Leaked agreement rocks Copenhagen

Leaked agreement rocks Copenhagen

By Europe correspondent Emma Alberici for AM

Representatives listen to Danish Prime Minister Lokke Rasmussen’s opening speech

Developing nations sidelined: Representatives from Antigua and Barbuda at the Copenhagen talks (AFP: Attila Kisbenedek)

The Copenhagen climate talks have been rocked by the leak of a draft final agreement which weakens the role of the United Nations in climate change negotiations and abandons the Kyoto Protocol.

The “Danish text” draft agreement, published by the UK’s Guardian newspaper, has been described as a dangerous document for developing countries.

Over the past week, parts of Denmark’s proposal have leaked into the public domain, but this is the first time it has been published in its entirety.

According to the Guardian, the secret agreement has been worked on by a group of individuals known as the ‘circle of commitment’.

It is understood to include Australia, the US, the UK and Denmark, which are all said to have finalised the deal in the past two days.

The document abandons the Kyoto Protocol, sidelines the United Nations in future climate change negotiations, and hands most of the power to rich countries.

The Kyoto Protocol relied on the principle that rich nations – responsible for the bulk of emissions – can and should be compelled to take on the biggest burden when it comes to cutting those emissions.

Under Kyoto, poorer nations were not required to act at all.

The leaked agreement not only brings the developing world into the frame, it allows rich countries to emit twice as much carbon as poor countries.

Representatives listen to Danish Prime Minister Lokke Rasmussen's opening speech

Developing nations sidelined: Representatives from Antigua and Barbuda at the Copenhagen talks – more on the story at (AFP: Attila Kisbenedek)

World Net Daily Banned From Copenhagen

Editor: A regular reader of this blog sent the story below – thank you.

Yesterday I spent most of the day calling major news outlets across Canada asking why they were not doing stories on the release of the emails exposing the fraud of MMGW.

I called CBC, CTV and Global news offices from Vancouver to Montreal – no one is interested in the story. Biggest story in years – yet no one is interested.  Why?

Simple – The very news outlets Canadians depend on for their news are withholding vital information from the Canadian public on purpose.

For years they have pushed the idea of MMGW and for them to do a real in-depth story on the “leaked emails” would discredit them as “real” news agencies.

I spoke with a researcher from Global and was dumbfounded when I was told the researcher had no knowledge of Bill C6 or Codex Alimentarius.

How is that possible?

The  sovereignty of Canada is at stake and our major news outlets appear to be both complicit and ignorant at the same time.

Will we allow ourselves to be governed by a group of unelected elitists?

That’s the question begging an answer!

.

Guess who U.N. banned from Copenhagen

WND’s credentials for coverage stalled, then denied


Posted: November 30, 2009
1:27 pm Eastern

 

© 2009 WorldNetDaily

WASHINGTON – The media coordinator for the U.N. climate-change convention in Copenhagen next week today formally denied WND and senior staff writer Jerome Corsi access to the meeting billed by some participants as a major step forward in global governance.

Axel Wuestenhagen, media coordinator for the event, admitted in his response that, after two weeks of deliberation on the matter, he consulted with U.N. officials in New York to make a decision about WND’s request.

“Having now reviewed the application and in consultation with the Media and Accreditation Unit in New York, regrettably, we are not in a position to grant accreditation in this instance,” he wrote. “As a for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit Western Journalism Center, we follow the U.N. guidelines on accreditation which specifies that advocacy publications of nongovernmental or nonprofit organizations do not qualify for media accreditation. Please note that the organization is under no obligation to accept your request if it does not meet U.N. standards and requirements for press accreditation.”

Joseph Farah, editor, founder and chief executive officer of WND, said the U.N. is grasping at straws for grounds to deny the news organization admittance to the convention – including completely bogus information about WND’s structure.

In a personal response to Wuestenhagen, Farah wrote: “Time is short, so I am responding directly as the founder and chief executive officer of WorldNetDaily to your complete misrepresentations as to WorldNetDaily’s structure and independence as a news organization.

“WorldNetDaily is NOT, as you mistakenly assert, a for-profit subsidiary of the Western Journalism Center. Neither is it an advocacy organization, though, like all news organizations, it does publish a broad spectrum of opinion – we believe, in fact, the broadest ideological spectrum of any news organization in the world,” he continued. “Neither has WorldNetDaily ever been a subsidiary of Western Journalism Center or any other organization.”

