George Soros gave Ivanka's husband's business a $250 million credit line in 2015 per WSJ. Soros is also an investor in Jared's business.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Pakistan flood forecast was known at least 10 days ahead but news was withheld from residents by European agency and Pakistan itself-BBC

2/1/11, Global warming profiteers give cover for Pakistan criminal government responsible for floods and deaths, Paki officials demand more cash




Pakistan floods were forecast at least 10 days before they happened but the information was withheld by a London company and by Pakistan itself, which resulted in deaths (a crime). Those on board the global warming ponzi scheme have eagerly used photos of the flood as proof of global warming rather than focusing on actual crimes that led to deaths.

1/31/11
, "Pakistan flood warning 'not passed on'," BBC

"A study has suggested that the effects of last year's floods in Pakistan could have been less catastrophic if European weather forecasts had been shared with Pakistan.

The American Geophysical Union said the forecasts could have given up to

  • 10 days' advance warning of the floods.

The study said this could have allowed the authorities in northern Pakistan to take preventative measures.

  • The monsoon floods affected 20 million people and one fifth of the country.

At least 1,500 people died in the deluge.

The American Geophysical Union said the information

  • did not reach Pakistan because of a "lack of cooperation between the forecasting centre and Pakistan".

Pakistan's own weather agency also did not forecast the floods, the organisation added.

"This disaster could have been minimised and even the flooding could have been minimised," said Peter Webster, a professor of earth and atmospheric science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and lead writer of the study.

"If we were working with Pakistan, they would have known eight to 10 days in advance that the floods were coming."

The study, which used data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), found that the floods could have been predicted if the data had "been processed and fed into a hydrological model,

  • which takes terrain into account".

The London-based ECMWF, however, said it did not

  • "give out weather forecasts and weather warnings to the general public
  • or media".

ECMWF scientist Anna Ghelli was quoted as saying that the organising provided forecasts to its members and co-operating states and

  • "they are responsible to prepare forecasts for the public and advise the authorities in their own countries"."


ap photo, Pakistan floods. top photo, postcolonialites.com
=====================

So it wasn't America's fault after all. ed.
====================

Reference: 8/18/10, "Illegal logging by Pakistan's timber mafia increased flooding devastation," Treehugger.com, Matthew McDermott


.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Buddies in climate cash Maurice Strong and Al Gore at Asia-Pacific global warming fest, June 2009



from MaximNewsNetwork

.

UK Met Office, a tool of the State, is physically incapable of objectively delivering a product in which the monarchy has a financial interest

Since the UK Met Office has been central to the world effort to transfer money away from the American middle class due to alleged climate crime, everything it does is relevant to me:

1/28/11, "The Met Office winter forecast lie is finally nailed," Autonomous Mind

"And heads must roll.

With compliments to Katabasis whose FOI request has been dealt with more quickly than mine… The information in the FOI response he has received today and written up in a detailed blog post goes into much more detail than Bishop Hill’s release from the Quarmby audit team.

A look at the information makes clear there is nowhere left for the Met Office to hide. The Met Office has been caught ‘cold’ lying about its winter forecast in a disgraceful attempt to salvage its reputation. Its claim that it forecast the cold start to the winter lays in tatters thanks to an

  • exchange of emails between the department and the Cabinet Office.

As a result the Met Office is completely discredited. Also utterly discredited is the BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin, who on the Met Office’s behalf used a column in the Radio Times (later carried in the Telegraph and the Daily Mail) to state that:

In October the forecaster privately warned the Government – with whom it has a contract – that Britain was likely to face an extremely cold winter.

It kept the prediction secret, however, after facing severe criticism over the accuracy of its long-term forecasts.

(My emphasis in bold italic above and below) Harrabin went on to say in his piece that:

Why didn’t the Met Office tell us that Greenland was about to swap weather with Godalming? The truth is it [The Met Office] did suspect we were in for an exceptionally cold early winter, and told the Cabinet Office so in October. But we weren’t let in on the secret. “The reason? The Met Office no longer publishes its seasonal forecasts because of the ridicule it suffered for predicting a barbecue summer in 2009 – the summer that campers floated around in their tents.

The email exchange in the screenshot below proves this is a lie. The Cabinet Office civil servant (bottom message) confirms the weather outlook supplied by the Met Office earlier that day is what the government will use in its ‘Forward Look’. The Met Office employee (top message) agrees with it.

The all important sentence is the first. ‘The Met Office seasonal outlook for the period November to January is showing

  • no clear signals for the winter’.

The Met Office knew this was the case when it sent Harrabin scurrying off to spin its lie that the Met Office did suspect we were in for an exceptionally cold early winter, and told the Cabinet Office so in October‘.

  • The briefing to the Cabinet Office contains no such warning –

and vindicates the parliamentary answer given by Francis Maude when questioned about the forecast the government received from the Met Office.

