Pope Catholic; Obama energy official profits from AGW | James Delingpole

April 28, 2010

Hey guess what – who’da thunk it? – one of President Obama’s energy advisers is on course to make millions from shares in green companies which may benefit from green policies that she has helped formulate.

Chris Horner has the scoop at Pajamas Media:

Surprising documents made available to this author reveal that Assistant Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi has a huge financial stake in companies likely to profit from the Obama administration’s “green” policies.

Zoi, who left her position as CEO of the Alliance for Climate Protection — founded by Al Gore — to serve as assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, now manages billions in “green jobs” funding. But the disclosure documents show that Zoi not only is in a position to affect the fortunes of her previous employer, ex-Vice President Al Gore, but that she herself has large holdings in two firms that could directly profit from policies proposed by the Department of Energy.

Among Zoi’s holdings are shares in Serious Materials, Inc., the previously sleepy, now bustling, friend of the Obama White House whose public policy operation is headed by her husband. Between them, Zoi and her husband hold 120,000 shares in Serious Materials, as well as stock options. Reporter John Stossel has already explored what he sees as the “crony capitalism” implied by Zoi being so able to influence the fortunes of a company to which she is so closely associated.

In addition, the disclosure forms reflect that Zoi holds between $250,000 and $500,000 in “founders shares” in Landis+Gyr, a Swiss “smart meter” firm. She also still owns between $15,000 and $50,000 in ordinary shares.

“Smart meters,” put simply, are electric meters that return information about customer power usage to the power company immediately and allow a power company to control the amount of power a customer can consume. These smart meters are a central component of the Obama administration’s plans to reduce electricity consumption as part of the “smart grid.”

Still, I suppose you can’t blame the green profiteers for making hay while they still can. All the signs are there that Project AGW is on the verge of collapsing – from Dr Roy Spencer’s convincing new rebuttal to the increasingly discredited notion that anthropogenic CO2 is the main driver of Climate Change to the news from Australia that Kevin Rudd’s government has shelved its Emissions Trading Scheme. (Hat tip: Peter T of Oz)

As Andrew Bolt reminds us, only two years ago, Rudd was claiming that it was the world’s most important issue:

The biggest challenge the world faces in the decades ahead is climate change. It is the great moral and economic challenge of our time.

Since then though, this decent, principled, forthright leader has considered the matter long and hard and come to an important new conclusion. There are no votes in it.

Climategate claims its first big political scalp

Australian conservatives have shown the way . . .

. . . by dumping the party leader who was in favour of massive carbon taxes and replacing him with one who stated last month that AGW is “crap.”

This makes Malcolm Turnbull, the suddenly-ex-leader of Australia’s Liberal party, the first major political victim of the Climategate furore. And his replacement Tony Abbott, the first politician to reap the benefits of the world’s growing scepticism towards ManBearPig. Of the three candidates, he was the only one committed to delaying the Australian government’s proposed Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

The trouble began last week when Australia’s opposition Liberal party began haemorrhaging frontbenchers, all of them preferring to lose their jobs than be railroaded by their leader into voting with the Government on Kevin Rudd’s new carbon tax.

Aussie blog hero Andrew Bolt has the blow-by-blow details. Particularly stirring is his description of how the Liberals’ newly elected leader Abbott – the Mad Monk as the libtard MSM is already calling him – takes the floor and tells like it is about the ETS (Australia’s equivalent to Cap And Trade).

Already the lines are potent – real fighting words from the Liberals at last: Rudd’s great green tax “is really an energy taxation scheme.” In fact, it is “a $120 billion tax on the Australian public, and that is just for starters.” Power prices will go up, for instance. “We just can’t wave that through the Parliament.”

To the public, Rudd’s scheme is “a great big tax to create a great big slush fund… run by a giant bureaucracy”. Already Rudd has overseen “a waste of money … worse than Whitlam”.

Too bloody right mate! (As they say in Australia where “bloody” isn’t a swear word s0 I’m allowed to use it as much as I like.)

Further useful background comes from Watts Up With That, with quotes from Abbott’s memoir Battlelines. Here is what he has to say about carbon taxes:

“Without binding universal arrangements, any effort by Australia (on emissions trading) could turn out to be a futile gesture, damaging local industry but making no appreciable dent in global emissions…. Another big problem with any Australian emissions reduction scheme is that it would not make a material difference to atmospheric carbon concentrations unless the big international polluters had similar schemes. Australia accounts for about 1 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. At recent rates of growth, China’s increase in emissions in about a year could match Australia’s entire carbon dioxide output. Without binding universal arrangements, any effort by Australia could turn out to be a futile gesture, damaging local industry but making no appreciable dent in global emissions.”