Farah continued: “The website WorldNetDaily.com began as a project of the Western Journalism Center in 1997. In 1999, the website was spun off as a completely independent for-profit corporation with no legal connection to its former parent. That was 10 years ago. I speak authoritatively on this subject as the founder of BOTH organizations, though I, like my company, WorldNetDaily, have no connection to the Western Journalism Center today.”

Farah also pointed out that many nonprofit news organizations have already been cleared for coverage of the Copenhagen convention, including the world’s largest, the Associated Press.

“Now that you have been made aware of the facts, we look forward to an expeditious approval of Dr. Corsi’s credentials for coverage,” he concluded. “If you have any more questions about our history or organization, I stand ready to address them so that our correspondent can make plans to be in Copenhagen.”

Farah said today that Corsi, as a senior staff writer for WND, was previously accredited for coverage of the U.N. He was admitted as a member of the press to cover Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s first address to the U.N. as president of Iran and for the appearance of President Bush.

Corsi is a two-time No. 1 New York Times best-selling nonfiction author and has served as a full-time senior staff writer for WND for many years, Farah said.

WND has already threatened the U.N. with legal action if the ban on Corsi is upheld.

“I vow that we will pursue all legal options to ensure that the free press is respected by these unaccountable global institutions,” said Farah.

Farah said WND is the largest independent English-language Internet news organization in the world.

“If WND is not permitted to cover a global event of this magnitude, the rights of all news organizations are threatened in the New World Order organizers hope to establish in Copenhagen,” Farah said.

The conference begins Dec. 7. WND is being represented by the U.S. Justice Foundation in the matter.

Recently, the first president of the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy, affirmed in a speech captured by the BBC his belief that “2009 is the first year of global governance with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step toward the global management of our planet.”

Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, asserts the real purpose of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen Dec. 7-18 is to use concern over “global warming” as a pretext to lay the foundation for a one-world government.

At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen “this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed,” Monckton told a Minnesota Free Market Institute audience at Bethel University in St. Paul.

Monckton warned that President Obama supports the idea and is ready to sign on the dotted line.

“Your president will sign it,” he said. “Most of the Third World countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regimes from the European Union will rubber-stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it. I read that treaty and what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created. The word ‘government’ actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity.”

He has warned the proposal would cede U.S. sovereignty, mandate a massive wealth transfer from the United States to pay reparations for “climate debt” to Third World countries and create a new “world government” to enforce the treaty’s provisions.

Meanwhile, in recent days, as WND reported, documents and e-mails retrieved by a computer hacker from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit indicate top climate-change scientists have manipulated data to hide cooling trends and worked together to marginalize scientists with opposing views.

The U.S. Senate’s leading global-warming skeptic says he plans to demand an investigation into the allegedly fraudulent data manipulation unveiled at the highly influential British research center.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said he knew scientists were “cooking” information years ago. The e-mails, he said, were the proof, and now something needs to be done.

“It is pretty serious,” Inhofe said. “And since, you know, Barbara Boxer is the chairman and I’m the ranking member on Environment and Public Works, if nothing happens in the next seven days when we go back into session a week from today that would change this situation, I will call for an investigation.”

Inhofe said he would ask for an investigation into the United Nations and its climate-change committee “on the way they cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.”

To contact Axel Wuestenhagen of the U.N., e-mail him here.

If you’re a member of the press and would like to interview Joseph Farah, e-mail press@wnd.com.

Climate Catastrophe Canceled

Editor:

Global Warming is a scam! Watch the video to understand how evil the plan and the people behind it are. The scam started with a directive from the Club of Rome and the rest is history.

 

The Finns have produced a half hour documentary that debunks the computer models predicting global warming and the IPCC’s use of climate data gleaned from the land of the reindeer and the Juhannus. Finnish scientists are not happy about their data being abused by the IPCC.
Subtitles in English are provided.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for this kind of penetrating analysis and criticism on American television.

Hat tip: John McMahon

Randall Hoven adds:

Wow! I finally watched the video. Here is what I remember of what our “scientists” will do:

(1) From a set of data, choose only the data points that support their theory, and ignore the rest.
(2) Refuse to release their data to other scientists and researchers.
(3) When new data refute their thesis, completely ignore the data.
(4) Show graphs upside down, without explanation.
(5) Assume a water-vapor feedback effect in computer models that is not only wrong, but also of the wrong SIGN, compared to physical observations.


This is bad, bad, bad. This is Orwellian bad. This is “get out of the house” bad.

American Thinker


more about “Climate Catastrophe Canceled“, posted with vodpod

 

China Building 500 Coal Plants

At the two minute mark of the video below, from Australia, we learn that China is building 500 coal plants over the next ten years — One new power plant every four days.

