party, a vocal fan of emissions trading, was promptly replaced by a rival who dismisses the whole idea of costly climate initiatives as political bunk.
In the United States, Obama’s pro-warming policy was suddenly in the cross-hairs. Threatening legislative investigation, California Congressman Darrell Issa, the senior Republican on the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee, cautioned EPA against a quixotic assault on greenhouse gases until it can "demonstrate that the science . . . has not been compromised." He questioned the accuracy of the 2007 UN IPCC report of the overriding culpability of human activity in climate change and branded the supporting "science basically faked in order to get an outcome those individuals wanted." In the U.S. Senate, 28 opposition Republicans petitioned UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to appoint an independent investigator to probe questions about global warming science raised by the leaked e-mails. UN IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri had already promised an internal inquiry, but the senators demanded one that is “that is truly independent of the IPCC and the UN.”
Washington Times newspaper weighed into the CRU scandal, likening global warming hysteria to a crusade by a secretive new cult theology, not real science which unlocks secrets. Unethical “high priests of this religion” of global warming have benefited from professional acclaim, international celebrity, peer influence and large grants. “Once the truth came out - of manipulated findings, phony data, rigged peer-review processes and intimidation of skeptics - the scheme began to collapse,” the newspaper concluded, calling it an “academic Ponzi scheme.”
To complicated matters, someone then leaked to the 15,000 conference participants in Copenhagen an unpublished draft proposal by the leading industrialized countries. It would yank the globalized climate-control program out of UN jurisdiction, handing it over to the unloved World Bank, IMF and a vast new global regulatory bureaucracy. And in return for large financial transfers, developing countries would have to limit their permissible carbon emissions to about half a level to be grandfathered for advanced Western countries. Delegates of developing countries were understandably incensed, according to news reports.
Yet, in continental Europe, the statist heartland of global warming orthodoxy, tranquility reigned on the mainstream information front. Few media outlets were eager to report that the facts may again have been fixed around a chosen policy. Despite 30 million retrievable items of news, information and comment on the CRU scandal at Google “search” by early December under the single popularly acclaimed heading of “Climategate,” the unwelcome news from besieged East Anglia traveled with glacial speed to Germany. The globe-spanning controversy merited scarcely a mention from that country’s major newspapers and broadcast outlets.
Carbon winners and losers
A binding accord on climate and carbon targets was unlikely to gel at Copenhagen anyway, said the Wall Street Journal. Now it looks even more problematic. But why the current Western political panic over something as ancient and inevitable as climate? And why the elitist detour around the home ballot box in order to have the costly scheme endorsed first by a supranational body? Who stands to gain?
The West looks like it needs a bailout. Its saturated economies stagnate, consumers and taxpayers are broke or exhausted, national treasuries are full of IOUs. Markets are abuzz with ghoulish speculation on possible sovereign defaults by countries far larger than Iceland. California has become a fiscal zombie, Greek debt has been downgraded, Britain and Ireland are on notice. Important segments of the capital markets would be deathly quiet without permanent central bank intervention and public guarantees. Amid the rubble of the Western financial architecture, the survivors on Wall Street and in London yearn for something to do. The gilded tradition of siphoning off a disproportionate share of the earnings of the productive economy is fading. The most promising source of the rent-seekers’ future unearned income is no longer national. It’s global. And it has now relocated in the global East and South.
The border-crossing business with derivatives remains one of the few outstanding profit-makers left for big investment banks. Trading CO2 rights on a grand global scale offers myriad fresh growth possibilities. And, of course, standardized emission-right contracts beg for efficiency’s sake to be traded globally in a single currency, loading the dice for the devaluing dollar. Europe’s forward trading in emission certificates has been observed to act like a magnet, magically lifting extra money out of the pockets of today’s power consumers by buoying current electric billings with notional future carbon costs. All energy tax revenue rises apace.
Many U.S. business groups opposed their new government’s desire to curb a gas as ubiquitous as carbon dioxide, reported the Wall Street Journal. An official of the U.S. Association of Manufacturers said the EPA endangerment finding "could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project." There is no doubt that the regulation of CO2 emissions will come at “huge cost to the economy,” he added.
Battling carbon dioxide ostensibly to keep the temperature down, however, allows policy makers to finance a simultaneous renaissance of commercial atomic power in good conscience. Nuclear power reactors are no less notorious thermal polluters than electrical generating plants fired by coal, natural gas or oil. But the nuke plants produce no CO2. And their lofty price-tags tantalize hungry Wall Street financiers, provided a blanket public guarantee come with each power utility’s debt issue for new reactor projects.
It was, of course, energy gangster Enron which initially spearheaded the U.S. lobby for capping and trading emissions rights, so Americans wonder where the oil majors might stand on the Copenhagen agenda. In the U.S. warming debate, Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson advocated a straight-forward national carbon tax instead of the stealth approach of trading emissions rights. But he also conceded in a speech this year: “It is easier and more politically expedient to support a cap-and-trade approach because the public will never figure out where it is hitting them. They will just know they hurt somewhere in their pocketbook.”
Worldwide stealth tax as last resort
Yet the global climate regulatory ploy at Copenhagen also offers what may become the last big chance for Western governments and their coddled financial players to tap into the anticipated economic growth of China, India, Brazil and the rest of the rapidly industrializing world. As the West’s relative economic clout diminishes and its economies stagnate, its politicians are in a hurry to cut the best deal they can with the economic powerhouses of the future. No wonder the Copenhagen initiative has been accompanied by appeals from Europe and the United States to include something like a Tobin tax on worldwide financial trading. The declining West could effortlessly participate in the growth of rest. All wrapped together, a Western success at Copenhagen could be the blueprint for the granddaddy of all financial globalization schemes.
The missing piece is an institutional setup like emissions regulation to manage and channel a permanent stealth tax on global energy consumption. The proposed war on carbon dioxide may deliver the perfect rationale for a new worldwide financial order. This atmospheric trace substance can never really be vanquished. And taxpayers and consumers can never really know how the battle is faring without taking the word of their political leaders. The new public enemy, after all, is invisible.
