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visitorq
Joined: 11 Jan 2008
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 Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 12:04 pm Post subject: |
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Wide, sweeping carbon taxes, to rape us even more for everything we're worth, squeezing every last breath out. Taxes even to breath, coming soon.
They've even got Nazi style youth brigades on their way, to rat out their own friends and family to authorities for committing 'carbon crimes'...
http://www.climatecops.com/
Who needs a republic, when we can have a police state instead? |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 3:58 pm Post subject: |
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| visitorq wrote: |
| Wide, sweeping carbon taxes, to rape us even more for everything we're worth, squeezing every last breath out. Taxes even to breath, coming soon. |
You can hedge by buying Goldman's stock.
http://www.rollingstone.com/issue1082-83
| Quote: |
BUBBLE #6 - GLOBAL WARMING
Fast-Forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs - its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign - sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.
AS ENVISIONED BY GOLDMAN, THE FIGHT TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING WILL BECOME A "CARBON MARKET" WORTH $1 TRILLION A YEAR.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits - a booming trillion-dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade.
The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.
Here's how it works: If the bill passes; there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billions worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.
The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of an electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.
Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate-change problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that 'Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money."
The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech ... the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy-futures market?
"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.
Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.
"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil-futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine."
Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees - while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it. |
| Quote: |
| House passes historic 'cap-and-trade' energy bill |
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/house-passes-historic-cap-and-trade-energy-bill |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 9:07 pm Post subject: |
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New report authored by two esteemed weather scientists challenges AGW theory
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) has issued a rebuttal to the United Nation's International Panel on Climate Change. The report challenges the theory that man somehow has played a major role in changing the global climate, and also challenges the need to adopt painful and costly measures to combat this perceived threat, such as giving up meat in our diets.
Where many in the AGW community would have you believe that there is a consensus over global warming theory, the reports showcases the ongoing debate on the topic and support for alternative theories. Over 31,478 American scientists signed a petition in the appendix citing �there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth�s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth�s climate."
Unlike the UN's IPCC, which is chaired by Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian economist with no formal climatology training, the NIPCC is headed by two esteemed climatologists, each with a large body of work in the field.
The first coauthor of the report is Dr. S. Fred Singer, a former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, now part of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Dr. Singer received a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal Award for his outstanding work in the field. In the 1980s he continued to study the Earth's climate as the vice chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Oceans and Atmosphere (NACOA). He also taught as a professor at University of Virginia.
Dr. Craig D. Idso also coauthored the report. Dr. Idso has a Ph.D in geography from Arizona State University. He has extensively studied the climate as a faculty researcher in the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University, and has published papers in the field of climatology. He also lectured on Meteorology at Arizona State University. His specialties include studying the growing season, the seasonal cycle of atmospheric CO2, world food supplies, coral reefs, and urban CO2 concentrations.
Among the conclusions reached by these esteemed researchers were that:
* Climate models suffer from numerous deficiencies and shortcomings that could alter even the very sign (plus or minus, warming or cooling) of earth�s projected temperature response to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations.
* The model-derived temperature sensitivity of the earth--especially for a doubling of the preindustrial CO2 level--is much too large, and feedbacks in the climate system reduce it to values that are an order of magnitude smaller than what the IPCC employs.
* Real-world observations do not support the IPCC�s claim that current trends in climate and weather are �unprecedented� and, therefore, the result of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
* The IPCC overlooks or downplays the many benefits to agriculture and forestry that will be accrued from the ongoing rise in the air�s CO2 content.
* There is no evidence that CO2-induced increases in air temperature will cause unprecedented plant and animal extinctions, either on land or in the world�s oceans.
* There is no evidence that CO2-induced global warming is or will be responsible for increases in the incidence of human diseases or the number of lives lost to extreme thermal conditions.