China is  exempt from KYOTO

Think About it!

In Ontario, Canada, the govt. is filling rural Ont. with wind turbines under the guise of saving the environment and closing our four coal plants. ( wind has never been responsible for the closure of any fossil fuel plant)

We are going to close four coal plants at the same time China builds one every four days.

Think About it!

In the USA Obama said he will bankrupt the coal plants.

Think About it.

The Scam is Huge

and

it’s not about saving the environment and it’s not Green

Think About it!

Where is Maurice Strong? Father of Kyoto and Mentor of Al Gore and David Suzuki

CHINA


Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the
industrialized civilizations collapse?
Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about
?”
- Maurice Strong, former Secretary General of UNEP

Think About it!

An Inconvenient Truth – The Reality!

Editor:

I’d like to thank Norma, a reader from South Africa,  for sending this article.

When I started researching  wind farms, it didn’t take long to realize global warming was a fraud.

As the late George Carlin said – “what do they want? more for themselves and less for everyone else.” (video on sidebar)

That in a nut shell, wraps up the reality of the global warming hoax, and wind farms are directly tied to the hoax. (no global warming – no need for wind farms)

The question then becomes – Are we going to let our ”so-called” leaders  get away with the lies and the bull, that will in the end, destroy our countries.

Write or call your newspapers, radio and tv stations. Let them know you intend to stop using their services until such time as they quit hiding the truth, and start printing and broadcasting some reality.

Enough with the corporate/UN garbage.

America may have a new President but the game is still the same.

Excerpt:

….There is a scientific consensus that the planet is warming ever so slightly. However, another inconvenient truth is that only 13% of the scientists—most of whom are funded by the oil industry, the environmentalists, or far left think tanks who believe global warming can be blamed on Republicans—believe that man-generated global warming is occurring. Eighty-seven percent of the scientific community knows that global temperature departures—both plus and minus—are cyclic events that are not caused by men nor can they be stopped by men since the origin of the heating and cooling comes from the sun and its affect on the Gulf Stream. Another inconvenient truth is that, currently, the global temperature departure, measured by NASA, is -0.05 degrees—over the past 50 years.

And finally, the inconvenient truth is that global warming exists not because it is fact but because its the excuse conjured up by the barons of business, the titans of industry and the princes of banking to justify the transfer of wealth from the affluent industrial nations to the human capital-rich third world nations where tomorrow’s consumers reside. The inconvenient truth is that global warming is a very transparent sham designed by evil men to force, through punitive environmental regulations, the wholesale transfer of not just jobs but entire industries from the industrial nations to the human capital-rich emerging economies where tomorrow’s consumers need jobs today—our jobs….

….When the inconvenient truth of Gore‘s Kyoto Protocol—which Bill Clinton signed, obligating the United States to the terms of the UN Global Warming Treaty even though the US Senate refused to ratify it—became public, most Americans believed that the vast right wing conspiracy was misrepresenting the terms of the agreement. Not true. Under the terms of the UN Global Warming Treaty, 134 of the 185 member nations were exempt and had no greenhouse gas restrictions. That was important because global warming has never been about global warming. Global warming has always been an issue about how to transfer jobs from the United States to the third world without Congressmen and Senators being run out of office. The inconvenient truth is the environmentalist Congressmen and Senators certainly did not intend to lose their jobs as they honored the wishes of their constituency! Not you—the ones with the thick billfolds who fill their campaign coffers. Now, that’s an inconvenient truth. Especially in an election year. The inconvenient question is—what are you going to do about it?

For full article please see: http://www.jonchristianryter.com/2006/052806.html

PRESS RELEASE-Space and Science Research

Editor:

I want to thank Norma, one of our readers,  for sending this important press release.

Since I started this blog, over two years ago, I’ve been saying that Global Warming is a scam and so are wind farms. The idea of wind farms was to save us from Global Warming/Climate Change caused by CO2 emissions.

CO2 never was a problem, therefore, there is no need for wind farms – CO2 was chosen as the “bogey man” to scare the populace into accepting the NEW WORLD ORDER!

Global Warming/Climate Change is and was a false fear cooked up by the Club of Rome and the IPCC, both arms of the UN.

Global Warming/Climate Change, pushed by the many NGO’s, all spawned by the UN or UN affiliated agencies, is the vehicle being used to gain ‘Control of the World’ and put in place the “New World Order” where everything and everyone will be ruled by a group of unelected elites, if they are successful.

