Goldman Sachs — bigger than fossil fuel in the climate debate

We can’t blame Goldman Sachs. It’s just good business.

Goldman Sachs pours money into lefty causes and politicians of both stripes. The gifts to left-wing flagships like climate change and same-sex marriage buy protection from the anti-bank Occupy crowd. And climate propaganda is doubly useful — Goldman Sachs can invest and profit from government largess. And these are very big biccies – -in 2009 Goldman Sachs announced it would spend $150 billion on green energy by 2020.

The message to non-left causes is that if you want to get multimillion dollar philanthropic funds, mobilize people and march in the street. When Goldman is afraid of what you might do against their bonuses or profits they might get interested in your cause too.

But infamously and so much more importantly, Goldman donates to both sides of politics and their people are appointed to key positions in the Treasury and corridors of power. When Goldman crashes, it gets bailed out — and that has happened four times in the last 20 years. The TARP bailout for Sachs was as much as $10 billion, so a mere $675k in speaking fees for Hillary-nearly-Pres might be viewed as a decent investment at the time […]

EU countries used €600 million climate loophole worth extra “114 million cars”

Taxing a basic molecule of life on Earth was never going to be easy.

Leaked paper exposes EU abuse of climate loophole

EXCLUSIVE/ European Union countries exploited loopholes in United Nations forestry rules to pocket carbon credits worth €600 million and the equivalent of global-warming emissions from 114 million cars.

That’s slightly more cars than exist in Germany, France and Italy combined.

You will not believe, governments overstated their logging targets then claimed credits for the forests they didn’t cut down, and the EU paid them for it.

Just saving the world, one lie at a time.

The document said that leaving the loophole open risked 133 million tonnes of unearned carbon credits falling into governments hands.

133 million tonnes is worth €665 million at today’s carbon price and is equivalent to 127 million cars on the road.

It’s a market based on intentions instead of a product. What could possibly go wrong?

9.4 out of 10 based on 78 ratings

Climate-Dollar bragging is over: funding goes underground to avoid “climate-axe”.

Once upon a time governments bragged about how much they spent on “climate change”. Every Climate Quiz or tin-pot-program to insulate a chicken-run was wrapped under the Climate Action banner so that politicians could claim they were saving the world. Nowadays voters have voted for the guy who called it a hoax, and the funding’s gone underground because he was going to boast about how much climate funding he’d cut.

When I wrote Climate Money in 2009, a lot of the spending was already documented, under the Climate Change Science Program or by the GAO. How times have changed.

To Protect Climate Money, Obama Stashed It Where It’s Hard to Find

President Donald Trump will find the job of reining in spending on climate initiatives made harder by an Obama-era policy of dispersing billions of dollars in programs across dozens of agencies — in part so they couldn’t easily be cut.

Climate change is so important that no one even estimates what the government spends on it:

The last time the Congressional Research Service estimated total federal spending on climate was in 2013. It concluded 18 agencies had climate-related activities, and calculated $77 […]

US donors funding activists to shut down Australian mines, ports and rail, approved by Hillary’s right-hand-man?

The Australian has been busy exposing how the supposedly grassroots anti-coal groups in Australia are being funded by the US and with the full knowledge and approval of John Podesta who used to be a special counselor to Barak Obama and is now Hillary’s campaign chairman. Thanks to Wikileaks for the info.

Restrictions needed on overseas charities funding legal battles

The US money was designed to bankroll a strategy developed five years ago by green activists to “stop Australia’s coal export boom”.

The focus of these efforts was to “run legal challenges that delay, limit or stop all of the major infrastructure projects (mines, rail and ports)”.

A particular priority was to stop the Adani coalmine in central Queensland that would employ up to 10,000 Australians and provide high energy, low impurity coal to India, where 300 million people still do not have access to electricity.

And Hillary wants us to believe that Trump is “risky” and “unpredictable” for foreign relations? This kind of industrial sabotage is a good way to hobble the competition — though playing mean and deceitful with your dedicated allies usually works better if done from secure computers, eh? For […]

Big headline climate funds, all puff, no money — Red tape strangles Pacific Islands. No one cares.

