Green Tech Media
He warns investors, “Run like hell when you hear ‘green jobs, green economy, double bottom line or carbon tax.’”
Palm Springs, California—T.J. Rodgers is the Founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, a force in Silicon Valley, an early equity investor in SunPower and a vintner. He spoke on Thursday morning at the CleanEdge/IBF cleantech investor forum and was introduced as “an unabashed free-market capitalist.”
Rodgers is a wry, in-your-face speaker. He walked into the lions’ den of green investors and environmentalists at this event to debunk the “religion of climate change” and warn the crowd to not get too reliant on government subsidy programs.
He does not accept human-induced global warming as reality nor the data of global warming adherents.
“Run like hell when you hear ‘carbon tax’”
Rodgers acknowledges that he has a conflict of interests in discouraging dependence on subsidies—solar subsidies have allowed SunPower to provide a 22.4 to-1 ROI for Cypress’ investors. More subsidies mean more money for SunPower and its investors. That said, he provided the audience with some advice:
Do not rely (for long) on government funding or subsidies.
Be a global warming skeptic (Rodgers most certainly is).
“Run like hell” when you hear the terms “green jobs, green economy, double bottom line or carbon tax.”
Believe in the free market and freedom of the individual.
Believe in the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and the Tenth Amendment.
Hanging over Rodger’s office desk is a letter from Milton Friedman who also advised Rodgers, “Get everything they [shareholders] are legally entitled to and still argue for an end to government subsidies.”
The SunPower Story
We take a break from politics and religion to briefly cover Rodgers’ role in the SunPower story. Rodgers knew SunPower’s CEO Dick Swanson in the 1970s—they were in the same PhD program at Stanford University.
Rodgers recognized the value of Dick Swanson’s high efficiency solar cells early on. Despite carpeting the roof of Cypress with 14 percent efficient BP solar panels in 2000, the roof only provided 33 percent of the building’s electricity. The 50 percent efficiency improvement promised by Swanson’s back-contact silicon cells would have provided 50 percent of the building’s power.
But the Cypress board of directors was not interested in funding Swanson’s struggling SunPower, so Rodgers wrote a personal check—the “best check he’s ever written,” for $750,000. As mentioned, that check yielded a huge return on investment and created one of the larger solar firms, now competing in the global market.
Rodgers made the important point that, “This is not the semiconductor industry.” Solar “is on a big scale with tons of silicon a day coming through the front door,” adding, “It’s not people in bunny suits—it’s a ton of silicon on a forklift.”
He said that solar requires “an order of magnitude improvement in price and throughput compared to semiconductors,” and that “We can’t afford any semi equipment—we use upgraded PCB equipment.”
As for the concept of green jobs, Rodgers insisted that “green jobs are almost all offshore—you ain’t gonna make them in Fremont, just ask Solyndra.”
He questioned the sense of Germany installing solar panels, considering their solar resource, but was happy to have Germany as a SunPower customer.
Rodgers On Global Warming
And now back to religion.
Rodgers cited surveys that indicate that the average consumer does not care about global warming. He railed against environmentalists converging on the climate talks in private jets and limousines, calling environmentalism “a secular religion, a non-god-based religion.” He also chastised the press, saying, “The press is uncritically on their side.”
Rodgers said, “Attacks on free markets are not new.” He quoted from Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb, with its doomsday scenarios that could only be remedied by a “coercive utopia” with “socialism replacing free markets,” and “altruism replacing individuality even in family matters.” Ehrlich’s predictions concerning global starvation, over-population and escalating commodity prices have turned out to have been patently wrong and cannot survive critical inspection.
Rodgers spent a considerable portion of his presentation examining and in some cases debunking the data from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and the data from the IPCC, The International Panel on Climate Change. Here are some of his points. [I will try to post his presentation shortly.]
“Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth was politics, not science”; Rodgers challenged the facts and interpretations of the movie at length. He noted the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere but challenged the causality of temperature rise and increase in CO2. He suggested that the rise in CO2, in some cases, lagged temperature rise.
Rodgers suggests, “It is not clear that 380 ppm of CO2 is bad,” adding, “Why would you pick 280 ppm as the correct number?” He also asked audience members to ponder whether the world in a high ppm environment might actually fare better.
He pointed out that IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) data was less than rigorously vetted and, in some cases, crucial trends such as the medieval warming period were either glossed over or ignored.
Hurricanes and extreme weather are not increasing.
Antarctic ice is getting thicker, not thinner.
There is a growing body of scientists questioning the evidence of global warming.
Mr. Rodgers’ incendiary talk was ill-received by many in the large, green-leaning crowd—there was some less-than-complimentary post-speech chatter. I’m reasonably sure that Rodgers doesn’t care about the critique from these “higher life forms” as he referred to people with elitist world views. Rodgers also quoted H.L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, which warms my heart.
I am not able to do full justice to Rodger’s logic and rhetorical style in the confines of the article but will look to obtain the presentation from him and post it online. Read post here.
