By Holger Krahmer
The financial crisis and subsequent recession in the United States have prompted some to begin calling for a completely new kind of economy. This new economy would be based on environmental values, a so-called “Green New Deal” to be ushered in by President Obama and leaders in Europe. The plan includes cap-and-trade legislation, new spending on “green” jobs, subsidies for favored firms and technologies, and trade restrictions against out-of-favor products and industries.
The United States is the world’s most crucial economic engine, and before it goes much further down this road, it might want to look at Europe’s experience with a similar deal. It has done little to help the environment but much to harm consumers and the broader economy.
In Europe, green ideas have been in fashion for two generations and have driven policy to a much greater extent than in the United States. Despite this, we have not witnessed a sizable green wave of new jobs, as evidenced by our unemployment rates, which are routinely several percentage points higher than in America.
The green movement has succeeded in generating increased government spending and subsidies at taxpayer expense. Much of this spending has been directed toward inefficient renewable-energy projects, such as solar and wind power. In my own country, these subsidies appease Germany’s mighty pro-green lobby, but they have done little to put downward pressure on unemployment, and their contribution to Germany’s overall energy mix is small.
Germany, like the United States, is a major industrial and manufacturing powerhouse. It continues to rely on fossil fuels and will do so for a long time to come. There is no escaping this fact, no matter what the Green New Deal enthusiasts say.
To that end, it’s important that Washington not make some of the mistakes we in Europe have made. Specifically, U.S. political and industry leaders should be careful not to follow Europe’s path of buckling under to “greenmail,” which undermines sound policy and genuine sustainable economic growth.
Here is what has happened in Europe: Caving to pressure from alarmist environmental groups, European companies such as Carrefour, Metro AG and Unilever have elected to halt the purchase of certain food, industrial and paper products from developing countries. The green groups claim these products, made in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, harm rain forests and other critical habitats.
However, several reputable studies show that nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, the global trade in goods created in these areas provides jobs and incomes to those desperately in need of economic advancement. These economic advances make environmental improvements in their home countries possible. The irony is that by refusing to trade with producers from these developing countries, European companies are making the global environment worse, not better.
Consider the global trade in paper products that are produced in Southeast Asia. This has been one of the great economic success stories of the region, as undeveloped countries such as Indonesia tap their environmental resources - in this case, renewable forests - to create products for exchange in global markets. The resulting pulp and paper industries employ hundreds of thousands of people across Southeast Asia, giving them good jobs and a chance to provide steady livelihoods for themselves and their children. This has been crucial to establishing a middle class and promising a better economic future for all in the region.
But radical environmental groups, mostly based in Europe, claim that the purchase of paper goods from these countries harms wild habitat. This is untrue. Countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia have some of the strongest wildlife and rain-forest protections in the world. They have set large swatches of their land off-limits, out of the reach of industrial interests. Their commitment to their own natural environments far exceeds anything in Europe’s own environmental history.
But facts rarely stop green pressure groups once they fixate on a target. The eco-activists pressure Western companies - via greenmail campaigns - to stop purchasing these goods, thus harming the economic prospects of Southeast Asia. The activists believe this is part of the larger Green New Deal they are orchestrating. But it’s a raw deal for the workers of developing countries and the consumers of Europe and the United States. And it does nothing to protect the environment.
Of course, this fits well with the agenda of the environmental left, which wants to limit consumer choice for wealthy Westerners and prevent the poor in developing countries from kick-starting economic growth. For too long, Europe has been complicit in perpetuating these deeply inhuman policies. It will be an even greater economic and humanitarian shame if America follows suit. Read story here.
Holger Krahmer is a German Liberal and a member of the European Parliament’s environment committee and the temporary committee on climate change.
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Carbon carousel: European market a haven for tax fraud
Connie Hedegaard, Center for Investigative Reporting
Flying below the American radar, a tax scandal has been rocking the global carbon markets. Ironically, it is emanating from Copenhagen, the city that six months ago hosted the world’s largest climate summit. But back in 2007, long before COP 15 arrived, the Danes began working behind the scenes to host a growing cadre of carbon brokerage firms, which have become central to trading the world’s fastest growing commodity.