Giant climate funds issue giant press releases but not much else.The pledges aren’t being kept, hardly any money is being handed out. The posterchild drowning Islands are being left dangling in danger because the forms are too complicated.

Everyone wants to save the world, but not enough to make the forms simpler: Red tape’ locking small island states out of billions in climate funds

Many small developing countries are so administratively stretched that they cannot fill in all the complex forms needed to access climate money to help them to reduce emissions and adapt to increasing global temperatures, rising sea levels and extreme weather.

Small Pacific Islands will drown in red tape before they drown in a rising ocean:

Although billions of dollars of climate money is theoretically available, in practice red tape and paperwork makes it is extremely hard and slow to get hold of, says the Commonwealth Secretariat, the central institution of the 53 Commonwealth countries, who are among the hardest hit by climate change.

UN priorities? What’s more important — collecting funds to save the Islands, or saving the actual islands…

Fiji’s high commissioner in London, Jitoko Tikolevu, said the process […]

Climate change is potentially a $7 Trillion dollar money making venture (for bankers)

The tide of money, the vested interests flows

H/t to Eric Worrall at WattsUp.

The current “green” industry is already around $1.5 Trillion a year. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England said he expects this to grow to $5-7 trillion.

Financial Post: Climate change a $7 trillion funding opportunity

He said that given the enormous funding needs for clean infrastructure — he estimates at somewhere between $5 trillion and $7 trillion a year — investment opportunities will rebound.

If clean green energy was efficient, cheap and reliable there would be no “funding need” as the market would leap to exploit that opportunity. Instead most leading investors act like they are skeptics. The fact that central bankers are selling it so aggressively says a lot. Perhaps central bankers want to help the poor and save the world, or could it be that the entire financial industry will profit from a fake, forced market and another fiat currency? What are the brokerage fees on a $7T market…

Again we get this “free market” myth:

[Carbon pricing is the cleanest way for markets to judge the tangible exposure to climate change,” said Carney

[…]

Bring on the climate fraud game? If Exxon can be sued, so can Al Gore, renewables, insurance, banks,

From the Republican Attorney’s General in the US – the message that policing the “global warming debate through the power of the subpoena is a grave mistake.” The Rep AG’s point out this is a public policy debate, and if other AG’s are going to use the subpoena’s to shake down companies like Exxon for supporting free speech on one side of the debate, then suddenly a lot of players are opening themselves to similar cases.

Wall St Journal: Two can play at Climate Fraud

Eric Schneiderman and Sheldon Whitehouse, call your office. The New York Attorney General and Rhode Island Senator who helped to launch the prosecution of dissent on climate change may not like where their project is headed. Thirteen state Attorneys General have sent a letter pointing out that if minimizing the risks of climate change can be prosecuted as “fraud,” then so can statements overstating the dangers of climate change.

Since the money in this debate is so one sided, it follows that a lot more people have profited from exaggerating the scare:

But the AGs’ letter points out that, “If Exxon’s disclosure is deficient, what of the failure of renewable energy […]

Peabody Big-Coal Yeti finally spotted — funds “heart and soul” of climate denial!

The Guardian are in hot pursuit of the nickel and dime Coal-Yeti.

Analysis of Peabody Energy court documents show company backed trade groups, lobbyists and thinktanks dubbed ‘heart and soul of climate denial’

The thing is, if Peabody was keeping the heart and soul of climate denial alive, it is now flat broke — it’s over for climate denial. No heart. No soul. Denial is dead! But can anyone spot the difference… ?

Poor Guardian schmucks. Peabody were funding people who write what they believe, so Peabody came and went and the same people are still writing what they believe. If climate skeptics were in it for the money, they’d be alarmists.

Yes, Do. Lets talk about the Funding If climate skeptics were in it for the money, they’d be alarmists.

Suzanne Goldenberg and Helena Bengtsson repeat all the usual sacred incantations completely blind to the real money. At one point they are so stuck for “big money” they whip out a $10,000 figure, and in an article about Peabody, that’s not even from Peabody, but from Arch Coal. General Electric make $20 billion a year in profits from “renewables” — when is The Guardian going to expose […]

Most leading investors act like they are skeptics

Shame investors who manage tens of billions are not good at assessing risk. They are missing something big and obvious:

Half of leading investors ignoring climate change – study

Reuters: A report by the Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP), a not-for-profit organisation aimed at improving the management of climate change, found that just under a fifth of the top investors – or 97 managing a total of $9.4 trillion (6.4 trillion pounds) in assets – were taking tangible steps to mitigate global warming.

