Senate Dems to set up global warming task force

Senate Dems to set up global warming task force

8:06 PM 01/09/2014
Michael Bastasch

Senate Democrats are planning on setting up a global warming task force to revive the issue in Congress and help President Obama achieve the goals set out in his climate agenda.

Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer and Sheldon Whitehousetold reporters on Thursday that they would launch the task force with than a dozen members. They save they have the full support of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

“The purpose is to use the bully pulpit of our Senate offices to achieve that wakeup call,” Boxer told reporters who gathered in her office. “We believe that climate change is a catastrophe that’s unfolding before our eyes and we want Congress to take off the blindfolds.”

“We are defending against legislative riders that would roll back environmental laws, including the president’s climate initiative,” Boxer said.

Boxer chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works committee where she has made several attempts to highlight the effects of global warming. One hearing the committee held with climate experts backfired when none of the witnesses on the panel could counter evidence presented by scientist Dr. Roger Pielke, who argued that global warming is not causing extreme weather.

The California Democrat also introduced a bill with Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to tax carbon dioxide emissions and use the funds to support renewable energy development. That effort failed in the face of stiff resistance from Republicans and some Democrats.

“The goals of carbon pricing include curbing our fossil fuel use, encouraging lower carbon emissions, creating jobs and spurring innovation,” Boxer and Sanders wrote in a recent oped.

“Cutting carbon pollution will help keep our air and water clean and protect our children from respiratory illnesses such as asthma. It also will help families and businesses across America save money,” the Senators said. “There is a growing consensus that putting a price on carbon pollution is the most effective way to fight global warming.”

While Boxer and Whitehouse say a carbon tax is still something they want to pursue, the task force will focus on protecting existing federal and state efforts to combat global warming, including imposing a national green energy standard and improving energy efficiency in federal buildings.

“There is a lot we can do on climate and a lot of room for optimism on getting things done now that the American public is very clearly with us,” said Whitehouse, who has delivered a weekly Senate floor address on global warming for the past year.

Passing any sort of global warming bill will be difficult in the split Senate, and will most likely be killed in the Republican House. That is why President Obama has resorted to executive orders to achieve the goals he laid out in his climate plan.

Obama ordered the creation of a climate council in November that would help prepare the country for the effects of global warming. The council, however, is mostly chaired by Democrats and will include some of the president’s national security advisers.

“The Obama administration uses ‘climate change’ as an excuse to accomplish other goals,” said Daniel Simmons, director of regulatory and state affairs at the Institute for Energy Research. “Who knows why the administration is including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the Department of Veterans Affairs on a council to ‘prepare the national for the impacts of climate change.’”

http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/09/se...-task-force/2/

R.I.P.: Al Gore’s Chicago Climate Exchange Has Died
By Greg Pollowitz
November 7, 2010 9:45 AM

Steve Milloy at PajamasMedia writes:

Global warming-inspired cap and trade has been one of the most stridently debated public policy controversies of the past 15 years. But it is dying a quiet death. In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading – the only purpose for which it was founded – this year.

Although the trading in carbon emissions credits was voluntary, the CCX was intended to be the hub of the mandatory carbon trading established by a cap-and-trade law, like the Waxman-Markey scheme passed by the House in June 2009.

At its founding in November 2000, it was estimated that the size of CCX’s carbon trading market could reach $500 billion. That estimate ballooned over the years to $10 trillion.

Al Capone tried to use Prohibition to muscle in on a piece of all the action in Chicago. The CCX’s backers wanted to use a new prohibition on carbon emissions to muscle in on a piece of, quite literally, all the action in the world.

The CCX was the brainchild of Northwestern University business professor Richard Sandor, who used $1.1 million in grants from the Chicago-based left-wing Joyce Foundation to launch the CCX. For his efforts, Time named Sandor as one of its Heroes of the Planet in 2002 and one of its Heroes of the Environment in 2007.

The CCX seemed to have a lock on success. Not only was a young Barack Obama a board member of the Joyce Foundation that funded the fledgling CCX, but over the years it attracted such big name climate investors as Goldman Sachs and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the CCX’s highly anticipated looting of taxpayers and consumers – cap-and-trade imploded following its high water mark of the House passage of the Waxman-Markey bill. With ongoing economic recession, Climategate, and the tea party movement, what once seemed like a certainty became anything but.

CCX’s panicked original investors bailed out this spring, unloading the dog and its across-the-pond cousin, the European Climate Exchange (ECX), for $600 million to the New York Stock Exchange-traded Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) – an electronic futures and derivatives platform based in Atlanta and London. (Luckier than the CCX, the ECX continues to exist thanks to the mandatory carbon caps of the Kyoto Protocol.)

