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Guardian UK, 5/26/08: "Billions of pounds are being wasted in paying industries in developing countries to reduce climate change emissions, according to two analyses of the UN's carbon offsetting programme.
A working paper from two senior Stanford University academics examined more than 3,000 projects applying for or already granted up to $10bn of credits from the UN's CDM funds over the next four years,
Governments consider that CDM is vital to reducing global emissions under the terms of the Kyoto treaty."
(WHY NOT? THE US GOVERNMENT simply ROBS ITS OWN TAXPAYERS TO THROW CASH INTO SLUSH FUNDS OF THE GLOBAL MAFIA). ed.
(Guardian, continuing): "To earn credits under the mechanism, emission reductions must be in addition to those that would have taken place without the project. But critics argue
A separate study published this week by US watchdog group International Rivers argues that nearly three quarters of all registered CDM projects were complete at the time of approval, suggesting that CDM money was not needed to finance them.
"It would seem clear that a project that is already built cannot need extra income in order to be built," said Patrick McCully, director of the thinktank in California. "Judging additionality has turned out to be unknowable and unworkable.
New York ACORN and a tangled web of affiliates own or manage nearly 1,500 housing units across three boroughs and draw in an estimated $5.7 million in rents, fees and profits from sales.
information flew back and forth between bloggers, activists and talk show hosts and the result was an authentic grass roots movement.
“The Mobs” that panicked Democratic politicians and their media press corps decry represent the one thing that a phony grass roots movement like the Obama campaign fear the most… being confronted with an authentic grass roots movement. Their campaigns against radio and TV hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck reveal that
but the only people they could find to represent them at the Town Halls were
the SEIU goons they packed the halls with. And there’s nothing like a “grass roots movement” that you have to bus in, which consists purely of people who are set to profit from your legislation.
The Republican leadership is almost as nervous, torn between seizing the moment or standing aside
to avoid being accused of “extremism”.
The same folks who thought the best way to run a Presidential campaign was by
Meghan McCain represents the future of the Republican Party
and that public opinion is determined by the op ed page of the New York Times and the Washington Post, naturally have no clue how to respond to the situation.
The Republican leadership has become detached from its base and increasingly has no idea how to connect to the concerns of ordinary Americans.
But as appealing as populist rhetoric about fiscal conservatism may be, the whole power of being a congressman rests in handing out pork.
Even Ron Paul who tried to brand himself as a leader in fiscal conservatism turned out to have his share of earmarks and family members on the payroll.
And that unfortunately is the default standard for politicians, and though some may hide it better than others, a politician is a man who works on your payroll to spend your money on behalf of his supporters, which is why expecting fiscal conservatism from congress is like expecting a lion to go vegetarian.
Politicians listen to their constituents when they say they want lower taxes, less regulation, less immigration and no NAFTA. Sometimes they even mimic the rhetoric or even get out front to lead the parade, but when they’re in the Senate cloakroom, it quickly becomes a whole different ballgame. But politicians can’t do anything except on behalf of the people—and rarely has there been such a showing of the people coming out to denounce a policy supposedly being enacted on their behalf.
The Town Hall protests tore away the philanthropic facade behind ObamaCare.
It was not some imaginary wealthy “Brooks Brothers Brigade” that went into the Town Halls,
but ordinary working class Americans who firmly and vocally said, “No Thanks” to the ObamaCare boondoggle. And that has become a major gamechanger.
Obama and his cronies were counting on fighting the Republican party.
They were counting on taking swipes at Limbaugh or Beck. They were not counting on serious public opposition. Denouncing the health care protesters as right wing extremists did not help. Trying to claim that the Obama socialist photoshop was racist was a desperate move that jumped the race card shark. By their very presence, the protests made ObamaCare controversial, and simply denouncing them was not going to be able to reverse that.
The more the media denounced them and the more SEIU thugs attacked them; the more the general public came to see ObamaCare as a controversial program.
While the Republican party may have been neutered for now, Obama finds himself in the very uncomfortable position of playing, “Obama vs the People”. The Obama Administration was counting on being able to run up the tab by the trillions with no serious congressional opposition. But while that worked long enough to subsidize UAW auto companies and bailout Obama’s Wall Street buddies, after two thirds of a year in which the economic situation kept sliding downward, the American people began grumbling about his lack of results.
Like most politicians, Obama did not understand that the voters did not put him into office so that he could run up a deficit of trillions of dollars composed of pork, giveaways
and senseless centralization.