These include investing in low polluting assets or encouraging the companies they invest in to be greener.

How low is this bar. Less than one-fifth are doing anything “tangible”. To even get the tally up to a half “not ignoring climate change”, the researchers had to include a category called “first steps”, nothing tangible mind you. Perhaps someone sent an email?

Anyone might think that four fifths of top investors think climate change is a complete non-event.

A further 157 investors managing a total of $14.2 trillion were taking “first steps” towards addressing climate change, while 246 managing $14 trillion were doing nothing at all, the report said.

[…]

Kochs, Exxon “influence”? Yale experts hunt through 40,000 documents for Big-Oil smear, find almost nothing

Got no actual data-trail on “big-oil” dollars? That’s no reason not to run another name-calling smear article. A Yale group has spent countless months reading through the tea-leaves of old worn out climate themes and think they’ve discovered that the Kochs and Exxon carried the most influence.

What’s really remarkable is that the Yale group had so much funding they could trawl through 40,000 documents, track 4556 people and 164 “contrarian” organisations across 20 years and through 39 million words. Yet despite this, they found nothing. There’s no smoking gun, no proof that anyone was being dishonest, that the messages were wrong.

What the Yale team found was that “documents produced by lobbyists backed by two key corporate benefactors (Koch and Exxon) — proved to have been reproduced more often and with more “semantic similarity”. Justin Farrell (of Yale) thinks that means the Koch’s and Exxon are artificially skewing public opinion. Here’s another hypothesis — Exxon and the Kochs are smart businessmen. They spotted the leading skeptics in the 1990’s and gave them some help. The messages stuck with the public because they were good ones, not because they were “oil funded”. Farrell gets cause and effect confused.

Despite running […]

Former NOAA Meteorologist tells of years of censorship to hide the effect of “natural cycles”

Pierre Gosselin has a great post: Former NOAA Meteorologist Says Employees “Were Cautioned Not To Talk About Natural Cycles”.

David Dilley, NOAA Meteorologist, tells how for 15 years work on man-made climate change was pushed while work on natural cycles was actively suppressed. Grants connecting climate change to a man-made crisis were advertised, while the word went around to heads of departments that even mentioning natural cycles would threaten the flow of government funds. Speeches about natural cycles were mysteriously canceled at the last minute with bizarre excuses.

But jobs are on the line, so only retired workers can really speak, and no one can name names.

We can corroborate David Dilley’s remarks. Indeed, he is probably just one of many skeptics hidden in the ranks of NOAA. Way back in 2007, David Evans got an email from a different insider within NOAA, around the time he started talking publicly about the missing hotspot. The insider said, remarkably: “As a Meteorologist working for [snip, name of division] it has been clear to me, as well as every single other scientist I know at NOAA, that man can not be the primary cause of global warming and that the predictions of […]

Spot the Vested Interest: The $1.5 Trillion Climate Change Industry

Climate Change Business Journal estimates the Climate Change Industry is a $1.5 Trillion dollar escapade, which means four billion dollars a day is spent on our quest to change the climate. That includes everything from carbon markets to carbon consulting, carbon sequestration, renewables, biofuels, green buildings and insipid cars. For comparison global retail sales online are worth around $1.5 trillion. So all the money wasted on the climate is equivalent to all the goods bought online.

The special thing about this industry is that it wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for an assumption about relative humidity that is probably wrong. As such, it’s the only major industry in the world dependent on consumer and voter ignorance. This is not just another vested interest in a political debate; it’s vested-on-steroids, a mere opinion poll away from extinction. You can almost hear the captains of climate industry bellowing: “Keep ’em ignorant and believing, or the money goes away!”.

To state the obvious:

Policy, or the anticipation of new policy, has been one of the biggest drivers of the industry, the report shows.