The pair, along with the 31,478 scientists backing their assertions, are urging lawmakers worldwide to carefully consider the body of evidence against AGW theory and lack of evidence in support of AGW theory. Cutting carbon emissions by a mere 15 percent is estimated to cost $1,600 per U.S. citizen yearly and leave the nation $9.4 trillian poorer. Totally forgoing carbon emissions could be extrapolated to cost the average citizen over $10,500 USD yearly. And Dr. Idso and Dr. Singer provide compelling evidence that this would be a pointless and foolhardy sacrifice as it would have virtually no affect on the climate. |
http://www.dailytech.com/Report+Debunking+UNs+Global+Warming+Alarmism+is+Backed+by+31478+US+Scientists/article15467.htm
All either 1) work for Big Oil and/or 2) sleep in tinfoil hats. For sure. |
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visitorq
Joined: 11 Jan 2008
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| Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 9:07 pm Post subject: |
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| AS ENVISIONED BY GOLDMAN, THE FIGHT TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING WILL BECOME A "CARBON MARKET" WORTH $1 TRILLION A YEAR. |
The amount of anger and outrage this makes feel cannot even be quantified... These people are just full-on pirates, looting and plundering our economy (literally destroying it) and nobody is doing a goddam thing to stop them. They give congress like about an hour to read over these death sentences (2000 pages of fine print on how they get to rape us and then foot us the bill to pay for the cost of the raping), and it gets passed!
We are so f**ked... And people are just going to wait around until it turns into a police state before revolting and trying to lock up these criminals as they deserve, but by then it'll be too late. I can't believe this sh*t is happening. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Sun Jun 28, 2009 5:54 am Post subject: ... |
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| The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) has issued a rebuttal to the United Nation's International Panel on Climate Change. The report challenges the theory that man somehow has played a major role in changing the global climate, and also challenges the need to adopt painful and costly measures to combat this perceived threat, such as giving up meat in our diets. |
And who published this report?
The Heartland Institute
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute
A tidy combo of oil and tobacco advocates.
Clearly, what this debate needed was a FOXNews-like entity to keep things fair and balanced. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2009 9:57 am Post subject: |
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10274412-38.html
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E-mails indicate EPA suppressed report skeptical of global warming
The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.
Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."
The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. |
I'm sure the authors of that report worked for Big Oil (and Tobacco too!). For sure.
Mod Edit: the article is too long. Please follow the link and read it at the original site. Thank you. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2009 10:17 am Post subject: |
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Krugman:
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| And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason�treason against the planet.... |
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/opinion/29krugman.html?ref=opinion
Prolly on the payroll of Big Carbon Credit Industry (like Al Gore's investment firm and Goldman's). |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Tue Jun 30, 2009 8:54 am Post subject: ... |
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| The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages. |
Hmm... Should carbon dioxide be strictly regulated by the government?
Weather (pun intended) or not it should be government regulated in the US is really just a matter of opinion.
It sidesteps the glaring fact that a vast array of nation and international scientific entities are still in consensus about anthropogenic co2 levels.
Additionally, you have violated guidelines on wordcount with a cut-and-paste strategy typical of those lacking in argument.
To be fair, your citation of GOP research, oil and tobacco research, and EPA malevolence seem to all be targeted at the creation of a "carbon market".
This carbon market seems to be news to you, but it was, and is, the essence of the Kyoto Protocol, not something cooked up as of late by "the Left" or the Obama administration.
As the emitter of something like 25% of all human-based carbon dioxide, it's rather futile for you to dwell on United States in-fighting in an effort to skew consensus about climate change. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Jun 30, 2009 10:13 am Post subject: |
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All work for Shell. For sure.
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Brief highlights of the report featuring over 400 international scientists:
Israel: Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has authored almost 70 peer-reviewed studies and won several awards. "First, temperature changes, as well as rates of temperature changes (both increase and decrease) of magnitudes similar to that reported by IPCC to have occurred since the Industrial revolution (about 0.8C in 150 years or even 0.4C in the last 35 years) have occurred in Earth's climatic history. There's nothing special about the recent rise!"
Russia: Russian scientist Dr. Oleg Sorochtin of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences has authored more than 300 studies, nine books, and a 2006 paper titled "The Evolution and the Prediction of Global Climate Changes on Earth." "Even if the concentration of �greenhouse gases' double man would not perceive the temperature impact," Sorochtin wrote. (Note: Name also sometimes translated to spell Sorokhtin) |
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport
Exxon. For sure.
Mod Edit. The article is too long, please follow the link and read it at the original site. Thank you. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 8:33 am Post subject: |
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Big Tobacco strikes again:
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What if global-warming fears are overblown?
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- With Congress about to take up sweeping climate-change legislation, expect to hear more in coming weeks from John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at University of Alabama-Huntsville.
A veteran climatologist who refuses to accept any research funding from the oil or auto industries, Christy was a lead author of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report as well as one of the three authors of the American Geophysical Union's landmark 2003 statement on climate change.
