Kerry’s Powerless America Act
Editorial, Investors Business Daily, 05/12/2010 [here]
Call it cap-and-trade or bait-and-switch, but John Kerry and Joe Lieberman continue to tilt at windmills with a bill to restrain energy growth in the name of saving the planet.
The bill introduced Wednesday and sponsored by the two senators is called the American Power Act, an Orwellian phrase if ever there was one. Like President Obama’s offshore drilling program, for every “incentive” there is a restriction. It’s as if Hamlet were to be appointed Secretary of Energy.
The legislation has little to do with developing America’s vast domestic energy supply. It’s cap-and-trade meets pork-barrel spending. It’s about regulations, restrictions and research. It does not deal with exploiting America’s vast energy reserves but with finding ways to mitigate their alleged harmful effect.
To that end, the bill creates some 60 new agencies and projects to eat up our tax dollars and buy support … [more]
Questions posed for Kerry, Lieberman on new climate-energy bill
by Paul Driessen, CFACT, May 12, 2010 [here]
The new Kerry-Lieberman climate bill mandates a 17% reduction in US carbon dioxide emissions by 2020. It first targets power plants and refineries that provide reliable, affordable electricity and fuel for American homes, schools, hospitals, offices and factories – and then, in six years, further hobbles the manufacturing sector itself.
The House-passed climate bill goes even further. It requires an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. Once population growth and transportation, communication and electrification technologies are taken into account, this translates into emission levels last seen around 1870!
House Speaker Pelosi says “every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory,” to ensure that America achieves these emission mandates. This means replacing what is left of our free-market economy with an intrusive Green Nanny State, compelling us to switch to unreliable wind and solar power, and imposing skyrocketing energy costs on every company and citizen.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is implementing its own draconian energy restrictions, in case Congress does not enact punitive legislation.
It’s time to ask these politicians some fundamental questions. … [more]
Potential cost of Kerry-Lieberman Cap & Tax: $69 - $145 Billion per Year
The Hockey Schtick, Wednesday, May 12, 2010 [here]
The Kerry-Lieberman Cap & Tax bill establishes a price collar for CO2 emissions with a floor of $12 per metric ton (increasing annually by 3% + inflation) and ceiling of $25 (increasing annually by 5% + inflation). According to the EPA, US emissions of CO2 in 2009 were 5787 million metric tons. Thus, if the legislation is applied to all US emissions, the cost would be $69 Billion (floor) to $145 Billion (ceiling) annually, increasing ~6 to 8+% each year forever.
The American Power Act: A Climate Dud
by Chip Knappenberger, MasterResource, May 12, 2010 [here]
“The global temperature “savings” of the Kerry-Lieberman bill is astoundingly small—0.043°C (0.077°F) by 2050 and 0.111°C (0.200°F) by 2100. In other words, by century’s end, reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% will only result in global temperatures being one-fifth of one degree Fahrenheit less than they would otherwise be. That is a scientifically meaningless reduction.”
Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman have just unveiled their latest/greatest attempt to reign in U. S. greenhouse gas emissions. Their one time collaborator Lindsey Graham indicated that he did not consider the bill a climate bill because “[t]here is no bipartisan support for a cap-and-trade bill based on global warming.” But make no mistake. This is a climate bill at heart, and thus the Kerry-Lieberman bill sections labeled “Title II. Global Warming Pollution Reduction.”
So apparently someone thinks the bill will have an impact on global warming. But those someones are wrong. The bill will have no meaningful impact of the future course of global warming. … [more]
House Minority Leader looks to AG for answers on LNG controversy
BY SARAH ROSS, Oregon Politico, May 6, 2010 [here]
SALEM- House Minority Leader Bruce Hanna, R-Roseburg, sent a letter Thursday to Attorney General John Kroger asking him to release documents related to the AG’s former special counsel, Brent Foster.
Foster is currently under investigation by the Marion County District Attorney after misrepresenting himself in a criminal environmental case.
NorthCoastOregon.com had requested to see 69 e-mail documents having to do with Foster’s time in the AG’s office but was declined. Now Rep. Hanna is requesting that the same documents be released.
“Mr. Foster’s involvement in the LNG issue, as well as recent revelations regarding Hood River Juice, leads me to question your commitment to promoting a positive business climate and defending the rights of all Oregonians,” wrote Rep. Hanna.
Rep. Hanna expressed how troubled he was at the office’s “unwillingness to disclose documents relating to interactions between your office, various state agencies and various special interest groups.”
The House Minority Leader was also concerned that the Attorney General had granted special waivers to Foster during his work with special interest groups to “undermine the development of energy projects.”
