Dion shifting away from Green Shift

The current leader of the Liberal Party, Stéphane Dion has been gradually shifting away from his proposal for a shifty green carbon tax.

Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said today that his Green Shift plan featuring a controversial carbon tax is not a major part of his election platform.

"You have said it was but never me," Dion told reporters.

His surprise declaration follows by a day campaign appearances in the Toronto area where he failed to mention it once in his speeches.

Not a major part of his platform? What nonsense! The Conservatives published this today.

Stéphane Dion used to say that his risky carbon tax scheme was “the heart of our strategy”. (Kingston Whig Standard, July 26, 2008)

It is true though that Dion has been mentioning his "Green Shift" tax less and less often in his election speeches per this graph from the CPC website:

Dion's Green Shift has been criticized because a) it is too difficult to understand, b) the details have yet to be worked out, b) Canadians doubt it will be revenue neutral as promised and c) Dion attempts to explain it only confuse rather than clarify.

Dion has trouble explaining any policy, let alone how a hefty new carbon tax could be a good thing. Take this comment for example:

Rudy Ammeter, the owner of an area farm where Dion released his agricultural plan today – he pledged $1.2 billion in green funding for farmers – told reporters that he wished the party leader would back away from it.

"I have a hard time figuring it out," he said.

The "green professor" Stéphane Dion seems to have realized that Canadians are not buying his shifty green carbon tax and wants to shift the dialog to other issues. But somehow I think that the other parties are not going to let him off the hook on this one.

Update: this has to be the quote of the day...

"Stephane Dion distancing himself from the Green Shift is like Tim Hortons distancing themselves from the donut," Harper said. "Just because the carbon tax is now a hidden agenda, doesn't mean it's going to go away."

Ross: Carbon Offset Market bogus from day one

Just another UN scam:

In short, the very authors of the original UN climate report that justified the carbon market were themselves poised to profit from that market. And, now, the UN does business directly with firms like Ecosecurities and SGS, enriching the authors of the original report!

Better read the whole thing.

Indulgences

The Federal Trade Commission is taking a close look at the carbon offset industry with a series of hearings, but it shouldn't take much scrutiny to find out that it's a scam.

The Money and Connections Behind Al Gore’s Carbon Crusade

For Al Gore, the business of climate change is all about the money. Here's a great article by Deborah Corey Barnes at Human Events.com

Al Gore’s campaign against global warming is shifting into high gear. Reporters and commentators follow his every move and bombard the public with notice of his activities and opinions. But while the mainstream media promote his ideas about the state of planet Earth, they are mostly silent about the dramatic impact his economic proposals would have on America. And journalists routinely ignore evidence that he may personally benefit from his programs. Would the romance fizzle if Gore’s followers realized how much their man stands to gain?

There's nothing new about Gore's profit motives concerning carbon trading, but Barnes lays out the details very thoroughly in her article.

Gore’s Circle of Business

Al Gore is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). According to Gore, the London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are going green. “Generation Investment Management, purchases -- but isn’t a provider of -- carbon dioxide offsets,” said spokesman Richard Campbell in a March 7 report by CNSNews.

GIM appears to have considerable influence over the major carbon-credit trading firms that currently exist: the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) in the U.S. and the Carbon Neutral Company (CNC) in Great Britain. CCX is the only firm in the U.S. that claims to trade carbon credits.

CCX owes its existence in part to the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago-based liberal foundation that provided $347,000 in grant support in 2000 for a preliminary study to test the viability of a market in carbon credits. On the CCX board of directors is the ubiquitous Maurice Strong, a Canadian industrialist and diplomat who, since the 1970s, has helped create an international policy agenda for the environmentalist movement. Strong has described himself as “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.”

(...)

Along with Gore, the co-founder of GIM is Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. Last September, Goldman Sachs bought 10% of CCX shares for $23 million. CCX owns half the ECX, so Goldman Sachs has a stake there as well.

GIM’s “founding partners” are studded with officials from Goldman Sachs. They include David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM); Mark Ferguson, former co-head of GSAM pan-European research; and Peter Harris, who headed GSAM international operations. Another founding partner is Peter Knight, who is the designated president of GIM. He was Sen. Al Gore’s chief of staff from 1977-1989 and the campaign manager of the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election campaign.

(...)

Front and Center

Clearly, GIM is poised to cash in on carbon trading. The membership of CCX is currently voluntary. But if the day ever comes when federal government regulations require greenhouse-gas emitters -- and that’s almost everyone -- to participate in cap-and-trade, then those who have created a market for the exchange of carbon credits are in a position to control the outcomes. And that moves Al Gore front and center. As a politician, Gore is all for transparency. But as GIM chairman, Gore has not been forthcoming, according to Forbes magazine.