And here he is on climate alarmists:

“It’s hard to take climate alarmists all that seriously, though, when they’re as ferociously against the one proven technology that could reduce electricity emissions to zero, nuclear power, as they are in favour of urgent reduction in emissions. For many, reducing emissions is a means to achieving a political objective they could not otherwise gain.”

Sounds a very sensible fellow. We can only hope that other leaders of conservative opposition parties – not naming any names – are listening to him closely.

Update: Australians have been counting the bitter cost of their failure to implement Kyoto, according to Terry McCrann in Australia’s Herald Sun. Here he ruminates on the miseries they have suffered by not being more eco-friendly:

A reader with a droll sense of humour has come up with an inspired way to achieve the same environmental effect as Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull’s Emissions Trading Scheme, but without the cost.

Simple, a National Apology on Climate Change. Same effect on global emissions as an ETS, but with zero cost.

More humour came less intentionally from an online commentator who set out to detail “What ignoring Kyoto has cost us”.

Two things it appears. Living in smaller houses.

Damn, if only we’d adopted Kyoto we could have been living in British-style shoe-boxes. Sorry, ‘cosy’ cat-friendly accommodations. Cat-friendly? Well, you can’t swing …

Secondly, not being serious about Kyoto has condemned us to cheap electricity prices. At least 50 per cent below the rest of the world.

If we’d gone for wind farms, nuclear, solar, etc, we could have had more expensive power over the past dozen or more years.

5 Responses to “Climategate claims its first big political scalp”

Jeremy Crow says:December 2, 2009 at 8:46 amIt still screws me up that conservatives in Australia are called the “Liberal” party, and that I have to go to a European for good political commentary. Of course being a conservative American I happen to love everything that Australia has done for us over the years, and am happy that they are leading the way in the war against Green Communism!JC
Hilton Gray says:December 2, 2009 at 11:23 amAustralian parliment just voted 41 – 33 to kill their cap and trade (ETS) bill!!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091202/ap_on_re_as/climate_australia
Jack says:December 2, 2009 at 5:35 pmJames,I just recently started following your work and have already become a big fan. I appreciate your used of pop culture, wit and irreverence for the entire farce we know as AGW. Keep up the fantastic work.
Jack says:December 2, 2009 at 5:38 pmPS I live in a suburb a few miles north of Dallas, TX and we had a fantastic dusting of Global Warming Snow today, Dec. 2, 2009. Greatness!
Duc de Blangis says:December 3, 2009 at 6:28 amWhile I’m heartened to see Turnbull deposed by an opponent of the absurd AGW theory, I hope that Abbott’s less libertarian attitudes are kept in check.

Climategate: Five Aussie MPs Lead the Way by Resigning in Disgust over Carbon Tax

Australia is leading the revolt against Al Gore’s great big AGW conspiracy

-–just as the Aussie geologist and AGW sceptic Professor Ian Plimer predicted it would.

ABC news reports that five frontbenchers from Australia’s opposition Liberal party have resigned their portfolios rather than follow their leader Malcolm Turnbull in voting with Kevin Rudd’s Government on a new Emissions Trading Scheme.

The Liberal Party is in turmoil with the resignations of five frontbenchers from their portfolios this afternoon in protest against the emissions trading scheme.

Tony Abbott, Sophie Mirabella, Tony Smith and Senators Nick Minchin and Eric Abetz have all quit their portfolios because they cannot vote for the legislation.

Senate whip Stephen Parry has also relinquished his position.

The ETS is Australia’s version of America’s proposed Cap and Trade and the EU’s various carbon reduction schemes: a way of taxing business on its CO2 output. As Professor Plimer pointed out when I interviewed him in the summer, this threatens to cause enormous economic damage in Australia’s industrial and mining heartlands, not least because both are massively dependent on Australia’s vast reserves of coal. It is correspondingly extremely unpopular with Aussie’s outside the pinko, libtard metropolitan fleshpots.