By hauntingthelibrary
Sometimes you don’t know who’s worse: the global warming alarmists, banging the pan with their latest prediction of impending doom, or the mainstream media who seem to not only let them, but positively help them,
For years, for years, the warmists banged on and on about the need to switch from taking oil out of the ground to renewable sources, such as ethanol, derived from corn. They got their way. The American Congress mandated that a certain amount of fuel must come from corn ethanol, come what may.
And what happened? What do you think would happen? The mandate meant that vast quantities of perfectly good corn was diverted from the world’s food supply and turned into ethanol for what even environmentalists now admit were “very marginal” gains:
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has said he made a mistake promoting first generation corn ethanol during his presidential campaign in 2000.
Gore says he was more concerned with garnering votes from farmers in Tennessee and Iowa than with what was best for the environment. A clean energy enthusiast, Gore says corn ethanol is not a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. The process of converting corn into ethanol is highly energy intensive and also requires using a food crop for fuel.
Gore contends corn ethanol is negatively impacting food prices and that there are better biofuel solutions to be developed and supported
The energy collective. Al Gore Says Supporting Corn Ethanol Was A Mistake.
Everyone knows this has been a total disaster. Reuters now reports that a quarter of America’s corn harvest now goes to making ethanol with totally predictable consequences on world food prices. A child of five could’ve predicted this scenario.
So should we be surprised that the latest Worldwatch press release warns that overpopulation and global warming are to blame for rising food prices?
Our early 21st century civilization is in trouble. We need not go beyond the world food economy to see this. Over the last few decades we have created a food production bubble - one based on environmental trends that cannot be sustained, including overpumping aquifers, overplowing land, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.
The challenge is to quickly reduce carbon emissions, stabilize population, and restore the economy’s soils, aquifers, forests, and other natural support system”.
Worldwatch Press Release: ‘When Will the Food Bubble Burst?’
Reading this, you’d think it was global warming and overpopulation to blame for rising food prices. And that’s exactly how it’s been reported. Most newspapers and media get the majority of their stories from the major news wire services like AFP or Reuters. they don’t have the resources to check stuff out properly and rely on the wire services to do this for them. Here’s how Reuters reported it:
The rapid surge in staple food prices in 2008 that sparked global riots and sent millions into poverty is back. Now, researchers say that because of global warming and trends in population, these dramatic price movements in the food economy are likely here to stay.
Reuters. On the Frontlines of a Warming World, 925 Million Undernourished People.
On the second page of the news wire, Reuters does get around to mentioning other factors, but as an afterthought. As you can tell from the title and the opening paragraph, the article pins rising food prices on overpopulation and global warming.
But elsewhere on the Worldwatch website, far away from the press release for easy consumption, is the full report on rising food prices. Still as alarmist, but buried halfway down the report, barely visible, is the truth:
The combined effect of these three growing demands is stunning: a doubling in the annual growth in world grain consumption from an average of 21 million tons per year in 1990-2005 to 41 million tons per year in 2005-2010. Most of this huge jump is attributable to the orgy of investment in ethanol distilleries in the United States in 2006-2008. Earth Policy Institute. The Great Food Crisis of 2011
Even Worldwatch has to admit this fact. It’s not global warming and overpopulation that has driven food prices up but biofuels. But you wouldn’t get this information from the press release, you have to actually read the report for that.
Food riots in Algeria, food riots in Haiti. People dying. People starving. And why? Because of the insane push for a “sustainable” alternative to petrol, one that even Gore admits was a damn stupid idea, driven by politics not science.
And don’t think this is coming as a surprise. Three years ago the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food slammed the drive for biofuels as a “criminal path” that was leading to hunger, starvation, rioting and death:
GENEVA, Switzerland, April 28, 2008 (ENS) - The United States and the European Union have taken a “criminal path” by contributing to an explosive rise in global food prices through using food crops to produce biofuels, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food said today.
At a press conference in Geneva, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland said that fuel policies pursued by the U.S. and the EU were one of the main causes of the current worldwide food crisis.
Environment News Service. UN: Biofuel Production ‘Criminal Path’ to Global Food Crisis’.
That’s right - the “food crisis” of rising food prices in 2008 was caused by pointlessly diverting food into fuel, exactly the same as now. The reports blaming overpopulation and global warming are smokescreens. The vast majority, the overwhelming majority of the rise in prices is due to perfectly good food being pointlessly turned into fuel that benefits (hardly) anyone and costs taxpayers a fortune.
So, let’s spell it out. Here’s what’s happened:
1) Gore and other global warming cheerleaders push for biofuels
2) America and EU mandate targets for biofuel use.
3) Quarter of corn production goes to fuel use, prices skyrocket.
4) NGO’s issue report blaming global warming and overpopulation.
5) The media repeat this line without investigation or even reading the report properly.