What is worse is that the Met Office knew this, yet with its claim tried to place responsibility for the lack of prepareness for an extremely cold start to the winter

  • on government inaction.

Harrabin added to this by saying he had put in a FOI to the government (referenced in this post) to discover what they were told, the insinuation being it was the government that had something to hide. This is very dangerous ground that leans towards the possibility of the Met Office and a BBC reporter engaging in a joint effort to undermine the government’s credibility.

This leads us to ask a serious question that must be answered: How is it possible that Roger Harrabin could claim the Met Office line he was retailing was the ‘truth’ with such certainty?

  • If Harrabin had seen the evidence and still spun his line then he has knowingly lied to the public
  • If he spun his line without seeing the evidence then he is utterly incompetent and the public can have no faith in the stories he broadcasts and publishes on the BBC
Either way Roger Harrabin’s position is now untenable and in addition to resigning he must make a full public apology. As for the Met Office, the buck stops with the Chief Executive, John Hirst, who has looked on as this false narrative was constructed and insinuations were made to deflect criticism from his department,
  • yet did nothing to correct it.

We now have the truth. It is what many people have suspected since the story materialised. It’s now time for those who are funded by taxpayers’ money and who engineered the deception, and those who allowed it to happen, to pay the price for their actions. Over to the executive board of the Met Office and the trustees of the BBC…

=================

Comment to Autonomous Mind post sums it up

This will be whitewashed, as all such has, will and must be. All journalists have their pension hopes pinned on renewables

  • and carbon trading.

Most of the main players in politics are neck deep in peddling the same. This has been in train for decades and has an inertia beyond imagining.

No-one capable of rocking the boat, let alone exposing this whole charade, will do so. Every now and again an example is made, very publicly – such as the Andy Gray affair this very week.

If you don’t line up you join the dole queue.

I have been following this for a long time and apologise for seeming negative. I would love nothing more than a solution."...

==============================

Reference: 10/25/10, "Queen set to earn millions from windfarm expansion," UK Independent, Andy McSmith

Reference: 12/31/10, "One's in the money! Why Prince Charles's secret 20-year campaign could make him the richest king in history," UK Daily Mail, G. Levy

Reference: 12/21/10, "GWPF Calls For Independent Inquiry Into Met Office's Winter Advice," Dr. Benny Peiser


via Tom Nelson


BBC, a tool of the state, mirrors the present monarchy's need for global warming to exist. BBC is physically incapable of being a news source.

If there is no CO2 danger, then no need for wind turbines (which need fossil fuel in order to operate anyway), and no future turbine rental income to pay Prince Charles' servants:
1/29/11, "How BBC warmists abuse the science," UK Telegraph, C. Booker

"The timing was immaculate. Last Tuesday, across a two-page extract from the memoirs of Peter Sissons, the senior BBC newsreader, was the headline: “The BBC became a propaganda machine for climate change zealots – I was treated as a lunatic for daring to dissent.” The previous evening the BBC had put out a perfect example of the zealotry which had made Mr Sissons, as a grown-up journalist, so angry. Horizon’s “Science Under Attack” turned out to be yet another laborious bid by the BBC to defend the global warming orthodoxy it has long been so relentless in promoting.

Their desperation is understandable. The past few years have seen their cherished cause crumbling on all sides. The Copenhagen climate conference, planned to land mankind with the biggest bill in history, collapsed in disarray. The Climategate emails scandal confirmed that scientists at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had distorted key data. The IPCC’s own authority was further rocked by revelations that its more alarmist claims were based not on science but on the inventions of environmental activists. Even the weather has turned against them,

  • showing that all the computer models based on the assumption that rising CO2 means rising temperatures have got it wrong.

The formula the BBC uses in its forlorn attempts to counterattack has been familiar ever since its 2008 series Climate Wars. First, a presenter with some scientific credentials comes on, apparently to look impartially at the evidence. Supporters of the cause are allowed to put their case without challenge. Hours of film of climate-change “deniers” are cherrypicked for soundbites that can be shown, out of context, to make them look ridiculous. The presenter can then conclude that the “deniers” are a tiny handful of eccentrics standing out

Monday’s Horizon exemplified this formula to a T. The scientist picked to front the progamme was Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, now President of the Royal Society

  • (which has been promoting warmist orthodoxy even longer than the BBC).

The cue to justify the programme’s title was all the criticism which greeted those Climategate emails leaked from Sir Paul’s old university, East Anglia, showing how scientists had been manipulating their data to support the claim that temperatures have recently risen to unprecedented levels.

