By Chris Horner, American Spectator
So President Obama is meeting in the White House tomorrow with BP’s chairman. The focus of public discussion of this event has been on it taking until the 57th day or so since the Deepwater Horizon rig caught fire following a well explosion, precipitating the ongoing oil leak.
The more relevant figure is 4,700. If my quick calculation has it right, that’s the number of days since the last time a BP CEO was in the Oval Office.
On that day, August 4, 1997, then-CEO, (then-Sir) John Browne, joined by Ken Lay, met in the Oval with President Clinton and Vice President Gore.
Their mission that day? As revealed in the August 1, 1997 Lay briefing memo which I was later provided—having left a brief dance with Enron after raising questions about this very issue—it was to demand that the White House ignore unanimous Senate instruction pursuant to Art. II, Sec. 2 of the Constitution ("advice", of “advice and consent” fame), and to go to Kyoto and agree to the “global warming” treaty.
Oh, and to enact a cap-and-trade scheme.
Oddly, President Obama tonite will telegraph that he’s really going to stick it to BP tomorrow and give ‘em...the cap-and-trade scheme they concocted with Enron and have been feverishly lobbying and supporting the greens in their push for ever since (spare me the hysterics, comrades, as I have detailed and explained in various ways here, here and here, I was in the room).
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Two Very Different Views on the Environmental Movement
The Marxist roots of the global warming scare
By Wes Vernon
The late Natalie Grant Wraga once wrote, “Protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West and all it stands for. Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values.”
And who was this person?
Natalie Grant Wraga (who died in 2002 at age 101) was an internationally-recognized expert on the art of disinformation. In her Washington Post obituary, Herbert Romerstein - veteran intelligence expert in the legislative and executive branches of government - described Grant/Wraga as “one of our leading authorities” on Soviet deceit.
In a 1998 article appearing in Investors Business Daily (IBD), reporter John Berlau wrote that some of the most respected scholars on Soviet Intelligence have credited this woman with teaching them how to penetrate desinformatzia, Moscow’s term for its ongoing operation to deceive foreign governments.
John Dziak - onetime senior intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) -is quoted by IBD as saying were it not “for someone like Natalie, we would have had more failures, and the Soviets would have had more successes.”
Which leads us where?
In many of her writings, she dropped her last name and wrote under the byline Natalie Grant. That takes us to the spring 1998 issue of The Register. Therein, Grant identified Green Cross International (GCI) as a Non-Government Organization (NGO) founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, the last communist dictator of the Soviet Union. The aim of GCI was worldwide enforcement of a rigid environmental agenda.
Concurrent with the advancement of GCI, there was the birth of yet another NGO called the Earth Council, chaired by Maurice Strong, a key environmentalist mover and shaker at the United Nations. According to Wikipedia, Strong - a Canadian - describes himself as “a socialist in ideology and a capitalist in methodology.” The bio also notes that “some consider Strong a frightening power seeker.” And then this: “He shares the views of the most radical environmentalist street protester, but instead of shouting himself hoarse at a police barricade at a global conference, he’s the secretary general inside, wielding the gavel.”
Meanwhile, about a dozen people participated in the organizing meeting of Gorbachev’s GCI, including then-U.S. Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.). The congressman had publicly stated that regardless of whether the allegation of man-made “global warming” was valid or exaggerated, the U.S. should proceed to take the steps required to fight it because those steps supposedly would benefit the planet. Read much more here.
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How Global Warming and Capitalism Are Deeply Intertwined
By By James Gustave Speth
This article is adapted from James Gustave Speth’s The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to Sustainability (Yale).
In 1970 James Gustave Speth co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has become one of America’s most well-endowed and high-profile environmental organizations. He worked in the White House under President Carter, chairing the Council on Environmental Quality; when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected in 1992, Speth was a senior adviser to their transition team. He spent the 1990s as the administrator of the United Nations Development Program, where he integrated environmental sustainability into the agency’s poverty-fighting mission. Thus, what follows--his call for a radical departure from the movement’s current strategy--comes from the ultimate environmental insider.
I grew up in a small town on the Edisto River in South Carolina in the 1940s and ‘50s. As a boy, I often swam the Edisto, though at first I could not buck the river’s current. But as I grew older and stronger, I was able to make good headway against it. In my environmental work for close to four decades, I’ve always assumed America’s environmental community would do the same--get stronger and prevail against the current. But in the past few years I have come to the conclusion that this assumption is incorrect. The environmental community has grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to deteriorate. The current has strengthened faster than we have and become more treacherous. It is time to consider what to do besides swimming against it.
