December 3, 2009

Anthropogenic global warming a fraud to enrich investment banks, speculators, offshore competitors, and United Nations
by Bill Levinson

Four events during the past two months have exposed anthropogenic climate change as the twenty-first century’s Piltdown Man or Cardiff Giant, the latter being the hoax that led P.T. Barnum or one of his associates to proclaim that a sucker is born every minute. Global warming is probably the biggest junk science scam of all in terms of its ambition to transfer money from working people to speculators and similar parasites, manufacturing firms in China and India, and the United Nations. Had carbon taxes and cap-and-trade mandates actually gone into effect, the trusts of the 19th century would have rolled in their graves with envy. We refer specifically to:

If Goldman Sachs (aka “Goldmine Sachs” per Michael Savage) and J.P. Morgan Chase are unhappy about being singled out as examples of cui bono (“who benefits?”), they need look no further than their own back yard in New York for the reason. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, for whom each of these companies bundled more than $12,000 in campaign contributions, named them explicitly in her letter to the Wall Street Journal.

An infrastructure is already beginning to form, as entities like the New York Stock Exchange, J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and the new Green Exchange are developing carbon trading platforms or expanding their environmental trading desks. There are nearly 100 funds already focused on green investments.

Henry Ford, whose industries created the American middle class that Barack Obama now seeks to destroy with carbon taxes in order to enrich the fat cat climate profiteers whose bundled contributions have bought him, defined entities like these as non-producing parasites whose “business” consists of speculating in things that have already been produced. (Ford had little use for any activity that did not mine, grow, or manufacture goods, or at least transport the goods and raw materials that constitute genuine wealth.)

There is plenty of work to do. Business is merely work. Speculation in things already produced–that is not business. It is just more or less respectable graft. But it cannot be legislated out of existence. (Ford, “My Life and Work”)

In fairness to the New York Stock Exchange and investment banks, they deliver value to people who wish to buy shares in value-producing industries, and investment banks often put up venture capital to create new industries and jobs. Speculation such as day trading by individuals is, however, exactly that. It is like gambling in a casino where the croupier (broker) takes a cut of the action no matter who wins. AIG speculated in mortgage backed securities, and then had to be bailed out with tax money from Americans who actually work (as Ford defined work) for a living. The mortgage backed securities at least had real property, albeit overvalued property, behind them but now Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, and other entities like them wish to profit from the exchange of what are effectively medieval indulgences for sins; i.e. carbon credits.

Even many medieval people recognized the sale of indulgences as a fraud, as shown by the ribald denunciation of the Pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The far more educated Americans of the 21st century recognize the sale of carbon credits as the equivalent, so today’s would-be indulgence sellers and traders must buy (through bundled campaign contributions, which are legal) Senators like Kirsten Gillibrand and a President like Barack Obama to enact laws to force people and businesses to pay or play. The following cartoon applied to the trusts or monopolies of the 19th century and, with only a few minor changes, it applies to the climate profiteers of today.

Kimberley Strassel’s “If the Cap Fits” names numerous other climate profiteers that seek to line their pockets (at the expense of the American people) from government-mandated cap and trade, carbon emission quotas, and so on. Their “green” agenda consists primarily of the color of money as opposed to any genuine concern for the environment–a premise underscored by the damage that government-supported corn ethanol does to the environment as well as family food budgets in developing countries like Mexico.

There was a time when the financial press understood that companies exist to make money. And it happens that the cap-and-trade climate program these 10 jolly green giants [U.S. Climate Action Partnership] are now calling for is a regulatory device designed to financially reward companies that reduce CO2 emissions, and punish those that don’t.

Four of the affiliates–Duke, PG&E, FPL and PNM Resources–are utilities that have made big bets on wind, hydroelectric and nuclear power. So a Kyoto program would reward them for simply enacting their business plan, and simultaneously sock it to their competitors. Duke also owns Cinergy, which relies heavily on dirty, CO2-emitting coal plants. But Cinergy will soon have to replace those plants with cleaner equipment. Under a Kyoto, it’ll get paid for its trouble.

DuPont has been plunging into biofuels, the use of which would soar under a cap. Somebody has to cobble together all these complex trading deals, so say hello to Lehman Brothers. Caterpillar has invested heavily in new engines that generate “clean energy.” British Petroleum is mostly doing public penance for its dirty oil habit, but also gets a plug for its own biofuels venture.