Obama ran for office promising hope and change. The only things he delivered were payoffs to Wall Street donors and UAW union featherbedders. And just as he was about to deliver a whopping payoff to his SEIU union Marxist buddies, the whole thing collapsed because the American people reached the point where they had enough....
The State Senate assigned him credit for other people’s legislation. In the United States Senate, he ran for higher office after only a 100 days in the chamber.
Like a precocious third grader who suddenly finds himself in college, Obama had no idea how to work with congress to get legislation passed.
And the same media which sneered at McCain’s claims that he had the experience that Obama didn’t, was now forced to admit that the lack of focus and credibility at the White House level was a serious problem.
While Obama was still coasting on his “historic election”, a lot of congressmen were getting ready for their nerve-racking midterm elections. The Republicans were still shellshocked, and liberal Democrats were arrogant, but the conservative Democrats who had given their party the majority in 06 and 08, felt vulnerable. Cut out of the loop by an increasingly radicalized White House and congressionalleadership, and threatened by midterm elections that traditionally cut down seats belonging to the ruling party, they became the legislative weak point in ObamaCare. And once the Town Hall protests made it safer to do nothing, than to do something, ObamaCare hit an invisible brick wall.
Using the media, Obama squashed most opposition by established politicians,
but he has now come face to face with a vocal popular revolt at the Town Hall protests and a quieter but vaster sense of dissatisfaction by the American electorate. Republican and Independent approval is peeling away, followed by that of many Democrats, leaving the naked emperor cloaked only in his own base and without a national mandate for change. And even his own supporters are beginning to suspect that
Obama may have nothing more to offer beyond magazine covers and high minded rhetoric.
The White House has tried to fight back by targeting first Limbaugh and then Beck, demonstrating a profound contempt for the views of the grass roots opposition, which they imagine will go away if a few talk show hosts will just stop “inciting it.”
But what the left fails to understand is that if Limbaugh and Beck went off the air tomorrow, the situation would not change in any significant way.
Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are not some sort of aberrant phenomenon,
and while the Democrats occupy the executive and legislative castles, they are finding that those positions may give them power, but also invest them with responsibilities in the middle of a crisis that they are simply not capable of living up to.
Throughout it all Obama has relied on his media manufactured charisma to shield a multitude of sins. But incompetence is one sin that cannot be covered by magazine covers. In the Senate, Obama could have gotten by easily enough. As a Vice President, he could have posed endlessly for magazine covers while accomplishing nothing. But in the Oval Office, he had to deliver, and the only thing he delivered was the hijacking of America at the hands of his radical legion of czars. Now is the moment of truth where Obama faces the people, and begins to deal with the consequences of the disaster he has created, the deficit, the lost jobs and the economic crisis he tried to exploit for political gain. The case of Obama vs the People has just begun." Canada Free Press, "Obama vs the People," by Daniel Greenfield, 9/7/09, via Lucianne.com
It’s no surprise that Alpine Group tops the list, given its environment and energy pedigree. The shop was co-founded in 1996 by Richard White, former legislative coordinator for the late Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.), who often bucked his party as an environmental champion, and by James Massie, a longtime energy lobbyist. Alpine Group’s stable of climate lobbyists includes former House Energy and Commerce Committee Democratic aide Courtney Johnson, former Senate Appropriations Republican staffer Les Spivey and
former aides to three Democratic senators — Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio — who could tip an eventual Senate vote. Alpine Group’s list of 13 climate clients includes Ford, BP America, BNSF Railway, 3M, Duke Energy and NRG Energy.
Ogilvy Government Relations — 13 clients
The firm formerly known as the Federalist Group was founded by Stewart Hall, a former legislative director for Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who opposed similarlegislation last year. Joining Hall in representing some of the biggest oil and chemical groups — the American Petroleum Institute and the American Chemistry Council, as well as power companies and agriculture groups — are
Julie Dammann, onetime chief of staff to Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), and Dean Aguillen, a former senior aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Reliant Energy, Chevron, Monsanto and the National Milk Producers Federation count themselves among Ogilvy clients.
