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I don’t think Gina McCarthy had thought this through. McCarthy to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee:
“And the great thing about this proposal is it really is an investment opportunity. This is not about pollution control. It’s about increased efficiency at our plants…It’s about investments in renewables and clean energy. It’s about investments in people’s ability to lower their electricity bills by getting good, clean, efficient appliances, homes, rental units,” “This is an investment strategy that will really not just reduce carbon pollution but will position the United States to continue to grow economically in every state, based on their own design,” McCarthy added.
She is discussing something called the Clean Power Plan. Mark this day. She goes on to find the perpetual motion machine of economics:
Sir, what I know about this rule is that I know it will leave the United States in 2030 with a more efficient and cleaner energy supply system — and more jobs in clean energy, which are the jobs of the future,” McCarthy responded.
The EPA doesn’t just have a landline to God. They are God. They can use less energy to generate more wealth, more employment, and global peace.
[…]
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 […]
I say, it’s lucky people who want to save the planet do it for the love of it:
National Post: The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has helped funnel almost $400-billion into emission-cutting projects in developing countries by allowing investors to earn carbon credits they can sell to companies and governments of richer nations that use them to meet emission targets.
I imagine they love $400 billion too.
This was just one branch of the great green-industrial-machine. (And yet skeptics are winning, she says wickedly, with hardly any money).
But those halcyon days are gone for the CDM — what was $30 per ton, is now 30c.
From 2003, developers flocked to register projects such as destroying heat-trapping waste gasses at Chinese chemical plants or installing hydroelectric power stations in Brazil, and made huge profits by selling the resulting carbon credits for up to $30.40 a tonne in 2008.
But interest has waned while countries wrangled over setting new emission goals under the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), hammering credit prices down to unprofitable levels below $0.30.
There’s a tiny $200 million or so left ticking over in the accounts:
The latest UN financial statements show […]
It’s just another day tracking the decline of the global warming meme.
Things were so pear-shaped for global carbon trading markets in 2012 that the World Bank canceled its annual State of the Carbon Market report. But how bad were they? In their last report in 2012 the grand global total was $176b USD for the 2011 year. Since the World Bank figure are not publishing their tally any more, I’ve switched to the Reuters Point Carbon figures instead, which are issued in Euro.
Rather devastatingly, despite the fact the FTSE grew 6% in 2012 and Euro Stoxx grew by 13% in 2012, the global carbon market (which is mostly an EU market) fell by a whopping 36% in 2012. Money printing is running rife and new money is pouring into asset markets worldwide, yet globally the money is running from invisible, rortable, pointless carbon certificates. We are past the peak, and over the hill. This parrot is almost dead.
Back in the heady days of 2008 the growth was described as “explosive” and it was predicted it would grow to $1.2 trillion by 2020 (about 880 billion €) .
…
These figures are different to previous USD ones, […]
This study on “skeptics” came out in the weeks just before the Australian election. I had quite some fun with it, then promptly forgot it. (You’ll see why soon).
But Amelia Sharman, of The Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, seems genuinely interested, claiming skeptics haven’t been studied much, suggesting skeptical blogs are quite important, and wait for it, discovering that the thing that makes the most central skeptical blogs popular is that they are interested in the science.
Despite all the rumors that we are an organized funded campaign of political ideologues, she discovered we are not densely connected, not-centrally-organized, and what ho, we value a command of scientific knowledge. If perhaps she was hoping to uncover some secret structure that would reveal a coordinated chain of command, she must have been disappointed.
To her credit, she called it as the results described it. However that post-modern education leaves poor Sharman wandering in the dark.
I feel like such a killjoy. Usually when academics reach out to the skeptics to “study” us, it is to attack us. So I ought to be grateful that Amelia Sharman is one of the few who appears to be doing it more […]
Steve Goreham highlights a school program which spends 30,000 dollars to save 300. The program is called “Wise” and hopes to change global weather.
Presumably with such profligate wastage, delusional ambition, and little practical purpose, it will breed future political leaders. — Jo
—————————————————————————-
US citizens pay for “solar school” foolishness
By Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Washington Times
Solar systems are being installed at hundreds of schools across the United States. Educators use solar panels to teach students about the “miracle” of energy sourced from the sun. But a closer look at these projects shows poor economics and a big bill for citizens.
Earlier this month, the National Resources Defense Fund (NRDC) launched its “Solar Schools” campaign, an effort to raise $54,000 to help “three to five to-be-determined schools move forward with solar rooftop projects.” The NRDC wants to “help every school in the country go solar.” The campaign uses a cute video featuring kids talking about how we’re “polluting the Earth with gas and coal” and how we can save the planet with solar.