Armed Narco-Terrorists Caught on Tape Where Arizona Deputy Shot on Friday (VIDEO)
by Connie Hair, Human Events, 05/03/2010 [here]
… Part of a series of hidden-camera video around this location obtained over the past few months by a group of Arizona private citizens; cameras are covertly planted along the border frontier in known high-traffic areas where they are triggered by activity within range of the camera’s motion sensors.
Arizona Pinal County Sheriff’s Deputy Louie Puroll was on patrol Friday afternoon when he was ambushed by five drug smugglers. He took fire from an AK-47 and was shot in the side above the abdomen.
The deputy returned fire and was able to call for help from his cell phone, but it took over an hour for authorities to find him in the remote location using GPS coordinates from his cell phone. He has since been treated and released from an area hospital.
The Arizona Daily Star reports 17 suspected illegal aliens were detained in a sweep of the area involving hundreds of local, state and federal law enforcement officers responding to the deputy’s shooting.
“The horrendous violence we see by narco-terrorists is uncontrolled, and our own federal government refuses to fulfill its responsibility to secure our border,” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said in a statement in response to the deputy’s shooting. … [more]
Update from Cochise County, Arizona
By T.J. Woodard, American Thinker, May 04, 2010 [here]
I had hardly received word from the editor that my first report from southeast Arizona would be published before more excitement occurred here — this time even closer to home.
Saturday morning, the headlines in all the area papers covered the shooting of a Pinal County Deputy by drug smugglers. The reports indicated that the officer was ambushed by drug smugglers using AK-47 rifles. How do we know these things? This time, the ambush failed and the officer survived.
But there is a lot of news in this report that destroys the liberal reports of those grandmothers crossing the border so they can make beds in cheap hotels. First, the Sheriff called it an ambush. This destroys the idea that drug violence has not crossed the border. Next, the drug runners used AK-47s. Last time I checked (and my military training confirmed this), the AK-47 was made in Russia by Kalashnikov. But what happened to all those reports of American guns going south to the drug cartels? Perhaps that is another bit of mass media misinformation. … [more]
Latest violence spasm claims 25 lives near Mexico-US border
AFP, Google News, May 2, 2010 [here]
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Mexico’s bloody drug wars saw a new spasm of killings late Saturday into Sunday, with 25 people fatally shot in the northern state of Chihuahua bordering the United States.
Seven of the deaths occurred in violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s murder capital, bringing to 62 the number of people killed in the city over the past week.
The 18 other slayings overnight included four people fatally shot by automatic weapons fire in a bar in the town of Camargo, near the state capital Chihuahua City, and two women whose bodies were found stuffed in the trunk of an abandoned car in the same town, prosecutors said.
So far this year, more than 850 people have been killed in Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million, while more than 2,660 were killed there in 2009, according to official figures.
To the east in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey early Sunday, three men and two women were trampled to death when some 10,000 people at an outdoor concert stampeded after three shots were fired, presumably in the air, by somebody at the fairground, local officials said.
Another 30 people were treated for injuries from the jostling, they added.
Moments before the gunshots, the crowd appears to have been primed for panic when shouts “hit the ground” and “gunfight” were heard, witnesses told the Mexican newspaper Reforma.
Monterrey, in Nuevo Laredo state that also borders the United States, has seen a spike in gang violence pitting the Guf of Mexico and Los Zetas drug cartels, officials said.
Authorities blame the northern Mexico violence on a battle for control of key drug trafficking routes into the United States.
More than 22,700 people have died across the country in suspected drug violence since the end of 2006, despite a government-ordered nationwide crackdown involving the deployment of troops and police.
The $10 Trillion Climate Fraud
Investors Business Daily, 04/28/2010 [here]
Cap-And-Trade: While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House.
Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore’s appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation’s philanthropic leaders.
“Time’s running out (on climate change),” Gore told them. “We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together.”
Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the climate scam alive as evidence of outright climate fraud grows, just as they were critical in the beginning when the Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, essentially, air. More specifically perhaps, hot air.
The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) advertises itself as “North America’s only cap-and-trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.” Barack Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002 when the CCX startup grants were issued. As president, pushing cap-and-trade is one of his highest priorities. Now isn’t that special?
Few Americans have heard of either entity. The Joyce Foundation was originally the financial nest egg of a widow whose family had made millions in the now out-of-favor lumber industry.
After her death, the foundation was run by philanthropists who increasingly dedicated their giving to liberal causes, including gun control, environmentalism and school changes.
Currently, CCX members agree to a voluntary but legally binding agreement to regulate greenhouse gases.
The CCX provides the mechanism in trading the very pollution permits and carbon offsets the administration’s cap-and-trade proposals would impose by government mandate.