Patton Boggs LLP — 11 clients
Patton Boggs represented 10 local governments in the first quarter, in addition to chemical manufacturer INEOS. Nearing a half-century old, Patton Boggs has been the king of K Street since it eclipsed Cassidy & Associates as the highest-paid lobbying firm in 2003, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Patton is home to a pair of municipally minded climate lobbyists: Tanya DeRivi, a former adviser to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Marek Gootman,
a former adviser on community development policy and intergovernmental affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Morgan Meguire, LLC — 11 clients
This specialized firm is led by Deborah Sliz, who started her career in the late 1970s as counsel to one of Capitol Hill’s most legendary environmental advocates, the late Rep. Morris Udall (D-Ariz.). Udall’s son Mark is now Colorado’s freshman Democratic senator. Sliz’s climate clients include some of the nation’s biggest public and consumer-owned water and power utility groups. Among them are Southern California’s Imperial Irrigation District, the Tennessee Valley Public Power Association and the Northwest Public Power Association.
Another Morgan Meguire climate lobbyist, Karen Zanoff, came to the firm after serving as a staffer on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as an adviser to former Rep. Karen McCarthy (D-Mo.).
McBee Strategic Consulting — 10 clients
The client list at McBee Strategic Consulting is diverse, and so are its lobbyists. McBee's roster includes a bipartisan pair of former counsels to the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee (Democrat Samuel Whitehorn and Republican Robert Chamberlin) and a bipartisan pair of former legislative aides to Washington state lawmakers.
Steve McBee worked for Sen. Maria Cantwell when she served in the House. Ashley Slater was director of legislative affairs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President George W. Bush. Her colleague Glynda Becker also served in the Bush administration as associate political director.
Ryan, MacKinnon, Vasapoli and Berzok LLP — 9 clients
The first two name partners, Thomas M. Ryan and Jeff MacKinnon, both have close ties to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Ryan was a Democratic aide and MacKinnon was legislative director to Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who is the ranking minority member of the committee. The firm represents the
Some of the nation’s largest coal-intensive power companies, including Southern Co., Duke Energy and Energy Future Holdings, as well as coal-hauling rail company CSX, are on the climate client roster of Bracewell & Giuliani.
The so-called super-greenhouse gases are the focus of Alcalde & Fay’s lobbying work. Not carbon dioxide, but an array of gases used in refrigerators and air conditioners and called hydrofluorocarbons, which are thousands of times more potent in trapping heat in the atmosphere. A possible phase-down of these gases is one of the issues lawmakers are grappling with. Alcalde & Fay’s two lead climate lobbyists, Kevin Fay and David Stirpe, worked on regulatory controversies before, including a long-fought battle over asbestos. Now they represent the HFC manufacturer and user group the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy.
Other clients include Dow Agrosciences, American Pacific and the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute.
Colling Swift & Hynes — 7 clients
With former Rep. Allan Swift (D-Wash.) leading its climate lobbying effort, this firm has been a magnet for companies from an industry that once was key in Swift’s home state: the paper business. Clients include Rock-Tenn Co., the Newark Group, White Pigeon Paper and Smurfit-Stone Container. In addition to Swift, the team includes Louis Hengen, once an aide to former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Frances McPoland, who coordinated federal recycling and waste reduction programs in President Bill Clinton’s White House
Hunton & Williams LLP — 7 clients
While McBee nabbed two former Senate committee lawyers, Hunton & Williams landed two former Republican counsels to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Mark Menezes and Joseph C. Stanko are among the climate lobbyists
in which the court determined that the agency could regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. However, that issue is now very much in play for the firm’s climate lobbying clients on Capitol Hill,
local officials, entrepreneurs and crime gangs are suspected of collusion in the construction of lucrative wind farms before their eventual sale to multinational companies.
Italian and EU subsidies for the building of wind farms and the world’s highest guaranteed rates, €180 ($240, £160) per kwh, for the electricity they produce have turned southern Italy into a highly attractive market exploited by organised crime.
Roberto Scarpinato, a veteran anti-Mafia prosecutor in the regional capital Palermo, told the Financial Times that his investigation, which began last week, was focused on the three large provinces of Palermo, Trapani and Agrigento.
An earlier investigation into a case near Trapani in western Sicily resulted in eight arrests in February, leading to accusations of a suspected nexus between a leading Mafia family that offered money and votes in
“Operation Wind” revealed Mafia promises to local officials in Mazara del Vallo of money and votes in exchange for help in approving wind farm projects.
The Mafia suspects were alleged to be linked to Matteo Messina “Diabolik” Denaro, a fugitive clan boss on ltaly’s most wanted list.
Prosecutors suspect the hand of the Mafia in fixing permits and building wind farms that are then sold on to Italian
In an effort to assert its control over the sector, the Mafia is suspected of destroying two wind towers that were in storage in the port of Trapani after their delivery by ship from northern Europe, local officials told the FT.