The ECX may soon follow the CCX into oblivion, however – the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. No new international treaty is anywhere in sight.

http://www.nationalreview.com/planet...greg-pollowitz

Scandal: Obama, Gore, Goldman, Joyce Foundation CCX partners to fleece USA


http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/def...?itok=GGxWf5Bl


Gregory DailOrange County Conservative Examiner

• Orange County Conservative

April 27, 2010

http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/...go-FAIRUSE.png

Glenn Beck breaks the biggest corruption story of the century yesterday and it doesn’t appear on a Front Page anywhere. Beck points the way to the 15 Trillion dollar scam that has some amazing players.
(See full transcript here)

First Glenn makes and astute point: If Goldman is really the bad guy, why are these people still on the job? The Goldman suit is a put up job!
• William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; was a partner and managing director at Goldman

• Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; spent 18 years at Goldman

• Mark Patterson, chief of staff to Tim Geithner; former Goldman lobbyist

• Philip Murphy; nominated for ambassador to Germany; former Goldman executive

• Diana Farrell; deputy director of the National Economic Council; formerly with Goldman

• Emil Michael; White House fellow; former investment banker with Goldman

Glenn tells us that a watchdog has steered him to the collusion between Barrack Obama, George Soros, Al Gore,Goldman Sachs, Franklin Raines (super crooked Fannie Mae head), CCX, and Generation Investment Management (GIM-London based co-founded by AL Gore).

Know the crooks and their roles:

George Soros, Joyce Foundation and connection to CCX.

What is CCX, the Chicago Climate Exchange, projected to gross 10 Trillion a year is Cap-N-Tax passes. Obama played a pivotal role in the formation of the CCX. (Click here for expose)

Barrack Hussein Obama, Board Member of the Joyce Foundation, funded the formation of the CCX. (

Valerie Jarrett is still on the board, Obama’s top adviser.) Obama sat on board and funneled money to Ayer’s brother (wild huh, just a guy in his neighborhood) and to form the CCX.

AL Gore--Goldman Sachs-- GIM: Hold on to your britches, London-based Generation Investment Management sees the Trillion and they purchased a huge stake in Chicago Climate Exchange (fifth largest shareholder.) The founder of GIM is none other than former Vice President Al Gore along with Goldman people. For example other founders are David Blood (former Goldman executive), Mark Ferguson (Goldman) and Peter Harris (Goldman) to name a few. “

Franklin Raines, mega crooked banker and bust Fannie Mae head, uses Fannie Mae (taxpayers money) to buy the technology to measure and manage carbon. The patent was award the day after Obama and Dems won the election.

Goldman Sachs owns ten percent of the CCX and its 10 Trillion a year potential. (CCX is 10% owned by Goldman Sachs (GS) and 10% owned by Generation Investment Management (GIM).) Gore, Goldman, and Cap and Trade - Tangled Web of Corruption

http://www.alipac.us/f19/%24candal-o...oldman-187381/

The Australians have wised up.

January 9, 2014
Australian Carbon Tax Repeal In The Balance

By Mary Swire.
Tax-News.com Hong Hong.

While the Australian Senate ponders legislation intended to repeal the country’s carbon tax law, the former chief executive of a greenhouse gas research centre has said that scrapping Australia’s carbon tax is “the right thing to do at this time.”

Peter J. Cook – who worked at the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies and on an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – claimed in The Australian that the levy has “proved inefficient as a mechanism for decreasing emissions.” Any reductions will have come from wind and solar and had “nothing whatsoever to do with a carbon tax and everything to do with the renewable energy target system.”

Last week, the Senate was urged by the Australian Industry Group (Ai Group) to “spare business and households additional cost and uncertainty,” and scrap the carbon tax. The Group warned of “great complications” should the Senate vote against the Government’s proposals. It is thought that electricity pricing and contracting deals will bear the brunt of any extended delays.

Group Chief Executive Innes Willox recommended that both the Labor Opposition and Green parties no longer focus on less crucial elements of the Government’s repeal package, such as the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Climate Change Authority. He stressed that resolving these issues was not urgent, because the two bodies do not impose any additional costs on energy. The Treasury should, therefore, “take the chance to repeal the core carbon pricing mechanism right away, giving energy users, generators and retailers the maximum chance to prepare.”

Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Coalition does not have a majority in the Senate. Although the Senate’s Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, which reviewed the repeal bills, is backing the Government on the issue, there does not yet appear to be a majority in favor of the repeal.. It found that the levy is “one of the highest and broadest carbon taxes in the world,” and has “had a significant impact on costs for Australian businesses and families.”

Willox says that Australians need “a sound policy basis for future investment.” To provide this, the country must “clear away the carbon tax and to focus on the major task of designing the Direct Action approach to meet the emission reduction targets to which Australia has committed.”

Cook suggests that for any price on carbon to have a positive impact, it would need be used “to directly support the research needed to develop and deploy emission-reducing technologies.” However, the former Labor Government provided “no such linkage,” with its carbon tax “targeted at broader budgetary issues and at social engineering rather than what its target should have been, namely clean energy engineering.”

The recently elected Coalition Government came to power with pledges to scrap the carbon tax. The Labor party has refused to support Government legislation to this end when the alternative remains Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s so-called “direct action plan.” As part of the repeal package, an Emissions Reduction Fund will be created, based on a “market-based mechanism,” and the Government will offer a series of positive incentives to reduce emissions.

The Government intends for the tax to be removed by July, 2014; but this is starting to seem unlikely. One theory is that Abbott wants the Senate to reject his bill twice, which would allow him to call another election for both houses of parliament.

http://realnewsaustralia.com/2014/01...n-the-balance/