Thanks to Fox News’ Glenn Beck, we have learned a lot about CCX, not the least of which is that its founder, Richard Sandor, says he knew Obama well back in the day when the Joyce Foundation awarded money to the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, where Sandor was a research professor.
Sandor estimates that climate trading could be “a $10 trillion dollar market.” It could very well be, if cap-and-trade measures like Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer are signed into law, making energy prices skyrocket, and as companies buy and sell permits to emit those six “greenhouse” gases. … [more]
ICE buying Climate Exchange for over $600 million
By Steve Goldstein, WSJ MarketWatch, April 30, 2010 [here]
LONDON (MarketWatch) — The IntercontinentalExchange on Friday made a bet on the future of emissions trading after reaching a deal to pay around $600 million in cash for the London-based Climate Exchange.
The Atlanta-based ICE had already cleared trades for Climate Exchange, which operates the European Climate Exchange, the Chicago Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange.
Terms call for ICE to pay 7.50 pounds a share, valuing Climate Exchange at 395 million pounds ($604 million), a premium of 57% to Thursday’s closing price and a 44% premium on the average price over the last three months.
The deal will “slightly” hurt ICE’s earnings for the remainder of the year before increasing them in 2011.
Climate Exchange shares surged 55.9% to 7.45 pounds on the London Stock Exchange. …
The Climate Exchange is the market leader in the world’s largest cap-and-trade market, the European Union, and also has a “significant” share of the main contracts in the U.S.
The ICE however is paying up for the Climate Exchange’s potential — the deal is valued at 58 times Climate Exchange’s adjusted pretax profit for 2009.
Emissions trading legislation has stalled in the U.S. Senate, and the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen produced few tangible results.
Chris Allen, an analyst at Ticonderoga Securities, called the deal a “reasonable long-term bet.”
“Given that the future of emissions trading is dependent on new laws to reduce emissions trading, which look a few years away, this is clearly a long-term bet for ICE. Although it is hard to define the potential size of the emissions market longer-term, we believe that it clearly represents a long-term growth opportunity and is a market that should provide long-term synergies with ICE’s core energy platform,” he said in a note to clients.
Morgan Stanley advised ICE, while J.P. Morgan Cazenove and Kinmont advised Climate Exchange.
Obama’s Climate Change Initiative (Cap and Trade) = Friends In High Places?
Key Obama Climate Change Exchange Being Swayed by Top U.N. Officials
Five members of the Chicago Climate Exchange advisory board are present or former top-ranking U.N. officials — including one who received $1 million from a convicted South Korean lobbyist in the Oil for Food scandal.
By Edward Barnes, RomanticPoet.com, April 20, 2009 [here]
A greenhouse gases trading system funded with the support of then-Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama, which is likely to play a major role in his $650 million cap-and-trade initiative, lists five present or former top-ranking U.N. officials on its advisory board who’ve had enormous influence over climate change matters — including one who received $1 million from a convicted South Korean lobbyist.
The most controversial figure of the five, Maurice Strong, was one of former Secretary General Kofi Annan’s key aides at the U.N. for years until the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal forced him to leave. Since then Strong has lived mostly in China. Calls to the exchange for comment about Strong’s role, and that of other U.N. figures, were not returned.
The Climate Exchange, which began operations in 2003, provides trading in carbon emissions and their offsets, along with those of other greenhouse gases, is among a group of companies and institutions that voluntarily participate in the program. It bills itself as the only voluntary, legally binding exchange of its kind in North America. Among its member companies are Ford, DuPont and United Technologies as well as a number of electric utilities; other participants include the City of Chicago and Miami-Dade County.
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Obama’s Goldman game
Perhaps the political collusion goes deeper
By Terrence Scanlon, Washington Times, April 27, 2010 [here]
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, the left’s favorite bank, are more than a little suspect - but not for the reasons you might expect. …
Evidence has surfaced that as Goldman’s attorneys tried to cut a deal with the SEC over the potential charges, Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein visited the Obama White House at least four times.
The decision whether to sue the bank was so controversial within the SEC that members split 3 to 2 on filing the lawsuit. Chairman Mary Schapiro, an Obama appointee, and the two Democrats on the commission voted yes, while the two Republicans voted no.
Add to this that Goldman just hired former Obama White House counsel Gregory B. Craig, the lawyer who helped President Clinton send 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez back to communist Cuba a decade ago.
Then factor in that Goldman is a creature of the political left and a natural ally of the Democratic Party. It is a big-government lovers’ bank that despises the unbridled competition of laissez-faire capitalism. Akin to Fannie Mae in that it generates private profits but forces taxpayers to cover its losses, Goldman loves bailouts and feeding at the public trough.