8.9 out of 10 based on 66 ratings […]
How do we fund science?
So far, conservative politicians don’t get it…
Most conservative governments have bowed to the name-calling bullies for far too long. They are either fooled by the names (do they think “denier” is a scientific term?), or they are so afraid of being called “deniers” themselves that they adopt the bullies meme, too scared to ask the most basic and substantial questions of it. They have stayed out of science, while big-government players have milked the good brand-name shamelessly. Science needs to be set straight.
Above all else, those who care about the environment and the people should grab the moral high ground and the sensible-middle-road at the same time, and get serious about getting the science correct— which means the most rigorous investigation, the best practice, and a real ongoing public debate (no, there hasn’t been one yet). The environment and citizens deserve nothing less. And paying for better studies costs a fraction of global trading schemes, along with tens of thousands of bird-killing turbines and solar industrial plants.
Before we spend anything on mitigating a problem based on models, we need to know what empirical evidence supports the assumptions in the models. (Make […]
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky
Over Easter, psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky moved from Perth to Bristol (lucky UK). He’s the psychologist who is expert in an imaginary group of humans called “Climate deniers”. Neither he, nor anyone else has ever met one but he discovered their imaginary motivations by surveying the confused groups who hate them. As you would, right?
None of the so-called researchers can explain what scientific observations a climate denier, denies. It’s an abuse of English, profoundly unscientific, but has some success in shutting down public debate, if that’s what you want.
Can humans change the weather and stop the storms? If you know we can, Lewandowsky calls that “science”. If you wonder “how much”, you are a denier.
The Royal Society, possibly reaching a tipping point in its rush to abject scientific decay, has immediately awarded him the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. It’s effectively a top-up on his salary for the next five years, just in case the UK might lose him. While Australia is grateful, scientists everywhere, cry. Hat tip to Geoff Chambers
[The Royal Society]
Value and tenure
The scheme provides up to 5 years’ funding after which the […]
UPDATE: Cash is being flown to British Troops in Cyprus. The banks will stay shut til Thursday. The finance minister has resigned. [SkyNews]
Remember how the EU was supposed to promote stability?
Sooner or later a central fund managed by central bureaucrats is going to fail in a “central” way. This isn’t it, but we are getting closer to the center.
Without competition between states on currency, Europe left itself open to be a case study in centralized stupidity. The bureaucrats needed to stop the waste of public spending, they needed to halt the corruption, increase competition. And their answer? Steal 10% of depositor’s funds from everyone in Cyprus. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
We are now in new territory. In previous bank bailouts, if anyone took any losses it was the shareholders and the bond holders, and the depositors did not lose any money. In the Cyprus bail out, the bondholders and shareholders lose nothing but the depositors lose about 10%. (Any chance the bondholders of the Cyprus banks include the ECB or IMF?)
Where is the natural law that makes sense in this decision? Don’t punish the shareholders, or the bondholders, […]
Thank God for Barack Obama and Greg Combet. For they have The Gift. They can change the weather.
Welcome back to another Golden Era of Climate-Hype.
Obama’s State of the Union speech and all-new legislation in the US is ramping up the debate again. Greg Combet (Australian minister for the weather) is getting so excited at the news, he’s sending out emails to all the skeptics who’ve ever written to him:
“For years climate sceptics have argued the United States is not acting, so nor should Australia. Can you share this video and show them that’s not true?“
Does Combet think that this will change skeptic’s minds? Is he serious? Does he have any idea why we are skeptics? Does he listen? He even asks skeptics to send him $10 to help. The tax you already are forced to pay is not enough. Is Combet an activist or a government minister?
PS. Can you help us defend the carbon price from Tony Abbott by chipping in $10? We can’t afford to fall behind the rest of the world on this issue.
Obama’s spinified climate statements
When shale gas is good we call it “natural gas” (don’t mention the “frack” word):
[…]
Assume for a moment that the ABC was a dedicated team working to serve the public, getting fair rates of pay. Then imagine Australians asked the ABC what salaries they paid their “celebrities”. The ABC team would be happy to provide that list, and surely it could be done in one working day.
Instead the national broadcaster has been hiding those details for two years and has just lost the second appeal. (How much money has it cost to hide the money ABC presenters get?) The ABC gets $1 billion a year from the people of Australia, and it has refused to disclose the details of its $25 million dollar “contractors and consultants” bill, and the salaries of top staff of shows like Media Watch, Four corners, and Mornings with John Faine.