If you haven’t noticed, it has been getting cooler not warmer for a long time now.

Please read the PRESS RELEASE and understand the scope of the SCAM that is being perpetrated upon you and your families.

The time has come for everyone, and I mean everyone, to call, write, fax. e-mail and visit your elected officials and demand a stop to this FRAUD.

It’s time to fill your local halls and churches and make plans to take back your communities and countries.

The  dangerous gas is not CO2 – it’s the gas being emitted every time one of the “GREEN CULT” members open their mouths.

The choice is yours – Live free – or accept the FRAUD  as reality!

Read the Green Agenda – NOW!

.

Space and Science Research Center 4700 Millenia Blvd. Ste. 175 Orlando, FL 32839 Tel: 407-835-3635 Fax: 407-210-3901 http://www.spaceandscience.net PRESS RELEASE SSRC 1-2009 Thursday, January 8, 2009 8:00 PM Obama Climate Change Advisers Holdren and Lubchenco Are Told Global Warming Is Over Time to Prepare the US for the New Cold Era The Space and Science Research Center (SSRC), today releases a letter mailed on January 1, 2009 to President-elect Barrack Obama’s nominated science adviser Dr. John Holdren and nominated NOAA administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco clearly stating that “…global warming is over; a new cold climate has arrived.” In this letter, SSRC Director John Casey calls on Dr. Holdren to immediately reverse course on global warming programs and start preparing the country for the next climate change. Since the early 2007 discovery of the solar cycles that according to Casey drive our climate over a period of about 200 years, he and later the SSRC have been on a mission to get the word out to government leaders and media representatives in order to prepare the US for the coming bitter cold era. In explaining the reason for this first press release of 2009, Mr. Casey says,” There can no longer be any doubt that the Sun has entered an historic period of dramatically reduced activity which will bring us many long years of deep cold weather. This was predicted by me and a few other scientists around the globe but of course we were not taken seriously because of the politics of global warming and the refusal of many media outlets to print or telecast alternatives to the now discredited man made global warming concept. According to national and international sources that monitor the Sun, what is happening on and in the Sun is nothing short of record setting, astounding, and at the same time worrisome. The solar wind is at its lowest level in fifty years. The surface movement on the Sun has slowed to record rates and according to NASA’s previous announcements is ‘off the bottom of the charts.’ Most telling is the current prolonged lack of sunspots between the normal 11 year solar cycles 23 and 24 which is about to set a one hundred year record for time without sunspots. NASA also has long since forecast that cycle 25 will be ‘one of the weakest in centuries.” All of these events in combination leave little doubt that a ‘solar hibernation’ lasting several decades delivering the coldest weather in over two centuries has in fact arrived.” In its last press release of 2008, the SSRC had warned President-elect Obama in its sternest language to date, of the coming cold and genuine apprehension about climate change campaign promises and recent appointments. The release expressed that such actions in support of anthropogenic global warming would create a punitive and restrictive atmosphere for scientists who oppose the belief that greenhouse gas emissions were the primary agents of climate change and that the ill-effects of the new cold weather without government assistance and preparation, would lead to a ‘worst case scenario’ for the American people. Director Casey repeated his long standing position on the next climate change with the comment, “The longer we delay the necessary nation-wide preparations for the coming cold era the more difficult it will be. If the extremist rhetoric of man made climate change advocacy takes hold in the Obama administration which at this point is at fever pitch, then the stage will be set for the new cold climate to catch us completely off guard and unprepared. This will cause many Americans to suffer needlessly.” He added further, “The Earth has been in a long term cooling trend technically for eleven years. The significant drop in global temperatures that also occurred between January 2007 and much of 2008 should have been enough for most observers to finally accept that global warming is over, except that this information was intentionally not passed on to the American people. Also and unfortunately, the Presidential campaign where both major parties continued to beat the drum of global warming and man made climate change only helped to cement in the flawed concept that mankind was more powerful and had more influence on the Earth’s climate than the Sun itself. This unbelievable idea has been pushed heavily by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This and the previous press release are intended to be no nonsense, to the point pleadings for some sanity in our government and the main stream media that have failed to accept the new climate reality. Specifically, it was the Sun and not man that caused the past twenty years of peak heating and it is the same Sun that through a dramatic decline in its activity will now bring us decades of extreme cold climate.” In a closing statement Casey reiterated, “The global warming of the past decades was caused by the Sun. It is now over. It will not return based upon the SSRC’s research, for at least thirty years. It will then return only because the Sun’s repeating cycles of activity are scheduled to pick up again at that time. We should not waste another minute, another penny in controlling something that simply does not exist, namely man made climate change and global warming. It is essential for the welfare of all Americans if not the world, that in light of these new and startling changes in the Earth’s temperature and the profound changes in the Sun, that the next administration initiate a top-down review and redirection of climate change policy as soon as President Obama takes office.” Letter to Dr. Holdren

To visit Space and Science Research Center and other press releases

My 500th Post

To celebrate my 500th post I decided to re-post my first.