Finally, there’s General Electric, whose CEO Jeffrey Immelt these days spends as much time in Washington as Connecticut. GE makes all the solar equipment and wind turbines (at $2 million a pop) that utilities would have to buy under a climate regime. GE’s revenue from environmental products long ago passed the $10 billion mark, and it doesn’t take much “ecomagination” to see why Mr. Immelt is leading the pack of climate profiteers.

In fairness to General Electric, the Obama Administration is using taxpayer money to import or support the importation of wind turbines from China and Spain; so much for the “green jobs” the stimulus was supposed to create. This is not, however, the point. Compare General Electric under Jeffrey Immelt to the Ford Motor Company under Henry Ford. Had Immelt been running Ford, he would probably have agitated for taxes or bans on horses while citing their solid waste pollution. Ford, on the other hand, got the price of the Model T down to what people would pay, and in fact so low that it was far cheaper to own a Model T than a team of horses. We do not have any automatic problems with corporate executives who get more money in a month than many working people earn in their lifetimes, as long as they actually do something to earn it. Henry Ford and Bill Gates, both of whom created millions of jobs (directly and indirectly) were/are entitled to multimillion dollar salaries and multibillion dollar profits.

We do not, on the other hand, see what executives and partners at the investment banks (e.g. Bear Stearns) that lost billions of dollars have done to earn more than a greeter at Wal-Mart or even a counterman at a fast food restaurant. The latter (investment bank executives, not Wal-Mart greeters) is the same class of people that can donate $2300 each to elect a President who will in turn force working people to support these executives, through carbon trading profits, in the style to which they have become accustomed. This explains Barack Obama’s ardent support for cap and trade, as well as the alleged willingness of EPA supervisors to commit the same kind of scientific misconduct that would get any private or academic research laboratory debarred from Federal contracts.

Next we have the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The United Nations is well known for dishonesty and corruption, as well as the statutory rape of girls as young as eight. The United Nations wants some kind of carbon tax on the United States, Europe, and Japan but apparently not on China, whose “brown cloud” of genuine pollutants (carbon dioxide is invisible, and harmless in ordinary concentrations) kills thousands or more Asians every year and that drifts across the Pacific to constitute a good quarter of Los Angeles’ air pollution. China, which now emits more so-called greenhouse gases than the United States, would be delighted to have the U.S. impose taxes on power from fossil fuel, thus encouraging energy-dependent industries to relocate to China at the expense of American workers. If the United Nations is paying for “climate research,” the researchers know what kind of results the UN wants and therefore have an incentive to skew their findings in that direction. This would explain the alleged willingness of some climate scientists to commit academic dishonesty in favor of anthropogenic global warming.

There were also been discussions to silence academic journals that publish research skeptical of significant man-made global warming. … “I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” Other emails refer to efforts to exclude contrary views from publication in scientific journals. Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute, told The Wall Street Journal: “This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn’t questionable practice, this is unethical.”

The impact of cap and trade would amount to trillions of dollars in the U.S. economy alone; trillions of dollars taken under fraudulent pretenses from working Americans who must buy gasoline, electricity, heat, and air conditioning and then given, in the form of commissions and profits on carbon credits, to fat cat investment banks and other speculators. Additional damage would result from higher costs for energy-intensive industries like steel, aluminum, and chemical manufacture, which would encourage these manufacturers to discharge their high-wage American workers and move their entire operations to China or perhaps India–neither of which has any plans to regulate carbon emissions. Our unemployment now exceeds 10 percent, and it would skyrocket under Waxman-Markey and similar cap and trade regimes.

No one can legitimately deny that climate change occurs, although Barack Obama named Van Jones, the equivalent of a Holocaust denier (he questioned what “really happened” on 9/11) as his “green jobs czar,” because the world’s climate does change according to the whims of the Sun. The polar ice caps once extended as far south as New York and Pennsylvania, where they created the Finger Lakes and Pocono Mountains respectively–and there is no guarantee that the last Ice Age was indeed the last. The proposition that anthropogenic climate change from so-called greenhouse gases can have more than a trivial effect on the world’s climate has, however, been shown to be a multitrillion dollar junk science scam that genuine working people (as opposed to fat cat climate parasites and profiteers) in the United States simply cannot afford.