And these are the people who believe that they know how to save the world. Who are demanding a total reorientation of everything. How we eat, live, work, travel - everything. They’ve driven up the price of food in a way even the UN calls “criminal” and then they turn around and say its global warming and overpopulation.
But then, that’s how it works. Read more here.
The Washington Times
Imagine if a former military officer, a traditional-values conservative now an attache at the State Department, wrote for a largely foreign audience to urge an international boycott of U.S. goods. The aim was to ruin the American economy to protest the new policy of allowing open homosexuality in the armed forces. Media outlets and politicians would be screaming for his dismissal. Free speech is one thing, but nobody on the taxpayer dole in a position of responsibility would be allowed to call for the destruction of our economy. One way or another, the man would be forced out.
Now consider James E. Hansen, director of the taxpayer-funded NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Last week, blogger Marc Morano discovered a Nov. 24 blog post by Mr. Hansen calling on China to lead an international effort to impose fees on carbon-dioxide emissions, then lead the World Trade Organization to allow import fees on goods from any county - with the U.S. being the target - without such fees. The goal would be to punish America, causing “continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being,” until the “fossil-money- ‘democracy’” no longer “rules the roost in Washington.” Mr. Hansen also praised communist Chinese leadership for “tak[ing] the long view ... in contrast to the West with its [lamentably] short election cycles.”
This blog-burst followed a Hansen trip to the Middle Kingdom, where he wrote similar columns for Chinese newspapers. This is part of a continuing pattern of behavior that could be in violation of ethical rules for civil servants. On Wednesday, the Environmental Law Center of the American Tradition Institute filed a lengthy Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request suggesting Mr. Hansen’s office has countenanced employment and honoraria receipts, without legally required waivers, outside of taxpayer-funded jobs. The FOIA request also sought apparently missing “statement* of conflicts of interest by James E. Hansen” and “any internal discussion of any cautions or warnings of actual or possible disciplinary action” involving Mr. Hansen.
His anti-democracy disposition is real. Mr. Hansen supports American courts forcing carbon-dioxide limits on the public without presidential or congressional action. A year ago, he endorsed “Time’s Up” by Keith Farnish, who argued, “The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization.” The book considers “razing cities to the ground ... along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage.”
U.S. taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay the salary of an anti-American loose cannon like Mr. Hansen.
See post here.
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ATI Environmental Law Center Seeks NASA Records on Dr. James Hansen
Today the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center filed a federal Freedom of Information Act request with NASA, seeking records detailing whether and how ‘global warming’ activist Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has complied with applicable federal ethics and financial disclosure laws and regulations, and NASA Rules of Behavior.
This request seeks records of longtime, taxpayer-funded activist Hansen, in the knowledge that FOIA-released records and other documents show his GISS colleague, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, has edited the activist blog RealClimate on regular business hours when he is nominally working for the taxpayer. In fact, FOIA-released records indicate this third-party activism was considered part of Schmidt’s job, seeking to rehabilitate the discredited ‘hockey stick’ and otherwise promoting GISS’s activist line.
The request for Hansen’s ethics-compliance records comes on the heels of his latest adventures in public advocacy, writing in the Chinese newspaper South China Morning Post to blame the United States for modern climate change and his ritually exaggerated claims of future catastrophe, as well as some by now typically nasty sneering at American democracy in a follow-up article published on his website (now taken down but surely produced, as FOIA records have already revealed that so much of his privately posted work has been produced, on taxpayer time).
This is the latest in a long line of often radical behavior by Hansen that, were it engaged in by a government employee on the other side of the ‘global warming’ issue, would have resulted in discipline and possibly termination years ago. Dr. Hansen may state that he is speaking as a private citizen - in fora ranging from his testimony supporting lawbreaking in the name of global warming, to extreme public advocacy only tolerated, if even celebrated, because of his position with NASA - but the obvious truth is that he is trading on his platform as a NASA scientist to gain the wide audience he has (Hansen is an astronomer).
“It seems that Hansen’s access to and use of the media has so cowed his NASA superiors that his office has been allowed to operate unencumbered by applicable ethics requirements which other NASA employees, not so darling to the media, must comply with,” said Christopher Horner, ATI’s senior director of litigation. “In fact, in public court pleadings filed in Competitive Enterprise Institute v. NASA, NASA recently revealed that Hansen’s office operated for years in violation of these obligations.”
ATI’s requests build on that record, seeking specific records since 2004 relating to:
Required Approvals and Waivers for Outside Employment
Required Financial Disclosure/Conflict of Interest Disclosure
Internal discussion of possible or actual disciplinary actions
ATI looks forward to NASA’s compliance with this request, in stark contrast to how it has recently treated other requests for GISS records, with expectation that NASA will provide the responsive records in the statutorily permitted period of time.
See ATI’s Freedom of Information Act request to NASA seeking James Hansen’s records relating to compliance with ethics and financial disclosure laws. (here).
For an interview with Christopher Horner, senior director of litigation for the American Tradition Institute Environmental Law Center, contact him at chris.horner@atinstitute.org.