One of the two “deniers” chosen to be stitched up, in classic BBC fashion, was the Telegraph’s James Delingpole. He has spoken for his own experience on our website. Still worse, however, was the treatment of Professor Fred Singer, the distinguished 86-year-old atmospheric physicist who set up the satellite system for the US National Weather Bureau. We saw Nurse cosying up to Singer in a coffee house, then a brief clip of the professor explaining how a particular stalagmite study had shown temperature fluctuations correlating much more neatly with solar activity than with levels of CO2. This snippet enabled Nurse to imply that Singer’s scepticism is based on one tiny local example, whereas real scientists look at the overall big picture. No mention of the

challenge the CO2 orthodoxy from every angle."

=======================

Reference: 1/25/11, "Wind power's dirty little secret," The Daily Bayonet

Reference: 12/31/10, "One's in the money! Why Prince Charles's secret 20-year campaign could make him the richest king in history," UK Daily Mail, G. Levy


via Tom Nelson

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Arizona drops support of Obama EPA CO2 campaign and drops out of Western Climate Initiative cap and trade

Among reasons are that Arizona uses more nuclear power than other states, and they don't have sufficient staff to carry out Obama's EPA mandates anyway. More people are realizing CO2 endangerment is a hoax which will ride the 'sustainable' industry gravy train until it gets the last penny of evil Americans.

1/28/11, "Arizona pulls support for EPA's greenhouse gas endangerment finding," GreenWire, Nelson, NY Times

"The state of Arizona, which had supported the Obama administration's decision that greenhouse gases are a threat to human health and the environment, has dropped out of the massive court battle over U.S. EPA's new climate regulations, court records show.

In a filing (pdf) yesterday, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne (R) asked to withdraw the state from the litigation in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia. The court approved the request this morning.

Arizona had taken the Obama administration's side during the tenure of former Attorney General Terry Goddard (D), who gave up the position to launch an unsuccessful challenge to Gov. Jan Brewer (R) last year.

The state was among the 20 states to join briefs in support of the "endangerment finding," which is the linchpin for efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the federal Clean Air Act. In one recent filing, Arizona joined other states and environmental groups in calling the December 2009 document a "compelling agency record demonstrating that adverse climate impacts have already occurred, and are continuing to occur."

As recently as Jan. 10, Arizona was still signing its name onto briefs in support of EPA's position in the case, even as some state

  • officials criticized the way the agency had implemented its new rules.

Since then, it appears that Horne has had a change of heart. A spokesman for the new attorney general, who was elected in November and sworn in at the beginning of January, could not be reached for comment by deadline.

Arizona has a smaller carbon footprint than most U.S. states due to its reliance on nuclear energy and has also become a renewable energy hub, in large part because its sunny climate is well-suited for solar energy.

Arizona has also backed out of the Western Climate Initiative, a planned

  • cap-and-trade program made up of Western states (ClimateWire, Feb. 12, 2010).

And while Arizona had agreed with EPA on the threat of climate change, the state raised concerns about the way the agency was implementing its new regulations. Unable to revise its own permitting rules as quickly as EPA demanded, Arizona reluctantly handed part of its air pollution permitting program

  • to federal officials late last year.

For the time being, large facilities that need permits for their greenhouse gas emissions will be getting them from federal officials rather than the state office that handles permits for other types of air pollution.

Notably, the state had been critical of EPA rules limiting greenhouse gases from cars, light trucks or industrial facilities, which took effect on Jan. 2. Ben Grumbles, the former director of Arizona's Department of Environmental Quality, wrote a letter to EPA last summer saying that he had

  • qualms with the "tailoring" rule, which limited the regulations to the largest pollution sources.

"Arizona is not in a position to expend significant resources chasing rules contrary to the state's policies on renewable energy and that may not survive legal challenges," wrote Grumbles, who led EPA's water office during the George W. Bush administration (Greenwire, Sept. 10, 2010).

Since taking office, Horne has taken several legal jabs at the Obama administration.

Last week, he broke from his predecessor by joining a lawsuit that seeks to block President Obama's health care reforms from taking effect.

He has also jumped to the defense of Arizona's controversial illegal immigration law, which was challenged by the Obama administration last year. When Goddard was still in charge, Brewer decided to replace him with private attorneys after he raised concerns about the state law.

The reversal by Arizona follows a trend in which positions on the climate litigation have lined up with states' partisan leanings. "...

--------------------------------

Maybe if Obama hadn't sued the state of Arizona for trying to protect its own citizens, or had even allowed the federal government to do its first job, which is to protect its citizens....Just a thought. ed.


via Tom Nelson

Friday, January 28, 2011

Climate deal to formalize enslavement of middle class Americans to openly criminal dictators of Africa, UNDP, others

Editor's note: This post was criminally hacked. Large portions of the middle art were erased. Instead of deleting it, I'm leaving it up as evidence among many others of mine. Hopefully the links that weren't vandalized still work so you can click to them if you wish.
-----------------------------
It is already spoken of as a done deal, a huge fortune said to be going to Africa (from middle class US taxpayers). We are handed over as chattel without a peep to organized crime including the UN, free as it is from criminal and civil prosecution.