To make it easier for these financial firms to set up shop in the Danish capital, the Ministry of Finance decided to skip background checks on companies being vetted to trade on the country’s national carbon exchange. According to a string of reports in the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, all the government asked companies to provide was an email address. This laissez-faire attitude succeeded in channeling close to a third of all EU carbon trades through Denmark, and has since backfired badly.
The paper reported that one firm after another was little more than a front company for transacting complicated financial scams. In fact, more than 80 percent of the carbon trading firms registered on the Danish exchange closed down after the media probe began, according to a statement (pdf) by the country’s Environment Minister, Lykke Friis.
The fraud is known as a “tax carousel.” Danish-registered companies buy carbon credits from brokers in other European countries. This intra-European trading of credits to meet EU emissions standards (and the trades made by speculators betting on the price of these credits) are not taxed. But when the buyer and seller are trading in the same country, in this case Denmark, a value added tax, or VAT, is imposed.
In Denmark, VAT is a hefty 25 percent on each transaction—one of the highest rates in Europe. But rather than turn the tax monies over to the Danish treasury, the traders packed up and disappeared. Three-quarters of the carbon traders registered in Denmark during the past year have either been dismantled by their owners or were shut down by the authorities.
According to a Reuters report, EuroPol estimates the scheme has so far cost treasuries in Denmark and other European countries some 5 billion euros (about US$7 billion) in lost revenues, while throwing into question the veracity of thousands of carbon trades.
Bo Elkjaer, the Danish reporter who broke the story, explained over email that his further investigations suggest the scandal is by no means confined to Denmark. Many of the same firms are suspected of running similar schemes in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and the UK. EuroPol reports that after the governments of France, the UK, the Netherlands and Spain changed their tax codes to close the loophole, the volume of carbon trading in those countries collapsed by 90 percent.
Meanwhile, the media blitz has raised questions about the EU’s new commissioner for climate action, Connie Hedegaard, who was Denmark’s climate minister when many of the fraudulent deals were set in motion. Hedegaard said publicly that she knew nothing about the fraud before Mr. Elkjaer and his newspaper began reporting on the case last December.
In May, the Guardian reported that it had obtained a document from inside the Danish ministry drawing attention to the tax fraud problem, which Ms. Hedegaard had initialed back in August 2009. Since then, she has admitted she was aware of the problem but says that at the time she signed the report, she saw it as a tax issue and, therefore, not her responsibility.
EuroPol is in the middle of a full scale investigation into the scam, and hundreds of arrests have been made across Europe.
Elkjaer says the scandal highlights the vulnerability of a system based on trading an intangible asset. “It’s just a computer certificate, moved from account to account in endless loops,” he said. “A trade can be performed from a single laptop anywhere in the world. All it needs is an internet connection.” See post here.
William O’Keefe, CEO, and Jeff Kueter, President, The Marshall Institute
Today, the George C. Marshall Institute published a reply to the book, Merchants of Doubt, which attacks the integrity of the Institute and its founders. The reply is available here.
Replete with half-truths and mischaracterizations, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s book besmirches the reputations of three great American scientists to silence dissent within the ranks of scientists and stifle debate among policy makers about how to respond to global warming. Their message is both anti-science and anti-democratic. Whether the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions is desirable or not is irrelevant, the merits of their scholarship and its implications are clear.
Predictably, they create a tobacco strawman and knock it down to set the tone of a grand conspiracy to harm the public. Specifically, the work overstates the linkage between Dr. Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Science - the nation’s most senior scientific establishment, and a past president of a leading biomedical institution, the Rockefeller University in New York City, and R.J. Reynolds. Yes, Seitz helped establish an advisory committee to direct a research and development program upon his retirement as president of Rockefeller. Why? Because Reynolds and Rockefeller University (as well as the Rockefeller family) had a long-standing relationship and it was an opportunity to provide input into a multi-million dollar program in basic medical and human health research. Seitz assembled a team of eminent health scientists to provide insight and advice. What did the research contribute? A Nobel Prize, for one, while others included studies of the effect of renin on blood pressure, factors affecting cell development, and contributors to arterial sclerosis.
