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On Wed, 20 May 2009 22:20:06 -0400, "James" <...@iglou.com
Al Gore Rakes in the Green
May 20, 2009
By: Joseph D'Hippolito
FrontPageMagazine.com
The Obama administration's decision this week to introduce
stringent new fuel efficiency standards for the U.S. car industry is a
testament to the power of climate change hysteria. The lobby goes
unchallenged in the corridors of power and will likely incur a
disastrous economic and human toll. (For an overview of the probable
cost in human lives, see Steven Milloy's "The Sad CAFE" in this edition
of FrontPage Magazine.) It is also a means to gaining political power
and, for the former vice president, personal riches.
The potential to cash in on Green hysteria is nicely summarized by
a cartoon in the daily Non Sequitur series drawn by Wiley. In the middle
of a desert stands a shack, the office of "Global Warming Realty." The
two proprietors flank a sign planted along the road advertising "Ocean
Front Lots Available." "It doesn't matter what we believe," one realtor
said to the other. "It only matters what they believe."
The world's most popular environmental alarmist appears to have
taken that advice to heart.
Al Gore - the former vice president, Nobel Prize recipient and
Academy Award winner for "An Inconvenient Truth" - has made tremendous
money off the global warming hoax. Since leaving office in 2001, Gore's
personal net worth exploded from $2 million to $100 million in 2007, as
reported by Investor's Business Daily.
Moreover, Gore hopes to make further big profits by creating
financial vehicles that ostensibly promote investment in renewable
energy sources - not that he would want anyone to know that.
On April 24, Gore testified before the House Energy and
Environment Subcommittee about pending cap-and-trade legislation.
Cap-and-trade policies, which Gore supports, enable businesses to
purchase credits for exceeding government-mandated limits on
carbon-dioxide emissions, thereby avoiding fines.
During the hearings, Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn asked Gore
about his involvement with Kleiner Perkins, an environmental
venture-capital group that Gore joined as a partner in 2007. Kleiner
Perkins, Blackburn said, "invested about a billion dollars in 40
companies that are going to benefit from cap-and-trade legislation that
we are discussing here today.
"Is that something that you are personally going to benefit from?"
Blackburn asked.
Gore replied: "The transition to a green economy is good for our
economy and good for all of us, and I have invested in it but every
penny that I have made I have put right into a nonprofit, the Alliance
for Climate Protection, to spread awareness of why we have to take on
this challenge."
However, Investor's Business Daily reported that in March 2008,
during a convention in Monterey, Calif., Gore revealed to his audience
that he had "a stake" in various environmental enterprises and
encouraged investment in them instead of what he called "subprime carbon
assets," tar sands and oil shale.
Two months later, Kleiner Perkins announced that it would invest
$500 million in the Green Growth Fund, which specializes in
environmental technology - potentially increasing Gore's stake.
Another congressman, Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, told Gore
during the hearing, "and I know you've got interests with Goldman
Sachs." Steven Milloy, science correspondent for Fox News and author of
Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan To Ruin Your Life and What You
Can Do To Stop Them, described what followed:
"Gore made facial gestures that implied he had never even heard of
Goldman Sachs. Gore then replied, No.'
"Rep. Scalise continued, ... well, that's been reported. If - is
that not accurate?'
"Gore replied, No. I wish I did, but I don't.'
Yet the former vice president has extensive, complex and personal
connections with Goldman Sachs.
In 2004, Gore helped found and became the chairman of Generation
Investment Management, which participates in cap-and-trade by purchasing
carbon credits. Among the founders are three Goldman Sachs officials.
Mark Ferguson served as the joint head of European research for Goldman
Sachs Asset Management. Peter Harris directed international research for
Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
But the biggest name is Henry Paulson - the former Goldman Sachs
chairman and Pres. George W. Bush's Secretary of the Treasury who
designed last fall's massive government bailout of various financial
firms.
Serving as GIM's managing director is David Blood, who once worked
as the CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
GIM - and, by extension, Goldman Sachs - are major players in
cap-and-trade. Deborah Corey Barnes wrote in Human Events that GIM
exercises "considerable influence" over the Chicago Carbon Exchange
(CCX) and its British equivalent, the Carbon Neutral Company. Both
exchanges transform the carbon credits their members purchase into
investments or donations to agencies that produce or promote
non-petroleum energy sources.
CCX's members include Ford, DuPont, Dow Corning and the states of
Illinois and New Mexico. CCX also owns 50 percent of the European
Climate Exchange, which features such members as Shell, British
Petroleum, Barclays - and Goldman Sachs.