Yet despite those green-sounding credentials, Christy is not calling for draconian cuts in carbon emissions. Quite the contrary. Christy is actually the environmental lobby's worst nightmare - an accomplished climate scientist with no ties to Big Oil who has produced reams and reams of data that undermine arguments that the earth's atmosphere is warming at an unusual rate and question whether the remedies being talked about in Congress will actually do any good.
...
His most controversial argument is that the surface temperature readings upon which global warming theory is built have been distorted by urbanization. Due to the solar heat captured by bricks and pavement and due to the changing wind patterns caused by large buildings, a weather station placed in a rural village in 1900 will inevitably show higher temperature readings if that village has, over time, been transformed into small city or a suburban shopping district, Christy says.
The only way to control for such surface distortions is by measuring atmospheric temperatures. And when Christy and his co-researcher Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist now teaching at UA-Huntsville, began analyzing temperature readings from NOAA and NASA satellites, they found much slighter increases in atmospheric temperatures than what was being recorded on the surface. Christy and Spencer also found that nearly all the increases in average surface temperatures are related to nighttime readings - which makes sense if bricks and pavement are in fact retaining heat that would otherwise be dispersed.
In testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee in February, Christy displayed a chart showing central California temperature trends for both the developed San Joaquin Valley and the largely undeveloped Sierra foothills. "The daytime temperatures of both regions show virtually no change over the past 100 years, while the nighttime temperatures indicate the developed Valley has warmed significantly while the undeveloped Sierra foothills have not," Christy told the committee.
I recently spoke with Christy about his controversial research.
In laymen's terms, what's wrong with the surface temperature readings that are widely used to make the case for global warming?
First is the placement of the temperature stations. They're placed in convenient locations that might be in a parking lot or near a house and thus get extra heating from these human structures. Over time, there's been the development of areas into farms or buildings or parking lots. Also, a number of these weather stations have become electronic, and many of them were moved to a place where there is electricity, which is usually right outside a building. As a result, there's a natural warming tendency, especially in the nighttime temperatures, that has been misinterpreted as greenhouse warming.
Have you been able to confirm your satellite temperature readings by other means?
Weather balloons. We take satellite shots at the same place where the balloon is released so we're looking at the same column of air. Our satellite data compares exceptionally well to the balloon data.
I know you think there's been something of a hysteria in the media about melting glaciers. Could you explain?
Ice melts. Glaciers are always calving. This is what ice does. If ice did not melt, we'd have an ice-covered planet. The fact is that the ice cover is growing in the southern hemisphere even as the ice cover is more or less shrinking in the northern hemisphere. As you and I are talking today, global sea ice coverage is about 400,000 square kilometers above the long-term average - which means that the surplus in the Antarctic is greater than the deficit in the Arctic.
What about the better-safe-than-sorry argument? Even if there's a chance Gore and Hansen are wrong, shouldn't we still take action in order to protect ourselves from catastrophe, just in case they're right?
The problem is that the solutions being offered don't provide any detectable relief from this so-called catastrophe. Congress is now discussing an 80% reduction in U.S. greenhouse emissions by 2050. That's basically the equivalent of building 1,000 new nuclear power plants all operating by 2020. Now I'm all in favor of nuclear energy, but that would affect the global temperature by only seven-hundredths of a degree by 2050 and fifteen hundredths by 2100. We wouldn't even notice it. To top of page |
http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/14/magazines/fortune/globalwarming.fortune/?postversion=2009051411 |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 8:47 am Post subject: |
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| Ice melts. Glaciers are always calving. This is what ice does. If ice did not melt, we'd have an ice-covered planet. The fact is that the ice cover is growing in the southern hemisphere even as the ice cover is more or less shrinking in the northern hemisphere. As you and I are talking today, global sea ice coverage is about 400,000 square kilometers above the long-term average - which means that the surplus in the Antarctic is greater than the deficit in the Arctic. |
Can anyone confirm or refute that glaciers in the southern hemisphere are growing and not melting?
How many southern hemisphere atmospheric scientists buy global warming? |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 8:59 am Post subject: |
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| OK. Now if you can appropriately answer the second question, you will have officially turned me into a skeptic. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 9:01 am Post subject: |
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| How many southern hemisphere atmospheric scientists buy global warming? |
Dunno. |
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