This is only the start, you should read the rest.

There's more in my earlier post: Blood and Gore.

Suzuki: I'm over by 'hundreds of tonnes'

This "profile" of David Suzuki appeared in today's Vancouver Sun (the writer is obviously so smitten by the great environmentalist that he completely forgot to make use of a grammar or spell-checker - I've copied his words below verbatim).

Buried amongst all the gushing praise, you will see this startling admission:

Our planet canabsorb each person creating one tonne of carbon emissions from fossilfuels a year, he figures. The average Canadian now accounts for morethan 20 tonnes. Yet hes far, far beyond even that excess. Each roundtrip between Toronto and London, he estimates, creates about one tonneof greenhouse gases per passenger. So, Suzuki guesses, hes over hislimit by hundreds of tonnes.

Yes, hes being buying carbon offsets, he says. But hes now decidedthats no longer enough: Starting out his eighth decade, hes decidedhe needs to be more in sync with the planets ability to absorb all hisgreenhouse gases, so this frequent flyers long-haul flights must bedrastically cut.

If he's over his limit by "hundreds of tonnes", then his carbon footprint is about 20 to 30 times that of the average Canadian. How Al Gorish of him!

So this epiphany means that Suzuki is promising no more annual vacations to Australia, and that he will be clustering future speaking engagements in geographic areas to cut back on emissions or speaking by video conference.

Big deal. Even with these reductions, Kooky Suzuki's carbon footprint will still dwarf that of the average Canadian, who he says is 20 times higher than ideal. The hypocrisy is astounding.

Free carbon offsets

Get 'em here.

Carbon offset swindle

Oh, what a surprise...

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place. (...)

The FT investigation found:

■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.

■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.

■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.

■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

■ Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

Get your Carbon Offsets now

Wow. 10 carbon units for only a buck! Get yours now!

via Grouchy Old Cripple with a hat tip to Love Global Warming.

The Pledge

that Al Gore refused to sign.

"As a believer:

• that human-caused global warming is a moral, ethical, and spiritual issue affecting our survival;
• that home energy use is a key component of overall energy use;
• that reducing my fossil fuel-based home energy usage will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions; and
• that leaders on moral issues should lead by example;

I pledge to consume no more energy for use in my residence than the average American household by March 21, 2008."

Be sure to follow the link above and read the full article. There's more info on insider trading at Molten Metal Technology, Inc. (MMTI) back in 1996 when the Goracle was merely Vice President involving another well known "environmentalist", Canadian Maurice Strong.

Yet MMTI's stock soared to $35 a share mainly on the basis of Gore's glowing support. But by March 1996, DoE officials decided to end the subsidies. Between March and October that year, Strong and eight other officers of MMTI dumped over $15 million in personal shares at $31 per, knowing full well that the government handouts were to end. As soon as Wall Street also figured that out, after MMTI issued an October 20th Sunday press release revealing for the first time the loss of DoE funding, MMTI's stock crashed the next day, eventually plummeting to 13 cents a share, prompting investor lawsuits.

(see my earlier post Blood and Gore). There's more...

This was not a first for Strong. In 1981 Strong headed Denver oil promoter AZL Resources. AZL paid $5 million to settle a lawsuit that he had falsely inflated the price of AZL stock, again cashing in. However, in the end, Strong made out like a bandit. AZL also owned a number of western ranches and when AZL merged with the Tosco oil refining company in 1983, Tosco sold Strong the 160,000-acre Baca Ranch in southern Colorado for a pittance.

There's lots more on how Gore and Strong are still associated as big players in the carbon offsets shell game. Read all of Another Oscar Performance from Al Gore by Michael Donnelly.

Update: here's the video of Gore refusing to make the Pledge. h/t: SDA.

Update 2: It's not easy being green

Krauthammer: Limosine Liberals

More on the modern day indulgences spotlighted at this year's "first-ever green" Academy Awards:

It turns out that the Academy neutralized the evening's "carbon footprint" by buying carbon credits. That means it sent money to a "carbon broker," who promised, after taking his cut, to reduce carbon emissions somewhere on the planet equivalent to what the stars spewed into the atmosphere while flying in on their private planes.

In other words, the rich reduce their carbon output by not one ounce. But drawing on the hundreds of millions of net worth in the Kodak Theatre, they pull out lunch money to buy ecological indulgences. The last time the selling of pardons was prevalent--in a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity--Martin Luther lost his temper and launched the Reformation.