A Freedom of Information request was lodged more than two years ago by the Herald and Weekly Times, seeking access to documents “dealing with salaries, or any payments” paid to program makers working on 13 programs, including those listed above, for the financial year ending 2010.
The BBC was caught paying presenters through personal service companies which allowed those presenters to pay less tax. (Are these the same […]
You’d expect a professor to have done the basic research.
Naomi Oreskes
Naomi Oreskes is famous (of sorts) for the book: Merchants of Doubt — it seeds doubts about skeptics by saying that skeptic’s “seed doubts” about climate change.
The skeptics seed doubts by questioning the evidence and pointing to contrary results (isn’t this known as “discussion”?). Oreskes seeds doubts by digging through biographies, analyzing indirect payments of minor amounts, hunting through unrelated topics and tenuous associations from 20 year old contracts.
The hypocrisy of saying that skeptics attack the messenger is lost on Oreskes who specializes in … attacking the messengers.
Oreskes’ work is based on a logical fallacy, inept research, and incompetent reasoning.
What is remarkable is that so many “intellectuals” or journalists can’t or won’t see through her thin rhetoric.
Oreskes can name virtually no significant funding for skeptics. Skeptics are almost all unpaid volunteers, working out of professional and patriotic duty, appalled by the illogical, anti-science sentiments of people like Oreskes. The enormous “vested interests” are well over a thousand to one in favor of alarmism as measured by funding, yet Oreskes has not even considered them. The largest proactive skeptical organization (Heartland) has […]
Climate Money turned the tables on the Big-Oil criers
A reply to an article on Wired and Ars Technica
Alarmists rarely attack, or even mention the Climate Money paper I did in 2009. It’s an own goal to draw attention to the fact that skeptics are paid a pittance, while the alarm industry soaks in extended baths of cash, grants, and junkets, and the vested interests are a magnitude larger. Exxon might lose some money if a carbon tax comes in, but the world will still need oil. The same can’t be said for ACME-Solar. If a carbon scheme falls over, so does a Solyndra.
So yes, let’s do talk about The Money. As Climate Money pointed out: all Greenpeace could find from Exxon was a mere $23 million for skeptics over a decade, while the cash cow that is catastrophic climate change roped in $2,000 million a year every year during the same period for the scientists who called other scientists “deniers”.
John Timmer tried to debunk it with words like “bogus”, and “false” but lacked things like evidence and numbers to back up his case. As far as I can tell the arguments amount to […]
File this under “Monopolistic Science”
Australian Taxpayer funds in 2012 are supporting around 50 projects about “climate change” or “greenhouse gases”.
One David McKnight has got $95k to study how Australian governments “spin” the news. So which cancer research project was knocked back so he could study a “hyper-adversarial” news system? And what is so bad about a competitive news system in any case? What are we aiming for — real news or better propaganda? (See my response to David McKnight in The Australian to see how confused this journalism lecturer is.)
The dollar values here are usually for three year projects. Some of these projects potentially produce press releases which are nothing more than disguised forms of government advertising for big-spending climate policies.
Jo
———————————————————————
Guest Post: Dr Roberto Soria, Perth
The ARC Major Grant results for 2012 were announced in Nov 2011. Here is what Australian scientists are up to this year.
The ARC (Australian Research Council) is the main source of funding for all researchers in all fields of natural, political and social sciences. Getting a grant will make a difference between carrying on doing research and finding another job, for many researchers. Take a […]
The game is up when everyone knows the only way out is printing money, because then everyone knows inflation is coming, and the bun-fight begins. Everyone wants the wage rise, the payment now, and to buy the commodities that they won’t be able to afford tomorrow. Price tags begin that rising spiral. I don’t think we are on the verge just yet, but it can’t be that far when someone like Murdoch is broadcasting it.
Rupert Murdoch tweets:
@rupertmurdoch
Governments worldwide have borrowed 100 trillion last ten years. Defaults inevitable sometime soon. Means crash, hurting rich and poor.
@rupertmurdoch Of course markets stay high with central banks printing huge sums, inflating everything except jobs.
The only question that matters then, is are they “printing”, and how long have we got?
US Money Base Figures
This is the US money base, starting in 1918.
You can see the moment Lehman Brothers went under. It’s that “bend”.
..
That graph again, logarithmically, so we can put the last 90 years in perspective. Remember the oil crisis, the Vietnam War, the 1987 crash, LTCM, and the dot com burst? They don’t […]
What kind of organization receives all its funding from one source, then claims to be “independent?” (Yes, spot another GONGO idea).
