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 Hillary it’s such cosmic bad luck that she keeps employing people who brag about deplorable, dishonorable and even criminal actions in emails and on video. A pack of cheats. Naturally she’ll sack the lot of them, and make it clear to US donors that this sort of thing is never to happen again: “Think of the children in India”.
This seems an apt moment to remind people that most voters think that Hillary’s greatest achievement was to be Secretary of State. Hmm.
The emails show that the funders included the Sandler Foundation, the Sea Change Foundation, the Tilia Fund, the Growald Family Fund and the Flora Family Foundation.
In other words, the legal challenges have not come from Mackay, Bowen or Townsville or from local landholders.
Instead they have come from Boston, Boulder and Berkeley from vanity pose foundations uninterested in the double digit unemployment rates in northern Queensland towns or energy access in India.
Green activists keep looking more and more like useful idiots for big money, and in this case, for foreign interests. These are true international grade suckers who help to keep people unemployed in Australia, and keep millions of children in poverty in India while they try to stop the sea rising with windmills.
Brendan Pearson notes:
A legitimate question is this: Did Podesta actively support, co-ordinate, condone or encourage this effort while in the White House?
We give him the benefit of the doubt.
The Adani mine is hoping to be a 40 year project. If Australia doesn’t dig up this coal, India will have to buy lower quality coal from elsewhere, or dig up their own, and that will produce up to 30% more CO2 (as well as increasing real pollution).
Green activists must not usurp national sovereignty
The Australian Editorial: Australia’s reputation as a reliable source for investment is on the line. For that reason, but also in the interests of our balance of trade, federal and state budgets and 200 million poor people in remote Indian villages in urgent need of power, Australian governments must not allow their authority to be abrogated by green activists across the Pacific, in inner-urban areas of Australia or elsewhere. As Tony Abbott said before he lost the prime ministership, the rules covering environmental groups delaying major mining projects through the courts should be tightened. The Turnbull government needs to act sooner rather than later to prevent vexatious litigation holding up vital projects.
In their quasi-religious zeal to rid the world of fossil fuels, green activists have elevated themselves, in their own narrow minds and those of their followers, to infallibility status (egged on, ironically, by Pope Francis’s flawed climate change encyclical, Laudato Si). But their arguments against the Adani project are morally and economically bankrupt and would confine millions of people to poverty and filth.
Bad cooking and heating fuels (like dung) cause smoke damage and leads to 4 or 5 million deaths each year.
India is not happy.
Coal activists risk driving India away
Dennis Shanahan, Michael McKenna
A highly orchestrated, secretly foreign-funded group of Australian environmental activists opposing the $16 billion Adani coalmine in Queensland has “dampened” Indian investment interest in Australia and received heated criticism from the federal Coalition and Queensland Labor governments.
Indian Power Minister Piyush Goyal told The Australian yesterday the years of legal challenges to the vast Carmichael coal project, now revealed to have been funded by multi-million-dollar foundations in the US, “will certainly dampen future investments” from India.
The Australian has several articles (probably paywalled).
Look closer at anti-coal groups
Green lobby plays hardball but economics still king
Activists must respect sovereignty
The warmists who love to play Green,
Are on fuels from fossils most keen,
As they happily get,
On board any jet,
Which for them, just like us, is routine.
— Ruairi