Though the ETS squeaked narrowly through Australia’s House of Representatives, its Senate is proving more robust – thanks not least to the widespread disgust by the many Senators who have read Professor Plimer’s book Heaven And Earth at the dishonesty and corruption of the AGW industry. If the Senate keeps rejecting the scheme, then the Australian government will be forced to dissolve.

For the rapidly increasing number of us who believe that AGW is little more than a scheme by bullying eco-fascists to deprive us of our liberty, by big government to spread its controlling tentacles into every aspect our lives, and scheming industrialists such as Al Gore to enrich themselves through carbon trading, this principled act by Australia’s Carbon Five is fantastic news.

Where they lead, the rest of the world’s politicians will eventually be forced to follow: their appalled electorates will make sure of it.

5 Responses to “Climategate: five Aussie MPs lead the way by resigning in disgust over carbon tax”

Climategate: five Aussie MPs lead the way by resigning in disgust … | Australia Today says:November 27, 2009 at 11:13 am[…] Read more from the original source: Climategate: five Aussie MPs lead the way by resigning in disgust … […]
Nick Mabbs says:November 27, 2009 at 4:48 pmWill you be joining Nigel Lawson, Prof Ian Pilmer, Prof Richard Lindzen (and me) etc
on the GWPF ? You seem to be in-tune with their call for a ‘re-count’ on the true facts of AGW
rather than on the massaged data and guesswork we have had so far.
The entire electorate of the UK must ask their politicians what their
revised viewpoint is on Global Warming post Climategate/KiwiClimategate
They may not have an answer ready, because no one will have told them what to say yet,
but if enough of their electorate e-mail them they may just get the point that we have been lied
to far too often on this subject and it’s time one or more of the spineless spongers stood up
and earned our money; and maybe some respect too !The Science is currently very unsettling. The fact that Al Gore nearly became US President
is even more unsettling.

Al Gore: “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it [anthropogenic global warming] is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are.”
Chris Vere says:November 27, 2009 at 7:01 pmReminds me of the ‘fart tax’ that was propsed in New Zealand a couple of years ago. A plan by the then Labour government to excessively tax meat and dairy producers for the byproduct of their produce; methane. In a very Australian-like demonstration an MP drove a tractor up the steps of parliament. The laughable tax was blown out of the window. I must say though, the Aussies could have protested with a little more gusto.
Aqua Fyre says:November 28, 2009 at 6:48 amTo think, that the Australian Labor Party would so willingly abandon its principles of “a fair go for working families” in order to support an international clique of Fraudulent scientists and IPCC hucksters is beyond the pale.They are gleeful over the current Liberal Party (conservatives) tearing itself apart over the ETS scheme; but what they don’t realize, is that it will be the Labor party that will be shaken to its very foundations in the next election if it stays its course on Carbon Trade.
Rudd & his Ecofascist elite, are seemingly oblivious to the very deep and palpable hatred that is growing in the hearts & minds of Australians from every walk of life. Outside of the cozy cocoon called Canberra (the home of Australian Federal government) there is a growing sea~change afoot and if the current Labor Party Prime Minister Kevin Rudd thinks that the Australian people will take this Carbon Trade ETS lying down, then he has another thing coming to him. They now know that every family will be forced to pay over $1500 to the United Nations. They now know, that electricity, water, gas, & petrol prices will jump anywhere between 10% to 20% per year, alongside this new Carbon Tax grab.

Already, a poll set up on Yahoo shows that if there were an election today, the Labor Party along with their Carbon Tax scheme, would be swept out of office.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/polls/popup/-/poll_id/50265

As of today, the Liberals would hold a combined 54% of the vote (with other liberals & nationals) : while the Labor party would barely hold onto 36% (including Greens).

In anyone’s language, that would be a landslide.

Little wonder Prime Minister Rudd has backed down on bringing on an election over this issue.

He is terrified of the fallout.
Con Michael says:January 16, 2010 at 1:26 amThe rigors of scientific discipline demand,inter alia,that a hypothesis or theory imply the kind of evidence that would prove it wrong.If something happens that should not have,and vice versa,the theory is discarded.In recent decades,global cooling occurred during and after a period of increasing CO2 emissions.Ergo the AGW theory has been discredited.End of story;game over;the AGW alarmists lose.Interestingly enough,the present widespread freezing temperatures have been deemed to be evidence of global warming.The MSM have not responded to this nonsense.There are encouraging signs that the public has had enough of the lies,cheating,filibuster and obfuscation.

Tag: ETS