Former Goldman employees - including Henry Paulson, President George W. Bush’s liberal, tree-hugging Treasury secretary - designed the $700-billion-plus “mother of all bailouts” in 2008 and then promptly steered $10 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the bank. Goldman veteran Neel Kashkari oversaw the doling out of bailout funds.
Goldman funds the left almost exclusively, so, as the left likes to say, follow the money.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Goldman’s employees gave the president $994,795 during the last election cycle, making the employees of the bank the Obama campaign’s largest private-sector financial backer. The nearly $1 million sum is “more than the combined Goldman haul of every Republican running for president, Senate and the House,” according to one report.
In the current election cycle, Goldman’s political action committee and employees have lavished $693,675 on federal candidates and parties, with roughly 70 percent of the total sum going to Democrats.
Goldman has an unfortunate history of caving in to left-wing pressure groups, such as Jesse Jackson’s Citizenship Education Fund and the extremist Rainforest Action Network. Its corporate foundation’s donations go exclusively to the left, according to a study that appeared in the August 2006 issue of the Capital Research Center’s newsletter, Foundation Watch.
In 2004, the Goldman Sachs Foundation shelled out $35.5 million to liberal nonprofit groups, mostly to environmental organizations such as the Nature Conservancy and the Wildlife Conservation Society. There were no recorded contributions to conservative or free-market public-policy organizations. None.
Note: Henry Paulson is not only a former Goldman Sachs executive, he is a former President of The Nature Conservancy. The current President and CEO of TNC is Mark Tercek formerly managing director at Goldman Sachs.
TNC owns or controls more than 17 million acres worldwide. Total assets are over $5.6 billion. Revenues in 2009 were over $600 million, of which $127 million came from government grants. An additional $115 million in revenues came from land and conservation easement contributions. An additional $186 million came from sales of land to the government [here].
TNC buys low and sells high. TNC acquires real estate for free by donation or at below market prices and resells to the government at exorbitant prices, collecting finder’s fees and government “charitable” donations besides. Often TNC purchases options on land parcels for a pittance and collects enormous profits while risking only pennies, if you could call it risk — in essence the government uses TNC as a real estate agent, with special benefits.
TNC also sits on the highest councils of Federal land management agencies and is one of the architects of the Fed’s Let It Burn program. Burned out private land can be had for a song and resold for windfall profits to captive government agencies.
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Fannie Mae owns patent on residential ‘cap and trade’ exchange
By Barbara Hollingsworth, Washington Examiner, April 20, 2010 [here]
When he wasn’t busy helping create a $127 billion mess for taxpayers to clean up, former Fannie Mae Chief Executive Officer Franklin Raines, two of his top underlings and select individuals in the “green” movement were inventing a patented system to trade residential carbon credits.
Patent No. 6904336 was approved by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office on Nov. 7, 2006 — the day after Democrats took control of Congress. Former Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., criticized the award at the time, pointing out that it had “nothing to do with Fannie Mae’s charter, nothing to do with making mortgages more affordable.”
It wasn’t about mortgages. It was about greenbacks. The patent, which Fannie Mae confirmed it still owns with Cantor Fitzgerald subsidiary CO2e.com, gives the mortgage giant a lock on the fledgling carbon trading market, thus also giving it a major financial stake in the success of cap-and-trade legislation.
Besides Raines, the other “inventors” are:
* Former Fannie Vice President and Deputy General Counsel G. Scott Lesmes, who provided legal advice on Fannie Mae’s debt and equity offerings;
* Former Fannie Vice President Robert Sahadi, who now runs GreenSpace Investment Financial Services out of his 5,002-square-foot Clarksburg home;
* 2008 Barack Obama fundraiser Kenneth Berlin, an environmental law partner at Skadden Arps;
* Michelle Desiderio, director of the National Green Building Certification program, which trains “green” monitors;
* Former Cantor Fitzgerald employee Elizabeth Arner Cavey, wife of Democratic donor Brian Cavey of the Stanton Park Group, which received $200,000 last year to lobby on climate change legislation; and
* Jane Bartels, widow of former CO2e.com CEO Carlton Bartels. Three weeks before Carlton Bartels was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, he filed for another patent on the software used in 2003 to set up the Chicago Climate Exchange.
The patent, which covers both the “cap” and “trade” parts of Obama’s top domestic energy initiation, gives Fannie Mae proprietary control over an automated trading system that pools and sells credits for hard-to-quantify residential carbon reduction efforts (such as solar panels and high-efficiency appliances) to companies and utilities that don’t meet emission reduction targets. Depending on where the Environmental Protection Agency sets arbitrary CO2 standards, that could be every company in America.
The patent summary describes how carbon “and other pollutants yet to be determined” would be “combined into a single emissions pool” and traded — just as Fannie’s toxic portfolio of subprime mortgages were. … [more]