The very documents Oreskes and Conway cite to build the tobacco strawman reveal that Seitz and his colleagues did nothing more than direct an advanced research program. The underlying citations state the Seitz-led research program was independent of Reynolds and conducted by scientists and scientific institutions of the highest regard. Other than asserting guilt by association, Oreskes and Conway present no evidence that Seitz and his many colleagues were participants in some grand conspiracy. That conspiracy exists only in their minds.
Next Oreskes and Conway claim Seitz and the George C. Marshall Institute wrongly defended the creation of a ballistic missile defense. Yes, Seitz and his colleagues, Dr. Robert Jastrow and Dr. William Nierenberg, believed it was morally repugnant to allow citizens to stand defenseless before the prospect of nuclear annihilation as an intentional U.S. government policy. Construction of a defense was technically possible and would enhance the security of the United States, they believed. Others didn’t and the debates across the foreign policy and scientific establishments were as charged and vociferous as any seen before or since. The facts are: the Soviet Union fell, President Reagan’s advocacy of missile defense was part of the equation contributing to their fall, the emerging missile defense offers the prospect of security against rogue states and terrorists for whom traditional deterrence likely fails, and a world where nuclear weapons were rendered obsolete (Dr. Jastrow’s 1983 book outlines steps toward this end) remains a goal of presidents of both political parties.
Next comes the charge that Seitz et al engaged in personal attacks on prominent climate scientists in hopes of fostering doubt about whether humans were causing global warming. If Oreskes or Conway had bothered to speak with anyone who actually knew or worked with these men, they would have quickly learned that they were men of principle, motivated by concerns about the erosion of scientific literacy and dangers of manipulation of science for political ends arising from that erosion. What caused them to look at climate change science? Curiosity about the scientific basis of claims of apocalyptic global warming and worry about the implications that political leaders would draw from potentially inflated claims. Each had decorated scientific careers and each had been leaders of world-class scientific institutions and participants on government-sponsored scientific panels. Jastrow was a professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth and founder of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Nierenberg was the head of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Each had considerable experience working at the nexus of science and public policy and understood the role that scientific information played in shaping policy and political outcomes.
Oreskes and Conway claim an opposition to government regulation motivated the Institute’s founders’ positions on climate change. Speculating about what Drs. Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg felt about global warming is unnecessary as they clearly described their concerns, “If the changes in our atmosphere are likely to cause consequences, we must understand the problems and promote sensible policies to remedy them. What would be unwise is to lapse into apocalyptic thinking or ostrichlike denial. We believe ourselves far more sophisticated, more enlightened, than preceding generations. Until we can calmly and objectively approach our environmental challenges without promoting public hysteria and exciting short-sighted, self-interested reaction, we cannot claim that we are.” (Scientific Perspectives on the Greenhouse Problem, Jameson Books, 1990: 92-93).
In fact, their work is remarkably prescient. Writing 20 years ago, Seitz, Jastrow and Nierenberg identified the critical variables affecting estimates of temperature and man’s impact of climate that remain the central focus of the scientific debate today. They were: adjustments for uncertainty in the temperature observations (the quality of the surface temperature record has been shown to be in question); the effect of the ocean thermal lag (the role of the oceans and the movement of heat and carbon dioxide in the oceans remains an area of active study); adjustments for natural variability (our understanding of the natural patterns of Earth’s climate is still under development); and procedures for estimating 21st century warming (a process based entirely on computer models and forecasts which have known limitations).
For its part, the Marshall Institute is not a “merchant of doubt.” Our long-held position is simple - take action on climate change commensurate with the state of knowledge and have that action be flexible so it can adjust as our understanding of man’s impact on the climate changes. Do we oppose cap-and-trade or Kyoto Protocol like policies? Yes. They are expensive and will yield little environmental return. Do we propose actions to take? Yes. Did Oreskes and Conway bother to inquire about them? No.
Oreskes and Conway’s work is the latest in a long line of one-sided, fear mongering pseudo-exposes whose purpose is to incite and intimidate. Readers are left with a clear message --Doubt and dissent are dangerous and scientists that question the conventional view of climate change are corrupt charlatans in the pocket of industry. Doubt and dissent are cornerstones of the advancement of knowledge and the scientific process. Read more here.
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” Galileo Galilei
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.