Most industries this size exist because they produce something the market wants. They worry that competitors might […]

Nobel Chutzpah Prize 2015: UN, World Bank need “$89 Trillion” to fix climate

The ambit claims know no bounds. Who else would ask for $89,000,000,000,000? If the evil “more developed” nations pay for their carbon sins, the bill for those 1.3 billion people works out at $70,000 per person by 2030 (babies included).* When the target is 89,000 billion dollars, anything the Global Saviours get, can be painted as “not enough”. (It’s never enough). A trillion in funds is a “tiny”, “insufficient” amount that is “barely adequate”. Compliant journalists will print those headlines. The crowd will pay the money and feel guilty they are not paying more.

Speaking of the loot, the world’s GDP is currently $70 trillion, so asking for $89 trillion is a claim on 8% of all the money turned over in the world economy for a decade and a half. Handsome!

There is a grand array of climate junkets for Global Worriers this year. A gala of red-carpet events culminating in Paris, from November 30 to December 11. The wheeling and dealing is on right now, months ahead — and though they talk about the importance of Paris, I expect that Paris is mostly the cabaret show (like UNFCCC event in Bali that I went to), and it’s the […]

EPA authors, media, miss $31 million dollar potential conflict of interest

Steve Milloy at JunkScience holds the media and EPA scientists up to the same standards they expect from skeptics like Willie Soon.

The Headlines are everywhere:

” E.P.A. Carbon Emissions Plan Could Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds “— NY Times

And the media go out of their way to make sure everyone knows what independent angels they are:

Peer-reviewed, non-partisan academic study finds that the EPA emissions rule will save thousands of lives (Lindsay Abrams) — Salon

In most articles the study authors were just researchers from Harvard and Syracuse Uni, who declare “they have no competing financial interests”.

Milloy wonders if $31 million in EPA grants could be a competing interest? Five of eight authors are paid grants by the EPA.

Below are listed the article’s authors and the dollar amounts of EPA grants with which they are associated as principal investigators”:

Charles T. Driscoll: $3,654,608 Jonathan J. Buonocore: $9,588 Jonathan I. Levy: $9,514,391 Kathleen F. Lambert: 0 Dallas Burtraw: $1,991,346 Stephen B. Reid: 0 Habibollah Fakhaei: 0 Joel Schwartz: $31,176,575

Now how could Schwartz’s $31,176,575 or Levy’s $9,514,361 or Driscoll’s $3,654,608 from EPA […]

Banks *really* want to save the world. Citigroup commits $100 billion to “climate change”. Media loves it.

The wall of money is enormous, and the media oblivious to the real flow from taxpayers to corporate welfare freeloaders.

The wall of money, part 23

Citigroup promised to spend, invest and loan $50 billion in 2007 and found it so easy, it managed to do it by 2013, three years ahead of schedule. This month it promised to send another $100 billion more towards “sustainability”.

How much of this is about being a green corporate citizen? Not much apparently. Citigroup are making the Citigroup buildings energy efficient, but what they didn’t say was whether they would stop investing in or taking money and profits from their fossil fuel customers. As it happens Citigroup might Big-Green, but they are also Big-Ungreen too, they were one of “the top providers of funding for the most damaging practices of the U.S. coal industry last year. “ Not that any journalist mentioned that when they repeated the press release.

The banks can sniff out a good subsidy — it’s money for jam, and they are happy to feed the machine that feeds them.

Easy money for “sustainability” will also generate thousands of scary press releases from each and every sub-project as they […]

Dear NY Times Re Willie Soon: Character assassination is not science.

This is about much more than just Willie Soon. The fans of man-global warming know they can’t win a polite science debate. They know the biggest threat to the green gravy train is for competitive research, free debate, and independent funding for scientific research. The anti-science brigade want to stamp out and starve independent research. Where once companies would be lauded for their philanthropy, now they are forced to hide it knowing they’ll be targeted, and no matter how good the research work and publications are the results won’t even be discussed if smear-fans can talk about “funding” instead.

Welcome to the dark world of manufactured petty smear campaigns against scientists.

Where was the outrage when a lead author of an IPCC report was paid by Greenpeace? Do the puritans of science funding care when GE lobbies for renewables subsidies, or owns parts of media outlets? GE makes $21 billion a year on “Clean Energy”.