In my fist post I posed the Question – Are wind farms a scam.

After much research, time and effort, I can confidently answer my own question with a resounding YES.

Is global warming a scam as well?  – YES.

If you want to be ruled by unelected officials from the UN then embrace the scam.

If  you want freedom for your country you must  reject the UN – One World Order and One World Religion.

Get to work educating your friends and neighbors.

Wishing everyone a very merry Christmas!

.

Beware! The Green Shirts Are Here

Agenda 21 Explained

Global Warming?

A United Green Religion

The Earth Charter and the Ark of the Ga

32K Scientists reject AGW “consensus”

Merry Christmas Poem – Time for everyone to Wake Up!

Carbon Trade Swindle Behind Gore Hoax

Will People Ever Learn?


.

Are Wind Farms a scam?

Posted on October 19, 2006. Filed under: Canadian wind farms, Canadian wind industry, Canadian wind news, Canadian wind power, Carol Mitchell MPP wind farms, Dwight Duncan wind farm wind energy Kincardine, Enbridge wind farm, Enbridge wind farm in Kincardine Ont., Energy Minister Dwight Duncan, Ontario wind energy, Ontario wind farms, Ontario wind industry, Ontario wind news, Ontario wind power, atomcat, wind farm Bruce County, wind farm in Kincardine | Edit This

I would like you to learn all you can about Wind Farms and Wind Energy.

Why the big rush for wind power?

Which Green is it about?

Is it about Green energy or is it about the Green money?

I hoped it was about Green Energy but the more I investigate the matter the more it looks like it’s about the Green Money.

You decide.

“Big money” discovers the huge tax breaks

Make a Comment

Make A Comment: ( 1 so far )

Climate ‘hockey stick’ is revived – Global Warming Scam Lives On

Editor: There’s been no warming for 10 years and the BBC reported that there won’t be any warming for another10 years.

Next decade ‘may see no warming’

20 years with no warming and now the same dumb fucks at the BBC say it’s getting warmer all the time .

Give it up. Here’s a video from 1958 warning of global warming. I’m still waiting.

Global Warming Video 1958

1922 the ice melted – and then it froze again!

Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt. November 2nd, 1922. Arctic Ocean

This whole game is so they can introduce a Carbon Tax. Period!

It’s time the world stood together and told these thieves to get their hands out of our pockets.

Want the truth – read the Green Agenda


By Richard Black

Environment correspondent, BBC News website


Extracting core (BBC)
Ice cores indicated that temperatures now are unusually high

A new study by climate scientists behind the controversial 1998 “hockey stick” graph suggests their earlier analysis was broadly correct.

Ten years on from the study that provoked all the ire, Michael Mann’s conclusion is that far from being broken, “the hockey stick is alive and well”.

But, the Penn State University researcher added: “If we want to understand things like El Nino and how it relates to climate change, it’s not enough to know just how anomalously warm the climate is today.

Full load of Bullshit at the BBC

NASA Discovers 70% Of Global Climate Due To Pacific Ocean Oscillations – Not CO2

Editor:
Apr. 25th 2007- Anthony Cary- High Commissioner for the United Kingdom stated at a
Club of Rome (Canada ) meeting. “There is no direct link between CO2 emission and climate change”.

How is everyone enjoying the scam so far?

From Strata-Sphere

Well, well. Congress learned something shattering today, which will
have the Church of Al Gore/IPCC running in fear of their lost
credibility. It has been scientifically demonstrated that 70% of the
Global Warming in the last century (and cooling in the last decade) is due to the Pacific Ocean Oscillations, not CO2:

One necessary result of low climate sensitivity is that
the radiative forcing from greenhouse gas emissions in the last century
is not nearly enough to explain the upward trend of 0.7 deg. C in the
last 100 years. This raises the question of whether there are natural
processes at work which have caused most of that warming.

On this issue, it can be shown with a simple climate model that
small cloud fluctuations assumed to occur with two modes of natural
climate variability — the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon (Southern
Oscillation), and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation — can explain 70% of
the warming trend since 1900, as well as the nature of that trend:
warming until the 1940s, no warming until the 1970s, and resumed
warming since then.

