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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (95036)	11/10/2010 12:17:13 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224756

The Crash Of The Climate Exchange Posted 06:51 PM ET Climate Fraud: As the case for global warming and cap-and-trade has collapsed, so too has the market that was to exploit this manufactured crisis for fun and profit. The climate-change bubble has burst. Lost in the hubbub leading up to the Republican and Tea Party tsunami on Nov. 2 was the collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). But its implications for the future of the American economy and the business climate are staggering: It is an acknowledgment that both the case for climate trade and cap-and-tax legislation has also collapsed. On Oct. 21 the exchange announced it was ending carbon trading, which, as Pajamas Media's Steve Milloy points out, was "the only purpose for which it was founded." Launched as a "voluntary" method of trading "carbon credits," CCX rested on the hope that cap-and-tax legislation would make such trading mandatory — and profitable. CCX billed 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 it issued CCX start-up grants. Presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett also once sat on the Joyce board. As president, cap-and-trade is one of Obama's highest priorities. The exchange's founder, Richard Sandor, says he knew Obama as far back as when the Joyce Foundation awarded money to the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where Sandor was research professor. He estimated that climate trading could be "a $10 trillion market," which it very well might have been if cap-and-trade legislation like Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer made into law. But now, in the wake of Climate-gate and other scandals, as well as recent election results, that's an unlikely event. For his efforts, Sandor was named as one of Time magazine's "Heroes of the Planet" in 2002 and one of its "Heroes of the Environment" in 2007. Sanders eventually sold his 16.5% stake in CCX for $98.5 million, making him a hero of take-the-money-and-run. The biggest losers are CCX's two biggest investors, Al Gore's Generation Investment Management and Goldman Sachs, that champion of sound money management that serves as the farm team for administration staffing. Other CCX founders include former Goldman Sachs partner David Blood, as well as Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris, also of Goldman Sachs. In 2006, CCX received a big boost when another investor purchased a 10% stake on the prospect of making a great deal of money for itself. That investor was Goldman Sachs, accused of selling financial instruments it knew were doomed to fail. A mechanism for extending carbon trading on the exchange to residences was purchased and patented by none other than Franklin Raines, who was CEO of Fannie Mae at the time. Raines profited to the tune of some $90 million by buying and bundling bad mortgages that led to the collapse of the American economy. His interest in climate trading is curious until one realizes cap-and-trade would make housing, like energy, more costly. Cap-and-trade and carbon regulation extended down to the homeowner level would have raised the cost of homes and homeownership and made him richer that way and through his patent. CCX's collapse was inevitable as both the enthusiasm for cap-and-trade — and the world itself — cooled. After the e-mail exchanges from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia reveled the extent to which global climate data were being manipulated to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, hopes for profiting off the scam with another scam evaporated. Nor did the global recession create a hospitable environment for pushing another job-killing Kyoto-style agreement. People were lining up for jobs, not electric cars, and bills such as the House-passed Waxman-Markey suddenly were going nowhere. Carbon trading at CCX all but dried up as prices plunged from over $7 a ton in 2008 to just 10 cents as of August. Like Dracula, cap-and-tax may yet rise from the grave. Anything can happen in the lame-duck session, and the EPA still conspires to regulate carbon and other emissions through the back door. Still, CCX's carbon-trading demise is reassuring evidence that eventually all houses of cards will collapse.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (95036)	11/10/2010 12:17:46 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224756

Desperate Days For Global Warm-ongers Posted 07:02 PM ET Environment: The United Nations wants $100 billion a year in taxes to deal with climate change. Two groups of researchers plan to go on the offensive against global warming "denialists." When will the madness end? The U.N.'s craving for money it hasn't earned is insatiable. So it's no surprise that one of its panels has proposed to raise $100 billion a year from taxes on carbon dioxide emissions and international transportation, and possibly on financial transactions as well, to mitigate the effects of climate change. This isn't the first time, of course, that the U.N. has proposed a global warming tax that would chill the world economy more than the Earth's temperatures. Taking $100 billion out of private hands and making it available to unelected bureaucrats who would channel money to unproductive, but politically favored, uses can't help but be a drag on growth. Remember the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill? Under different versions of that legislation, real aggregate GDP losses by 2035 ranged from $7.4 trillion to $9.4 trillion and job losses from 844,000 to 2.48 million a year. Fighting global warming is not only useless, it's expensive. At roughly the same time the U.N. announced this plan to dig deeper into our pockets, a group of researchers led by John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota said it was mobilizing a "climate rapid-response team" that would also mount a media campaign to defend its position. The researchers, the Tribune News Service reports, are even willing to appear before "potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows." According to Scott Mandia, a professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York, this team will "not only communicate science," but also "aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists." "We are taking the fight to them because we are tired of taking the hits," Mandia told the Tribune news service. "The notion that truth will prevail is not working. The truth has been out there for the past two decades, and nothing has changed." Apparently the alarmists are alarmed yet again, this time at the election to Congress of dozens of Republicans who are skeptical that human activity is causing Earth to warm. It seems they're afraid that with the GOP in control of the House, political funding for their climate change research will dry up. Having virtually invested their lives in the needless spread of fear, they must feel that they've been thrown into a struggle for relevance. Organizing a rapid-response team looks like a desperation move. Believers' beloved CO2 cap-and-trade legislation, which for many on the political left is just the tip of their plans to cut carbon emissions because they don't think it goes far enough, is dying from wounds suffered in last week's midterm elections. What do they have left outside of a public relations battle? With no evidence in the environment that man-made global warming is occurring, there is an urgent need among the global warming believers to keep reminding the public about their hunch. And they know that the mainstream press is the right place for them to conduct their campaign. The media are as invested in the tale as the scientists who have politicized it. It's possible that just as the president believes that poor communication on his part, not his extreme agenda, is the reason voters turned out his party last week, the global warming believers think their "messaging" is the problem — not the message itself. But that notion has as many holes in it as the global warming theory. The media have eagerly bought into, zealously spread and protectively nurtured the man-made global warming story. It fits their narrative: Corporations are malevolent, and conspicuous consumption by anyone outside their elitist circle is immoral. The media have not been objective by any measure and have, in fact, campaigned as hard as any group for cap-and-trade and other schemes to cut carbon emissions and add to the taxpayer and consumer burdens. There's been no shortage of rapid responses to any criticism of global warming claims. While the thinking on the issue keeps getting clearer, global warming hysteria is still with us. But it can't last much longer. That's why believers are trying to squeeze as much from it as possible before it's gone.