It is no accident that environmental crisis is gathering as social injustice is deepening and growing inequality is impairing democratic institutions. Each is the result of a system of political economy--today’s capitalism--that is profoundly committed to profits and growth and profoundly indifferent to nature and society. Left uncorrected, it is an inherently ruthless, rapacious system, and it is up to citizens, acting mainly through government, to inject human and natural values into that system. But this effort fails because progressive politics are too feeble and Washington is more and more in the hands of powerful corporations and great wealth. The best hope for change in America is a fusion of those concerned about the environment, social justice and strong democracy into one powerful progressive force. This fusion must occur before it is too late.
Sadly, while environmentalists have been winning many battles, we are losing the planet. Read more out of the Marxist environmental handbook from Yale extremists here.
By Lawrence Solomon, National Post
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”
Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia - the university of Climategate fame - is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.
Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.
See post here.
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Rudd’s “4000” scientists turn to just “dozens”
By Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
Kevin Rudd tells yet another lie to justify his global warming policies:
“And the most recent IPCC scientific conclusion in 2007 was that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and the ‘increase in global average temperatures since the mid 20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” This is the conclusion of 4,000 scientists appointed by governments from virtually every country in the world...”
Mick Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia and an IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author, corrects the record:
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields.”
Just a few dozen scientists, not Rudd’s “4000”. The man is utterly shameless.
But this raises the question: how easy is it for such a small group to become slaves of group think - or, indeed, to become intoxicated with their enormous and flattering influence on geo-politics?
In 2006, Professor Edward Wegman raised this very fear in his report, commissioned by the United States House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee to examine the IPCC’s discredited “hockey stick”, devised by Michael Mann, which purported to show unprecedented warming last century:
One of the interesting questions associated with the “hockey stick controversy” are the relationships among the authors and consequently how confident one can be in the peer review process. In particular, if there is a tight relationship among the authors and there are not a large number of individuals engaged in a particular topic area, then one may suspect that the peer review process does not fully vet papers before they are published…
However, it is immediately clear that the Mann, Rutherford, Jones, Osborn, Briffa, Bradley and Hughes form a clique, each interacting with all of the others. A clique is a fully connected subgraph, meaning everyone in the clique interacts with every one else in the clique....
Michael Mann is a co-author with every one of the other 42 [in his clique]. The black squares on the diagonal [fig. 5.2] indicate that the investigators work closely within their group, but not so extensively outside of their group.
Note those names again: Michael Mann, Scott Rutherford, Phil Jones, Tim Osborn, Keith Briffa, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes are all climate scientists implicates in the Climategate scandal.
And Rudd not only fell for it, but lied for it. See post here.
By Myron Ebell
The Senate on Thursday defeated the Murkowski Resolution by a vote of 47 to 53. Six Democrats joined all 41 Republicans in voting for S. J. Res. 26 to block the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated by the Clean Air Act. The six Democrats were Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Jay Rockefeller (WV), Evan Bayh (Ind.), and David Pryor (Ark.).
Opponents had to work overtime to defeat Senator Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) Resolution. Environmental pressure groups spent millions of dollars in the last few weeks on radio and television advertising and on grassroots mobilization. The White House issued a sternly-worded veto threat on Tuesday. I even heard that an appeal for phone calls to the Senate was sent to President Obama’s Organizing for America e-mail list of 13 million names.
Reid’s Last Second Machinations
But by Wednesday, it was clear that all of their efforts were not going to be enough to defeat the Resolution. So Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) promised to hold a vote later in the year on a bill introduced by Senator Rockefeller that would delay the implementation of Clean Air Act regulations for two years. That was enough to peel away the votes of Senator Jim Webb (D-Va.) and several others.
Although I doubt that anyone in the Senate is counting on Reid to keep his promise, it was a remarkable concession to have to make. It reveals that the Democratic leadership and the White House realized that they were in deep trouble if the Senate passed the Murkowski Resolution. My guess is that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told the White House and Reid that she would have a hard time preventing a House vote if the Senate voted yes. That’s because 170 House members, including 25 Democrats, have already co-sponsored identical resolutions and there are a number of Democrats who voted for the Waxman-Markey energy-rationing bill who think that a vote against energy rationing now might help them save their seats in the November elections.
What’s Next?