The Conversation trumpets that it is “Independent” but it’s funded with $6 million from … the Government. As Tim Blair said “it’s a baby ABC“. (A Government organized “non government” organisation).
The Conversation gets 20,000 readers a day (apparently). According to the Alexa Stats, I single-handedly get about half the global traffic they do. They have an entire nation of university staff to help write stories. I’ve had ten guest authors and have written over 700 posts myself.
(If what they do costs $6 million, does that mean my site is worth $3m? Am I grossly underpaid, or are they grossly overpaid?)
This is another example of the self-growing-cycle of big-government. The site is dominated with stories that favor statist-big-government policies. They break laws of logic and reason, claim that experts are writing, but we non-experts working from home can point out the errors of those with professorships in our spare time, and with no PhD.
Consider the wit and wisdom of one Stefan Lewandowsky — who writes as a Professorial Fellow of a misnamed topic […]
Was it just me? Was I the only one who noticed a tiny announcement in February that Airport Scanners were coming to Australia, the land where terrorists haven’t landed (yet), and … wait for it… there would be no (NO!) — opt — out– clause. Did I hear that correctly?
And the crowd roared (about the cricket), nobody said a word about the scanners, and the ten libertarians left who can bear to watch the ABC were too busy trying to save the nation from nastier threats. Australia is getting millimeter wave scanners at International Airports, and if you don’t want to be scanned, you need to leave the country… by boat. (Either that or swim with the crocs across the Timor Sea.)
Metal objects show up on a white body, but not on a black background. Image: Daily Mail and Herald Sun.
With no opt out clause, what happens when the first person facing deportation refuses to be scanned? Well that’s all right then, we’ll just book them on a cruise to Kandahar? Civil Liberties Australia was one of the few to speak up. Maybe those scanners are safe? Maybe? But at least one man with a pacemaker […]
Good news. The talented strategists left the UNFCCC team before COP17 in Durban. The A-graders saw the trainwreck coming and moved on.
Everyone knows it’s a herculean task to get 190-odd countries to sign anything, and with a typical pragmatical approach the UN drafting team have gone for … not just a new “International Court” (crikey!) but rights for Mother Earth (can we be sued by a rock?), and oh boy, the holy grail, the whole kit and caboodle … we demand Peace On Earth, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree, as Part 47a, and starting by morning tea tomorrow.
Monckton reports that the funereal collapsing Durban talks still held the highest of ambitions. Godlike even. The real action behind the posters of parrots and pleas to save pygmy corals, or spotted limpets is the plea to make some unelected bureaucrats the totalitarian Kings of The World.
In part it’s chilling, a New International Court — which could presumably try you for crimes against coastlines, clouds, or (more likely) against endangered windfarms. Those with their hands on the legal wheel want the power to direct money (was that $1.6 Trillion?) from the richest nations to their friends, patrons, or […]
Pew Charitable Trusts is an influential “progressive” think-tank with $5 billion in assets. What was the The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has lost the Pew name and funds, and become the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES).
Pew used to supply $3.5 million of the center’s current $4.4 million annual budget. Instead, in complete green purity, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Entergy Corp. will be the principal founding sponsors for the new C2ES.
DeSmog immediately denounced them and declared that all of their pronouncements are automatically biased since they are now oil-funded deniers:
…
Or maybe not. If Shell had sponsored a skeptic, Desmog would have turned it into a high rotation ritual chant.
9.3 out of 10 based on 58 ratings […]
by Color CS
You know, the one comforting thing about the insanity going on in the UK is that Australia doesn’t seem quite so basket-case, suicidally silly. Actually that’s not really true, both countries are barking mad, but thanks to David Cameron its a little less lonely at the loony farm. Democractic dementia has company.
Exhibit A:
In 2008 Ministers were aiming to generate 20 per cent of the country’s energy from renewable sources by 2020. Professor MacKay explained back then, that to reach that, they would have to put wind farms over the entirety of Wales. How did the governing class respond? By 2011, the UK Coalition took that crazy renewable target and doubled it.
Exhibit B:
— Two thirds of Britain’s turbines are fully or partly owned by foreign businesses.
— Total subsidies paid to these non-UK owned farms is £523 million.
— The subsidies paid to local folk are handy for Dukes and whatnot, and those who have large estates (especially ones they don’t live on) who can pick up the £20,000 a year in subsidies — milked from people who don’t have large estates and are […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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