1/27/11, "How Well Does a U.N. Agency Do Its Pricey 'Green Job'? Not That Well, Study Says," Fox News, George Russell

"Exclusive: How much money did the United Nations Development Program, the U.N.'s flagship anti-poverty agency,
  • spend to create 5,280 "green" jobs around the world?

UNDP has said the price tag is $53.9 million—an average of $10,208 per job spent in 2010 on 135 environmental projects world-wide.

But according to documentation obtained by Fox News, the projects that generated those jobs have a total cost of about $1.68 billion—which would work out to a much more staggering average figure

  • of about $288,700 per job.

The wildly differing size of those price tags for a fairly trivial amount of employment emerged as part of a muted rebranding effort at UNDP. Top management is trying to burnish some of its credentials in the face of internal critics who feel that when it comes to

  • merging environmental management and economic development to solve poverty problems,

UNDP is not very good at its job.

The stakes for UNDP are high. UNDP spends about $570 million a year on implementing environmental programs and projects,

  • mostly on behalf of outside donors.

Half of that funding comes from the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), which calls itself the world’s "largest funder of projects to improve the global environment." GEF is a partnership which includes 182 governments, as well as numerous international institutions, non-governmental organizations and the private sector.

  • The United States contributed $86.5 million to the GEF last year, according to a U.S. Treasury official.

Since 1991, GEF has dispensed $9.2 billion, plus more than $40 billion in additional co-financing, around the world, on its environmental mission. Its focus is on fostering environmental projects that cut carbon emissions and preserve the planet, and that have "global benefits."

Much of that project money, about $286 million a year, has been showered on UNDP. According to an internal evaluation of UNDP’s environmental stewardship, environmental projects funded by GEF and managed by UNDP’s array of national offices around the world are now

  • a substantial portion of the global bureaucracy’s livelihood.

Indeed, the report says, “GEF financing has become essential in at least 15 of the 29 country offices interviewed [for the study], to pay for professional staff and maintain a substantial portfolio of activity. The poverty area [of UNDP’s work] receives much less external funding,” and instead comes from the organization’s regular, or “core” budget. Moreover, “the GEF is not mandated to tackle poverty,” as the study puts it.

In other words, UNDP manages environmental projects in part to pay the rent. For the most part, the evaluation notes, its environmental work has been kept separate from its main focus on development and energy projects in the poorer parts of the world—

  • a situation that the study concludes has not been necessarily good for either.

All of that, however, appears to be about to change—because the world-wide environmental movement is also apparently changing its view of the relationship between development and the environment, especially in the wake of the failed attempt to get a new, global climate agreement in Copenhagen in December, 2009.

The old view was that poverty and environmental decay went hand in hand, as

  • poor people abused scarce natural resources in the struggle to survive.

The new view is that the so-called “poverty-environment nexus” can be managed differently so that environmentalist projects can lead poor people to win new employment and better standards of living in the global “green economy”—especially at a time when

  • traditional anti-poverty aid from budget-conscious Western nations
  • is drying up.
The new, virtuous “poverty-environment nexus” is increasingly hailed by environmental activists as
  • a vehicle for transferring new wealth to the poor.
And that praise is likely to rise to a crescendo in the months ahead,
  • culminating at a new Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in May, 2012—
two decades after the first Earth Summit in the same city put environmentalism solidly on the global agenda.

The explicit aim of the Rio+20 Summit is to give increased momentum to the notion of “sustainable development in a global “green economy,” and to establish new instruments of

  • “global governance” to make those changes permanent.

One sign of the impending change of emphasis is UNDP’s curiously specific claim about creating

  • 5,280 jobs through its environmental projects.

The claim popped up—with no price tag attached—in a top management response to the internal evaluation, which is highly critical of the agency’s effectiveness and desire to use environmental tools to manage that nexus differently.

Both the study and the response are due to be presented to UNDP’s 36-nation supervisory Executive Board,

  • which meets starting on Jan. 31.

According to the 112-page study document, UNDP’s ability to marry its environmental projects and anti-poverty efforts has been “haphazard” and uneven; “monitoring and evaluation

  • for the poverty-environmental nexus

is almost entirely missing in UNDP”; and the agency’s environmental agenda is driven mainly by opportunities to secure funding from outside sources for its activities.

Moreover, the study says, some UNDP staff are “genuinely not convinced that the poverty-environment nexus is necessary or workable,” and “hard data on the benefits of the approach are not available.” It adds that

  • “if integrating environmental management and poverty reduction is to become a widespread reality,

evidence must be available demonstrating that it produces benefits in a timely and efficient manner.” But currently, “there is little incentive to include, monitor and evaluate the role and benefits of including poverty-environment linkages in projects.”