The gentlemen making this claim is the lead investigator one of NASA’s flagship Earth Observing Observatories (H/T Ice Cap). I have the honor of working on this mission on the periphery (Aqua), it is operated out of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

I posted on some of these effects yesterday.
What this means is no matter how much you change your CO2 footprint,
how much you try to be CO2 green, no matter how much liberal
governments tax you – you cannot save the planet from its natural
cycles. Remember, the draconian actions being proposed by the Church of
Al Gore/IPCC, which will run into the tens of trillions of dollars and
cripple the world economies, is only meant to reduce today’s CO2 levels
by a fraction.

Say they reduced the CO2 25%. Say the CO2 is the driver for the
remaining 30% of Global Warming (which it cannot be, but let’s just be
only half as ridiculous as the IPCC), then all that effort would only
impact 7.5% of the forces driving the global climate. The other 92.5%
would roll on, impervious to the effort. And since CO2 is not 100% of
the remaining 30% of the equation (more like 10%), a more realistic
expectation is that all the suffering that would go into dropping CO2
levels by 25% would result in a less than 1% change in the forces
driving our climate.

In other words, you might as well light a match to all that money
because it would have no effect, you would be throwing it away on a
fool’s errand.

Must be the week to bust myths, because this means all those efforts
to drive down CO2 emissions are a scientifically proven waste of time.
From Strata-Sphere

T. Boone hard-wired for subsidies

Editor:
Picken-s your pockets and Gore-ing your rights. What a team.
Are Picken’s TV ads part of Al Gore’s 300 million media campaign?
They’re sitting back counting their sheep. Are you one?


Jerry Taylor,
Financial Post

Published: Thursday, July 24, 2008

Virtually every claim made by T. Boone
Pickens to justify the lavish subsidies he is seeking for his wind
energy investments is flat wrong.

First, oil imports are not the
cause of high gasoline prices. On the contrary, oil imports serve to
keep gasoline prices down. After all, we import oil for a reason –
it’s cheaper than the domestic alternative. If we were to restrict our
energy diet to energy produced in the United States, it would make
domestic energy producers (like Mr. Pickens) far richer and energy
consumers (the rest of us) far poorer, and GDP would be reduced as
well. While one can understand why Mr. Pickens is attracted to the idea
of “energy independence,” for the rest of us, keeping the country open
to imported goods is pro-consumer, whether we’re talking about oil,
steel, textiles or athletic shoes.

Second, we are no more forced
to rely on the “goodwill” of foreign oil producers when we shop for
petroleum than we are forced to rely on the “goodwill” of supermarkets
when we shop for eggs and milk. Oil producers export crude oil because
it’s a great way to make money — and for many, the only way to make
money. And once that oil is in the global marketplace, market actors,
not oil producers, dictate where it goes. Hence, we are betting on
producer greed — which is a pretty safe bet.

Third, if wind
energy were a sensible economic investment, it would not need the
lavish federal and state subsidies already in place or the additional
largesse sought after by Mr. Pickens. Likewise, if compressed natural
gas (CNG) vehicles are an economically sensible alternative to
conventional gasoline-powered vehicles, then no government “master
plan” is necessary to deliver them to market. Price signals will induce
investors to invest and consumers to buy, without government having to
lift a finger. The same goes for all the other energy-related R&D
Mr. Pickens would like the taxpayer to dole out. If that R&D is
promising, it will be pursued, whether government subsidizes it or not.

Fourth,
if reducing our carbon footprint is the goal, then the most direct and
efficient means of reducing that footprint is to impose a tax on carbon
emissions and then leave it to the market to sort out how to most
efficiently order affairs under those new prices. Maybe it will mean
windmills and CNG, but maybe not. Perhaps it will mean more nuclear
power, new hydrogen-powered fuel cells, “clean” coal, the emergence of
cellulosic ethanol, battery-powered cars or hybrids — or a
continuation of the existing energy base but less consumption as a
consequence.

Of course, if the market were to go into any of
those directions, Mr. Pickens would be out a lot of money, which is
probably why he wants to hard-wire the market to consume the things
he’s investing in and have the government lavish him with subsidies in
the course of doing so. I wish Mr. Pickens well in his wind energy
business, but I see no reason why taxpayers, ratepayers or consumers
ought to be forced to sacrifice in order to fatten his already ample
bank account. – Jerry Taylor is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

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