Brilliant analysis, as always, by Charles Krauthammer who describes offsets as "a way for the rich to export the real costs and sacrifices of pollution control to the poorer segments of humanity in the Third World" in this Time article, Limousine Liberal Hypocrisy:

GreenSeat, a Dutch carbon-trading outfit, buys offsets from a foundation that plants trees in Uganda's Mount Elgon National Park to soak up the carbon emissions of its rich Western patrons. Small problem: expanding the park encroaches on land traditionally used by local farmers. As a result, reports the New York Times, "villagers living along the boundary of the park have been beaten and shot at, and their livestock has been confiscated by armed park rangers." All this so that swimming pools can be heated and Maseratis driven with a clear conscience in the fattest parts of the world.

h/t: Les Enfants Terrible

The Carbon Offsets Swindle

Any investigator worthy of his/her salt will tell you to "follow the money". Here's two very good examples.

Canada Free Press has an article called Creators of Carbon Credit Scheme Cashing in on it which follows up on Al Gore's interesting connections to Maurice Strong and Molten Metal Technology, Inc of Massachusetts. See also my post on Blood and Gore.

Update: Rush Limbaugh takes notice. [audio] [more audio]

Doug Ross takes a look at the carbon offsets market and Al Gore's company Generation Investment Management and asks if this is all a $250 Billion scam?

Wanton profiteering appears to be at the very heart of "carbon offsets." Put simply, a wide range of respected scientists, environmentalists, researchers, agriculturalists, and activists believe that carbon offsets are a "scam", "fantasy", "fiction", "nonsense", "fraudulent" and worse. And they've been saying so since 2000 (...)

Ross offers up a number of examples of environmental groups calling the carbon offsets market as "fictitious" and even "fraudulent" and goes on to explore what he terms "The vested interests of the UN's IPCC Panel".

Solar energy portal Ecotopia reports that members of the IPCC "...had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees... [and] should have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such 'offset' projects."

...the whole carbon offset boondoggle appears to be a "fraudulent market" of epic proportions. It has been denounced by scientists, environmentalists, academics, and researchers almost continuously since May of 2000.

That "market of epic proportions" approaches $250 billion, says Ross. There's lots more. Go read it.

Carbon Indulgences

The new pseudo-religion of Global Warming has discovered the value of a tried and trusted practice from the Middle Ages, that of selling indulgences to its believers to help relieve them of their guilt caused by their own carbon emitting "sins". These new modern day indulgences come in the form of "carbon offsets" and they were all the rage at the recent Academy Awards:

HOLLYWOOD'S wealthy liberals can now avoid any guilt they might feel for consuming so much non-renewable fossil fuel in their private jets, their SUVs, and their multiple air-conditioned mansions. This year's Oscar goodie bag contained gift certificates representing 100,000 pounds of greenhouse gas reductions from TerraPass, which describes itself as a "carbon offset retailer." The 100,000 pounds "are enough to balance out an average year in the life of an Academy Award presenter," a press release from TerraPass asserts.

Not to be left out, the Goracle has jumped onto this bandwagon too and claims to purchase enough indulgences and green power to offset the incredible energy consumption of his Tennessee mansion which came under criticism earlier this week. Bill Hobbs takes a closer look:

So, where does Gore buy his ‘carbon offsets’? According to The Tennessean newspaper’s report, Gore buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management. a company he co-founded and serves as chairman:

Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe…

As co-founder and chairman of the firm Gore presumably draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he “buys” his “carbon offsets” from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn’t buy “carbon offsets” through Generation Investment Management - he buys stocks.

Al Gore profiting from his climate change activisim? Say it isn't so!

But like the Indulgences of the Middle Ages, these modern "carbon offsets" are unlikely to be of any real value, at least not in the way in which they are being promoted - environmentally. From Economist.com:

The carbon offsets, on the other hand, sound like a very reasonable plan. That is, they did until I began thinking about them.

Most carbon offsets seem to work on one of a few principles: they plant trees, invest in renewable energy sources, or pay someone in a developing country to use some less-polluting technology, like a CFL.

It turns out that a lot of websites have already devoted quite a lot of space to discussing why these plans don't work particularly well.

A lot of websites like here, here, here, here and here to name a few.

So if Al Gore and the Hollywood-ites start whipping out these coupons and claiming to be green, be very, very skeptical. My guess is that TerraPass is less like a real carbon offset and more like, say, the International Star Registry, where you get a nice certificate for the wall and the internal glow of having a star named after you (which, officially, it really is not). Both the star registry and TerraPass are selling the exact same thing -- fluff. (...)

This type of thing is incredibly amenable to fraud. If you sell more than 100% of an investment, eventually the day of reckoning will come when you can't pay everyone their shares (a la the Producers). But if people are investing in CO2 abatement -- you can sell the same ton over and over and no one will ever know.

The fact that Carbon offsets are just another unregulated scam was the topic on the Rush Limbaugh show today. Transcript. Rush even came up with a pretty funny parody commercial.

Update: Mark Steyn weighs in.