Above all, the study says UNDP itself apparently does not yet know how to go about the task of blending its environmental role with its anti-poverty mission.. According to the internal report, the agency’s “strategies and policies do not provide a conceptual framework or model on how to include the poverty-environment nexus in policy advice or programs.”

The lack of anti-poverty consciousness on the environmental side of UNDP’s business is matched, apparently, by a lack of environmental consciousness on the economic development side of the house.

Buried in a footnote in the study is the observation that “UNDP does not currently require environmental impact assessments for its projects, though a new safeguards policy is being developed that may require environmental assessments for some projects.” Elsewhere, the report snipes that the lack of environmental safeguards is “based apparently on the assumption that UNDP projects do not cause environmental harm.”

(By contrast, the World Bank, which is the mainstay of global anti-poverty financing, has an environmental impact policy that dates from 1991.)

Bottom line: UNDP has learned how to talk a good game on using environmentalism to alleviate poverty, but “policy is not yet systematically translated into practice.”

Yet the evaluation also argues that UNDP still has a major part to play in the global green transformation, in large measure due to the fact that its country offices are the most widely spread U.N. presence around the world and it already plays an important role as a development coordinator.

  • It also gives UNDP credit for helping GEF to “recognize how these projects affected poor people in the areas around [them]"

Finally, the study warns that “if these efforts are to be more successful in the future, UNDP will need a better understanding of why mainstreaming environment, particularly in relation to poverty reduction, is proving so challenging.”

Click here for the full report

In its 11-page rejoinder, UNDP is clearly eager to show the Executive Board that it is getting with the program. It declared it will start

  • breaking down the barriers between its traditional anti-poverty efforts and environmental areas

early this year. New environmental safeguards on its work—approved by management just as the critical evaluation was being finalized-- will be rolled out through 2011. (But they will apply only to new projects, a UNDP spokesman told Fox news.)

“There is a need for further analytical work to broaden the measurement of poverty,” the agency’s management declares in its response. Moreover, “UNDP will continue to further integrate poverty reduction and environmental protection into GEF-financed projects,” saying this new, improved approach is “is already generating relevant socio-economic quantitative data that previously was not captured.”

Click here for the UNDP management response.

Then comes its highly specific and very modest jobs claim: “2010 data obtained from 135 project implementation reviews (47 percent) of GEF projects implemented by UNDP indicate that approximately

5,820 jobs have been created and 2,730 (46 per cent) of these jobs are held by women.”

But where did those curiously specific figures come from? And what was the full cost of creating them, which UNDP did not mention?

UNDP initially provided summary details of the projects that generated the employment figures—but not the total cost—to Fox News on request.

UNDP also said that the 5,280 job figure was “likely an under-estimate,” since it had never tallied the employment impact of its environmental work before 2010.

But when asked the total cost of the 135 projects, UNDP at first did not answer. It later added that “total disbursements for these projects was $53.9 million in 2010”—which only added to the fog, since the agency also told Fox News that they were among a group of GEF projects “that have been under implementation for more than one year as of July 2010.”

Using GEF websites, Fox News was able to locate the project documents for 128 of the 135 GEF projects on the list provided by UNDP, and discovered they were funded roughly 25 percent from GEF resources, and the rest from various governments agencies and other participants.

But there the figures provided by UNDP and those recorded on the GEF website parted company. According to the GEF website, the projects cited by UNDP appear to have cost the trust fund alone at least $430 million. With co-financing added in,

  • the total jumped to a whopping $1.675 billion.
Click here for a list of the UNDP projects and their cost

Those would be eye-popping figures anywhere. But they are even more dramatic when measured against the average annual incomes of the countries where the GEF projects are located.

These range from desperately poor nations like the Democratic Republic of Congo (per capita income : $160 in 2009) and Niger ($340) to moderately more prosperous Pakistan ($1,000) and Uzbekistan ($1,000) to such middle-class nations as Chile ($9,470) and Croatia ($13,720).

Moreover, most of the programs had little or nothing directly to do with poverty in any form. Mostly, they are concerned with such legal or quasi-legal matters as zoning, regulatory improvement, or augmenting the boundaries of environmental protection zones.

Those on the list provided to Fox News, for example, include “consolidation and implementation of the Patagonian Coastal Zone Management Program” (cost: $2.8 million), “Capacity building for planning, decision making and regulatory systems and awareness building/sustainable land management in severely degraded ecosystems in Cuba ($29.3 million) , and “Integrated conservation of priority globally significant migratory bird wetland habitat” in Kazahkstan ($38.4 million)

Other projects appeared to be directly concerned with upgrading the skills of bureaucrats. One such:

“Strengthening national capacity in Rio Convention implementation through targeted institutional strengthening and professional development” in Uzbekistan

  • ($640,000).
Moreover, the documentation associated with many of the projects appeared to be in vast disarray. A number of the projects on the UNDP list appeared to have
  • ended years ago.
In others, parts of the documentation were not included on the website. In still others, portions of the electronic paperwork
  • appeared to have been openly altered.
Whatever the helter-skelter state of affairs, it seemed clear that in many cases, substantial amounts of money had gone into government and regulatory offices in countries where corruption is often not unknown, and perhaps to pay for consultants who were
  • helping those officials renovate their administrations.
But that too raised a question: didn’t those people
  • already have jobs?"