A handful of people control the wind sector. Many companies exist but it is the same people behind them,”
said Mr Scarpinato, whose investigations have focused on the evolution of the Mafia into a modern business organisation.
Sicily’s Cosa Nostra is evolving and finding new business opportunities, including the renewable energy sector, by exploiting its historic grip over territory, construction and ability to corrupt local officials.
Several wind farms built by companies suspected of being linked to the Mafia have not functioned for one or two years,
which did not produce electricity,” the prosecutor said.
The regional governments in Sicily, as well as Calabria and Basilicata on the mainland, have suspended the authorisation of new wind farms in part because of suspected criminal involvement and confusion over the real ownership of the ventures.
Most, if not all, of Sicily’s wind farms began as projects by local developers, some of whom
International Power of the UK is the largest wind power operator in Italy. Others include Italy’s Enel and Germany’s Eon through its purchase of part of Endesa of Spain in 2007. France’s EDF also has assets. While the international companies knew the identity of their Sicilian developers, there is no evidence they were aware of Mafia involvement.
Although Italy is lagging badly in meeting its EU 2020 emissions targets,
International Power became the single largest operator in 2007 with its purchase of the Maestrale portfolio of mostly Italian wind farms, including five in Sicily, for €1.8bn
Italy ranks fourth in Europe in terms of installed wind power capacity." by Guy Dinmore via the Drudge Report
Organizer Mark Meckler singled out GOP opportunists who wouldn’t give him the time of day weeks ago — and then wanted to hitch their wagons to the Tea Party bandwagon at the last minute.
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MAN FREELY BUYS HOUSE NEAR RAILROAD TRACKS WHERE HOUSES ARE CHEAPER BECAUSE IT'S NOISY. THEN HE WHINES ABOUT THE NOISE, DECIDES YOU SHOULD PAY TO IMPROVE HIS CIRCUMSTANCE. APPLIES TO THE STATE OF OHIO, RECEIVES FEDERAL PORKULUS:
Greg McNeil made a request for $168,300 on behalf of his homeowners association. The project was one of 149 transportation projects the state selected to receive stimulus money - and
A report issued on the sidelines of U.N. talks in Bonn working on a climate treaty said that a flood of forest carbon credits could also slow the fight against global warming and divert billions of dollars from investments in clean technology.
"Cheap forest credits sound attractive but a closer examination shows they are a dangerous option," Roman Czebiniak, Greenpeace International political adviser on forests, said of estimates by Kea 3 economic modeling group in New Zealand.
About 175 nations are meeting in Bonn from March 29-April 8 to discuss measures for fighting global warming. Among them are ways to slow
Trees soak up carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow and release it when they are burned or rot. Placing a price on intact trees could help save forests from the Amazon to the Congo basin from logging and land clearance by farmers.
"Including forest protection measures in carbon markets would crash the price of carbon by up to 75 percent and derail global efforts to tackle global warming," Greenpeace said.
The report projected the 75 percent fall in prices, to 3.9 euros ($5.16) per tonne by 2020 from a baseline of 16.05 used in the report, under current national policies for limiting emissions.
CLEAN ENERGY INVESTMENTS
"Countries like China, India and Brazil could lose tens of billions of dollars for clean energy investments if forest protection measures are included in an unrestricted carbon market," it added.
There is so far no agreement on how to put a price on forest carbon under a new treaty. Suggestions range from carbon trading to new taxes in developed nations to raise cash. Governments aim to agree a new U.N. climate treaty in Copenhagen in December.
A European Commission report last year also said the European Union should not let industry meet its climate goals by funding forest conservation in tropical nations before 2020.
"Allowing companies to buy avoided deforestation credits would result in serious imbalances between supply and demand," it said. It said deforestation emissions were three times bigger than emissions regulated by the EU emissions trading scheme.
And New Carbon Finance analyst Aimie Parpia estimated in a report earlier this month that unlimited use of forestry could cut carbon offset prices by 40 percent by 2020.
Greenpeace's own forest proposal is to allow industrialized countries to meet a part of their emissions reduction goals by buying cheaper "tropical deforestation units" as an addition to deep cuts in domestic emissions.
These units, however, would not be tradeable on markets for industrial emissions." via Lucianne.com
THE AVERAGE AMERICAN DOESN'T BEGIN TO HAVE THE TIME TO KEEP UP WITH GLOBAL CRIMINALS--in concert with most elected officials in the Beltway-- ROBBING THEIR OWN HOUSE FROM THEM WHILE THEY WORK THEMSELVES TO DEATH. sm