What we need is a science debate, but if “science writers” want to talk money, I say Yes Please. Lets talk about the wall of money distorting science from monopolistic government funding. This one vested interest is running at almost 100% purity in climate science. […]

Billionaires club fund Green Blob “Climate Works”

David Rose at the Daily Mail has been following a network of money. The big machine funding climate activism is Climate Works, which was kicked off with a half billion from a Hewlett Foundation in 2008 (as in Hewlett-Packard). Other donations are in the order of $60 – $100 million, any one of them vastly larger by orders of magnitude than budgets that skeptical groups operate on (if they have a budget at all).

It takes a lot of money to keep a false idea alive. This is just another Wall of Money. Yet despite that, skeptics are winning battles, unwinding schemes, shrinking the Green gravy trains, and spreading the word. It’s amazing what a small group of volunteers and barely funded skeptics can achieve with only their wits and truth on their side. (Thank you to the readers who help us, it makes a big difference.)

ClimateWorks feeds money to the whole gamut of groups like Greenpeace, WWF, and the usual suspects, and it partners with the European Climate Foundation, and in the US, the Energy Foundation. There are Chinese and Indian branches and an Australian Climate Works as well (but it’s not clear how or if the latter […]

Outgoing UK Environment Minister says green groups are profiteering anti-capitalist agit-prop

Some extraordinary statements from Owen Paterson, the man who was the UK Environment Secretary until a week ago. This is baking hot. Paterson also draws attention to the way big-goverment has fed big-government lobbyists 150 million euros since 2007. Can we get this man to Australia? — Jo

I’m proud of standing up to the green lobby

The Telegraph UK I leave the post with great misgivings about the power and irresponsibility of – to coin a phrase – the Green Blob.

By this I mean the mutually supportive network of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and some public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape. This tangled triangle of unelected busybodies claims to have the interests of the planet and the countryside at heart, but it is increasingly clear that it is focusing on the wrong issues and doing real harm while profiting handsomely.

Local conservationists on the ground do wonderful work to protect and improve wild landscapes, as do farmers, rural businesses and ordinary people. They are a world away from the highly paid globe-trotters of the Green Blob who besieged me with […]

Big-Green have more money than Big-Oil but the media are blind to it.

Finally, some coverage of the massive amount of money pumping the Big-Green agenda. What is really so remarkable about this is that skeptics are winning, despite the fact that the greens have almost all the institutional, academic, government, and big-media support, and far, far more money. All we have is truth and wits.

The Washington Examiner

Mainstream media don’t know Big Green has deeper pockets than Big Oil

Ron Arnold

Mainstream reporters appear not to be aware of the component parts that comprise Big Green: environmentalist membership groups, nonprofit law firms, nonprofit real estate trusts (The Nature Conservancy alone holds $6 billion in assets), wealthy foundations giving prescriptive grants, and agenda-making cartels such as the 200-plus member Environmental Grantmakers Association. They each play a major socio-political role.

Seeing Big-Green funding means taking a broader view of the money trail:

Invisible fact: the environmental movement is a mature, highly developed network with top leadership stewarding a vast institutional memory, a fiercely loyal cadre of competent social and political operatives, and millions of high-demographic members ready to be mobilized as needed.

That membership base is a built-in free public relations machine responsive […]

Abbott needs to be more pro-science and cut funding to models that don’t work

Look out, Australia might trim a tiny slice from the Tithe to the Gods of Weather (protest coming)

The Australian budget is in dire straits after the Rudd-Gillard years of promised surpluses but exploding arithmetic. The Commission of Audit is here to test public reaction to all the possible ways of paying off the Labor debt. Somehow, it missed the biggest cherry waiting to be plucked. We could save billions if the the Abbott Government become more rigorously scientific. Abbott should cut funding to any scientists who are using models that don’t work, and only fund ones that do.

“Abbott should cut funding to any scientists who are using models that don’t work, and only fund ones that do.”

I expect the Greens will join me in declaring that if the Abbott government cared about the environment it would immediately launch a royal commission, a real audit, or an independent investigation into the effect of carbon dioxide. Only the best science for the planet, right? All funding to environmental programs dependent on unverified research should be frozen until the audit is finished. Easy eh? Let me be PM for a day. :- )

But apparently the sacred carbon cow must […]