----------------------------


11/18/11, "UN IPCC Official Admits 'We Redistribute World's Wealth By Climate Policy'," NewsBusters (item is third paragraph of Edenhofer

"EDENHOFER): Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War....First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy....One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."...

(NewsBusters): "For the record, Edenhofer was co-chair of the IPCC's Working Group III, and was a lead author of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report released in 2007 which controversially concluded, "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."

As such, this man is a huge player in advancing this theory, and he has now made it quite clear - as folks on the realist side of this debate have been saying for years - that this is

  • actually an international economic scheme designed to redistribute wealth."...




via Climate Depot

By now everyone knows 'green' jobs are a myth or a lie but Obama keeps pitching them like this week in Wisconsin

Obama acts like George Bush only much worse and at a worse time. Both destroyed the lives of ordinary Americans and in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan (which are just business deals), sent them to suffer and die without a shred of conscience. The idea of 'green jobs' is just another mechanism. ed.

1/28/11, "Green jobs...at what cost?" MacIver Institute, Wisconsin

"Despite millions in government grants and subsidies, the Manitowoc company President Barack Obama called a glimpse of the future lost $4.2 million last year and cannot promise shareholders it will be profitable in the foreseeable future.
  • Even Orion Energy Systems admits there are a lot of risks and uncertainties in the green energy industry.

“Many technologies do not become commercially profitable products, applications or services despite extensive development and commercialization efforts,”the company stated in its most recent 10-K SEC filing on June 14, 2010.

The last five years have been a rollercoaster for Orion. It lost a total of $3.9 million in 2005 and 2006, made $4.3 million in the next three years, and then finally lost $4.2 million in the 2010 fiscal year.

  • “We may continue to incur further net losses and there can be no assurance that we will be able to increase our revenue, expand our customer base or be profitable,” the report indicates.

Investors have responded to the company’s volatility, and Orion stock has plummeted in the past four years. It closed 2007 at $18.82 a share. By the end of 2010 it was $3.34.

Regardless, President Obama is putting his, and the U.S. taxpayers’, money on companies like Orion.

“It’s important to remember that this plant, this company has also been supported over the years

  • the Small Business Administration, but by
  • tax credits and
  • awards we created

to give a leg up to renewable energy companies,” Obama said at the Orion plant on Wednesday.

The State of Wisconsin has also given its share trying to help Orion to succeed. Since 2005, the state has given the company

  • $350,000 in community development zone tax credits,
  • $506,000 in economic development funds, and
  • $420,000 from the Wisconsin Energy Independence Fund.
Plus the company got another
  • $260,000 in stimulus funds for a State Energy project.

In addition to direct aid, public policy has also helped the struggling company. Wisconsin law requires that 10 percent of all electricity sold in the state come from renewable sources by 2015. Orion knows that without government intervention like that, there would be little prospect for the green economy.

“The reduction, elimination or expiration of government mandates and subsidies or economic or tax rebates, credits and/or incentives for alternative renewable energy systems would likely substantially reduce the demand for, and economic feasibility of, any solar photovoltaic and/or wind electricity generating products, applications or services and could materially reduce any prospects for our successfully introducing any new products, applications or services using such technologies,”

  • the SEC report states.

Currently Orion has about 250 workers and, according to Obama, could have as many as 300 working there by the end of the year. However, tracking green jobs and the return on that taxpayer subsidized investment can be difficult to track, as the MacIver News Service reported in 2010. At that time the wind industry was claiming thousands of manufacturing jobs directly tied to wind energy, but MacIver News Service was only able to identify three dozen jobs, after calling every single primary manufacturer on the wind energy industries database.

Regardless, as evidenced by his State of the Union Address

  • and his comments in Wisconsin this week,

President Obama policies will continue to emphasize green energy companies like Orion Energy Systems in Manotowoc."


via Climate Depot


After Massachusetts solar scam, economist says energy policy must be separate from 'jobs' programs -NPR

.
1/28/11, "Loss Of Solar Jobs Has Mass. Rethinking State Aid," NPR, Tovia Smith

"Hundreds of employees of a solar panel factory in Massachusetts are looking for new jobs after the company announced that it's moving the plant to China.

Three years ago, Massachusetts wooed Evergreen Solar to locate in a former Army base in Devens that had been converted into an office park, hoping it would help boost the state's reputation as

  • a hub for green industry.