This was therefore not just a symbolic vote, as opponents have claimed for months. It was a very important vote that will reverberate through the election campaign. Nor is it the end of efforts to block EPA from implementing regulations that will suffocate the economy. There is clearly majority support in the Senate and House at least to delay EPA implementation of emissions regulations. A vote on the Rockefeller bill, S. 3072, may or may not occur, but there are a number of other avenues still open: the lawsuits filed against the Endangerment Finding; a House discharge petition to bring the Resolution of Disapproval to the floor; a rider to the EPA appropriations bill could be offered this fall to remove funding for implementing any greenhouse gas regulations; and next year the new Congress may be much more hostile to the Endangerment Finding and to energy-rationing policies in general.
High-lights and Low-lights
I listened to much of the six hours of Senate floor debate on C-Span. Anyone who missed it who would like to hear some of the speeches can find them archived here. Senator Murkowski did an excellent job explaining the issues and what was at stake and why even supporters of energy-rationing legislation (as she is herself) should vote to block EPA. The speeches of the Chairman and Ranking Republican of the Environment and Public Works Committee provided a sharp contrast in intellectual seriousness. Ranking Republican James Inhofe (R-Okla.) gave a cogent and factually accurate speech that summarized the whole issue. Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), on the other hand, let loose with howler after ridiculous howler. I shouldn’t be unfair to Senator Boxer, however. Many of the other Senators opposed to the Resolution spoke just as much foolish nonsense. I should single out Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) as one of them. Kerry is the chief sponsor of the two Senate cap-and-trade bills, but is as clueless as Boxer.
Three other floor speeches should be mentioned. Senator John McCain’s (R-Az.) speech was made possible by his Republican primary opponent, J. D. Hayworth. I expect we will hear many other good conservative speeches from McCain between now and 24th August. Senator Webb gave an excellent analysis of what was at stake: “I do not believe that Congress should cede its authority over an issue as important as climate change to unelected officials of the Executive Branch. Without proper boundaries, this finding could be the first step in a long and expensive regulatory process that could lead to overly stringent and very costly controls on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Congress - and not the EPA - should make important policies, and be accountable to the American people for them.” Then, of course, Webb voted No. I guess there wasn’t time to re-write his speech after he switched his vote.
Senator Rockefeller summed up his reasons for voting Yes: “I don’t want EPA turning out the lights on America.” Fifty-three of his Democratic colleagues disagreed. They now bear full responsibility for the dire economic consequences of EPA’s regulatory onslaught.
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Senate surrenders to the EPA
Examiner Editorial June 11, 2010
Fifty three of the Senate’s 59 Democrats gave unelected, overpaid bureaucrats at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a green light yesterday to do pretty much whatever they choose in their quixotic crusade against global warming. All 41 Republicans and six brave Democrats voted for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution nullifying the EPA’s recent usurpation of authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the U.S. economy to combat greenhouse gases. Thankfully, this craven surrender of congressional authority isn’t the last word on the issue, assuming that the November elections produce a Senate with enough backbone to reassert the legislature’s rightful power.
In the meantime, it’s vital to understand how bureaucracies function. Whatever else they may do, leading bureaucrats always do two things, regardless of which party controls the White House or Congress: They limit choices available to the rest of us by imposing regulations that increase government power and thus justify expanding their budgets and staffs; and they protect themselves and their turf by suppressing internal dissent, often at any costs.
As an example of the latter, consider career EPA scientist Alan Carlin. Last year, Carlin went through all the proper channels in submitting a study to the EPA’s top leadership in which he raised serious questions about the credibility of scientific reports used to justify the agency’s decision to regulate greenhouse gases. Carlin’s study became public thanks to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Carlin’s reward was to be publicly pilloried by President Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson. His work was suppressed within the agency, and he was threatened with additional retaliation if he continued voicing his views. Rather than endure this bureaucratic muzzling, Carlin retired.
Similarly, EPA lawyers Allan Zabel and Laurie Williams—a married couple living in San Francisco who between them have four decades of experience at the agency—became so concerned last year about the EPA’s support of cap-and-trade legislation that they created a YouTube video titled “The Huge Mistake” to explain their case. They made it clear that the video represented only their personal opinions, but the EPA still ordered them to change the video’s content or face severe punishment.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., predicts that a suffocating new round of EPA regulations will soon descend upon the “one-fifth of our restaurants, one-fourth of our schools, two-thirds of our hospitals and doctor’s offices, 10 percent of our churches, thousands of farms and millions of small businesses” that emit greenhouse gases. Considering how the EPA grandees mistreat their underlings, we wonder how the agency will respond to the soon-to-be-swelling ranks of critics on the outside. Read more at the Washington Examiner here.