In 2006, Goldman Sachs paid $23 million for 10 percent of CCX's
shares. Also that year, Goldman Sachs supplied $2.3 billion in grants to
study ways to regulate or reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, and $1
billion to projects designed to generate energy without petroleum.
Gore's relationship with Goldman Sachs extends even to investing
in oil exploration! Kleiner Perkins, where Gore works as a partner,
combined with Goldman Sachs last year to invest $65 million in
Terralliance, which develops software to make drilling more efficient.
"As a Kleiner Perkins partner, Al Gore must have known, if not
approved of the Terralliance deal, and that it involved Goldman Sachs,"
Milloy wrote. "At the very least, under partnership law, such knowledge
is legally imputed to him as a partner."
What about the Alliance for Climate Protection, Gore's non-profit
"The group favors more stringent environmental policy regulations
on the private sector and especially wants cap-and-trade legislation so
that companies will be forced to lower their greenhouse gas emissions
and buy carbon credits."
Naturally, companies would have to join CCX (if they had not
already done so) and purchase credits from the organization that Gore
and Goldman Sachs helped establish. Those credits, in turn, would help
finance projects that could make even more money for Gore and Goldman
Sachs.
"Whatever its impact on the environment, the cap-and-trade carbon
scheme is sure to boost the economic and political prospects of people
and groups that are behind it," Barnes wrote. "Before the company
collapsed under the weight of financial scandal, Enron under CEO Ken Lay
was a key proponent of the cap-and-trade idea. So was BP's Lord John
Browne, before he resigned last May under a cloud of personal scandal."
The global warming hoax not only offers its promoters the
opportunity for massive profits. It also provide another rationale for
self-benighted elitists to promote their utopian visions of the future -
and, like all utopian visions, they are fundamentally totalitarian.
John Holdren - Pres. Obama's new science advisor and a disciple of
zero-population advocate Paul Ehrlich - wrote more than 30 years ago
that technological progress, especially in developed countries, must be
sacrificed for global ecological harmony.
"Only one rational path is open to us-simultaneous de-development
of the (overdeveloped countries) and semi-development of the
underdeveloped countries, in order to approach a decent and ecologically
sustainable standard of living for all in between," Holdren and Ehrlich
wrote in the introduction to their 1971 book, Global Ecology. "By
de-development we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer
gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence."
Two years later, the pair combined with Paul Ehrlich's wife, Anne,
to write the following in Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions:
"A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality
environment in North America and to de-develop the United States. . . .
Resources and energy must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses
in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of
underdeveloped countries. This effort must be largely political."
Such "largely political" means can range from putting the CEO's of
large energy companies on trial for crimes against humanity (as Front
Page Magazine's Ben Johnson reported in his article, "Obama's Biggest
Radical") to preventing opponents from expressing contrary opinions.
Lord Christopher Monckton, former science advisor to British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher, was scheduled to testify alongside Gore at
the April 24 Congressional hearing. But the Democrats - led by the
committee chairman, California Rep. Henry Waxman, who is co-sponsoring
the cap-and-trade bill being considered - refused to let him appear.
Lord Monckton told Marc Morano from ClimateDepot.com that he found
out when his plane landed in Washington the day before he was scheduled
to testify.
"The Democrats have a lot to learn about the right of free speech
under the U.S. Constitution," Lord Monckton said. "Congressman Henry
Waxman's refusal to expose Al Gore's sci-fi comedy-horror testimony to
proper, independent scrutiny by the House minority reeks of naked fear.
"Waxman knows there has been no global warming' for at least a
decade. Waxman knows there has been seven and a half years' global
cooling. Waxman knows that, in the words of the UK High Court judge who
condemned Gore's mawkish movie as materially, seriously, serially
inaccurate, the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any
scientific view,'
"The House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated, so they slammed
the door of the Capitol in my face. They are cowards."
Lord Monckton is not alone. More than 700 scientists from around
the world have signed the Senate's minority report disputing the claims
about man-made global warming. By contrast, only 59 scientists signed
the "Summary for Policymakers" published by the United Nations'
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But if Gore and his allies ultimately succeed, they will add an
immense and unnecessary weight to the heavy financial burden many
American families already carry. The Congressional Budget Office
reported that reducing carbon-dioxide emissions by 15 percent would cost
each American family $1,600.
Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University
of London, believes that inducing such financial stress plays a
fundamental role in the global warming hoax:
"Global warming' has become the grand political narrative of the
age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and
human choices." But at least some of its exponents believe in raking in
the profits of capitalism, however disingenuous their "truths" may be.
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