Now, many are second-guessing if and how government should be in the business of helping private business.

On paper, it was a match made in heaven. Evergreen moved in and began to reap millions of dollars in fringe benefits, from

  • tax breaks to free rent and cash grants.

Evergreen grew from 100 to 800 employees. This month, the state woke up to what was basically a note on the kitchen table saying Evergreen was leaving....

"There was shock at every level," echoes Jack Burroughs, an environmental health and safety engineer, who got the news just one week after starting work at Evergreen.

  • "I left a very good job in order to come here.

I thought this was a more long-term career opportunity."

While many have directed their anger at Massachusetts for giving too generously to Evergreen, Burroughs says the problem may be that the manufacturer didn't get enough assistance at the federal level.

"I like the idea of the state supporting an industry such as this," he says. "But maybe there needs to be

Gov. Deval Patrick and Greg Bialecki, the state's secretary of housing and economic development, agree."...

  • (Translation: This just makes the crime bigger. ed.)

(continuing): ""We feel like we gave it our best shot," Bialecki says. "And I think, realistically, we have to talk about what role the federal government is going to play to keep manufacturing here and not to let it go overseas."

Evergreen's CEO Michael El-Hillow agrees, saying

  • U.S. manufacturers cannot compete with companies in China that get far more government support.

He says Washington needs to do more to nurture fledgling industries, including changing government procurement policies to require buying American, and easing bank regulations and import duties that

  • put American manufacturers at a disadvantage....

But others scoff at the notion of a company that was given so much looking for even more. "It sort of has remarkable chutzpah," says Harvard University economics professor Edward Glaeser.

And, Glaeser says, Massachusetts officials should have known better than to believe that a manufacturing plant could make it

Bradley H. Jones Jr., a Republican state representative, is one of many voices calling for a new review process for future government subsidies and incentives to private businesses.

He says the state was seduced by the lure of a sexy new industry.

"There was a leading with your heart and not your head," Jones says. Officials were all caught up in the idea that "this is going to put us on the map, and we're going to be green, green, green, and this is going to be great," Jones says. "And I think that served to cloud judgment."

Even Democratic supporters, like state Sen. James Eldridge, whose district includes Fort Devens, where the plant is located,

  • are now expressing morning-after regret.

"I admit I was mistaken," Eldridge says. "I learned my lesson."...

But Harvard's Glaeser says it would be a big mistake to measure the state's energy policy by how it works as a jobs program.

"We need good energy policy," he says. "But the point of that policy should not be to maximize the number of employees. If we try to do energy and jobs together, I think we get

  • neither a good energy program nor a good jobs program. "

In other words, Glaeser says, Massachusetts may have lost 800 jobs, but if the state's investment helps

  • then it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

via Lucianne.com

In Afghanistan infants are routinely fed opium instead of food-CNN

1/24/11, "Afghan infants fed pure opium" CNN, by Arwa Damon, Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan

"In a far flung corner of northern Afghanistan, Aziza reaches into the dark wooden cupboard, rummages around, and pulls out a small lump of something wrapped in plastic.

She unwraps it, breaking off a small chunk as if it were chocolate, and feeds it to four-year-old son, Omaidullah. It's his breakfast -- a lump of pure opium.

"If I don't give him opium he doesn't sleep," she says. "And he doesn't let me work."

Aziza comes from a poor family of carpet weavers in Balkh province. She has no education, no idea of the health risks involved or that opium is addictive.

"We give the children opium whenever they get sick as well," she says, crouching over her loom.

With no real medical care in these parts and the high cost of medicine, all the families out here know is opium.

It's a cycle of addiction passed on through generations.

The adults take opium to work longer hours and ease their pain.

Aziza's elderly mother-in-law, Rozigul, rolls a small ball in her fingers and pops it into her mouth with a small smile before passing a piece over to her sister.

"I had to work and raise the children, so I started using drugs," she says. "We are very poor people, so I used opium. We don't have anything to eat. That is why we have to work and use drugs to keep our kids quiet."...

"Opium is nothing new to our villages or districts. It's an old tradition,

  • something of a religion in some areas,"

said Dr. Mohamed Daoud Rated, coordinator of the center.

"People use opium as drugs or medicine. If a child cries, they give him opium, if they can't sleep, they use opium, if an infant coughs, they give them opium."...

Most Afghans aren't aware of the health risks of opium and only a few are beginning to understand the hazards of addiction."...


via MichaelSavage.com

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Germany halts payments to UN Aids fund on news billions siphoned off fraudulently-BBC

UN spokesman said corruption is to be expected. Germany concerned the goodwill of its taxpayers was being abused, said other pathways could be explored to help the poor (than what the UN provides).

1/27/11, "Germany halts Aids fund payment over corruption claims," BBC

"Germany has suspended its annual payment of more than 200m euros (£172m) to the Global Fund against Aids, TB and malaria, following corruption claims.

Germany is the third-biggest donor to the UN-backed fund, which has an annual budget of

  • more than $20bn (£12bn).

Media reports speculate that billions of dollars may have been siphoned off.

  • But the Fund said the sums concerned were far smaller and it had "one of the most intensive investigation regimes of any international organisation".

It says the misuse was discovered by its own investigative unit. It says $34m of misappropriated or unsubstantiated funds have been demanded back as a result.

The Global Fund is the biggest single source of money to tackle the three big killer diseases.

  • The allegations of corruption were raised in reports by The Associated Press (AP) news agency....

Jon Liden, a spokesman for the Global Fund, confirmed to the BBC that the misuse of some $34m of funds had been uncovered in nine countries by the Fund's own inspector general, following investigations in 33 of the 145 countries the Fund is active in.

He said the most grievous instances of fraud had been found in

  • Mali, Mauritania, Djibouti and Zambia -

but said in three of those cases it was the Fund's own regular audits which picked up the irregularities, and that they had been made public over previous months by the Fund itself.

He acknowledged that there "are probably more instances of misuse to be uncovered", but said media reports suggesting the sums concerned could amount to billions were likely to be wildly inaccurate....

  • He said corruption was a "necessary risk"

the Fund had to take when disbursing funds in countries racked by poverty and war, and claimed the Fund had saved more than seven million lives....

A spokesman for the German development ministry, Sebastien Lesch, told the BBC that he understood Fund representative Christoph Benn would be visiting the ministry on Monday to explain the situation.

Mr Lesch defended the German decision to suspend the funds, saying the move aimed to safeguard the interests of German taxpayers and denying the ministry had acted hastily.

He said he expected the Fund to clear up the matter, but also pointed out that

  • using a multilateral agency such as the Fund was not the only way to disburse aid.

"This type of fund which gives the disbursement responsibility to partner governments is

"There are other instruments which are more suited to dealing with the money in the correct way - for example, bilateral programmes. There are different ways.

"The Fund is susceptible to corruption and the minister has always made clear [it] is a very good instrument to fight disease

  • but it is not the only instrument."

.


UN chief using same global warming strategy as Obama and Frank Luntz, do whatever you want, just describe it in different words

Like Obama and Frank Luntz plan, ie, do anything you want, just choose your words more carefully. UN Chief says "sustainable development" #1, climate #2, so no real change.

1/27/11, "Ban Ki-moon ends hands-on involvement in climate change talks," UK Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg
  • 'UN secretary general will redirect efforts to making more immediate gains in clean energy and sustainable development'
"Ban Ki-moon UN secretary general who made global warming his personal mission, is ending his hands-on involvement with international climate change negotiations, the Guardian has learned.

In a strategic shift, Ban will redirect his efforts from trying to encourage movement in the international climate change negotiations to a broader agenda of promoting clean energy and sustainable development, senior UN officials said.

The officials said the change in focus reflected Ban's realisation, after his deep involvement with the failed Copenhagen summit in 2009, that world leaders are not prepared to come together in a sweeping agreement on global warming – at least not for the next few years....

UN officials say Ban will no longer be deeply involved in the negotiations leading up to the next big UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, meeting at Durban in December 2011.

"He will continue to encourage leaders to aim for a higher level of ambition but there will need to be less day-to-day stuff," said one UN official. ...

Ban will focus on broader issues of sustainability, which will be in the spotlight at a summit in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, marking 20 years since the first Earth summit.

"Because the circumstances have changed, the nature of his engagement is changing," Orr said. "The relative balance of his time is

  • shifting towards getting it done on the ground out there."

UN officials, and those who closely track climate change negotiations, insist that Ban has not lessened his commitment to finding a solution to climate change. Ban has called global warming "the greatest collective challenge we face as a human family"....

However, they say he now believes there are more immediate gains to be made in mobilising international finance to support a green economy in developing countries than in trying to persuade world leaders to commit to deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Others inside the UN system as well as in world capitals have been circling towards a similar conclusion as Ban: that gains in clean energy technology and energy efficiency could do more in the near future to reduce emissions. They could then drive the overarching deal that the UN still sees as necessary....

Meanwhile, he (Moon) is in the course of expanding his advisory team on sustainable development to about a dozen people ahead of the Rio meeting.

"The things that are moving faster are the investments in renewable energy, the kind of actual investments and changes on the ground that will make a difference," said Tariq Banuri, director of the division of sustainable development at the UN's department of economic and social affairs. ...

The strategic shift by the UN secretary general in some ways mirrors thinking in Washington,

The first public indication of a shift in direction was delivered in a speech to the UN general assembly on 14 January, in which

Ban ranked sustainable development as the lead item on his agenda for 2011,

  • ahead of climate change,

human rights, security and humanitarian aid for Haiti."...


via Tom Nelson

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