Gore: Break the law to push through Copenhagen

Civil unrest has a role in stopping climate change, says Gore

Ahead of Copenhagen summit, former US vice-president says ‘non-violent lawbreaking’ is legitimate in persuading governments to cut emissions

guardian.co.uk | Nov 6, 2009

by Oliver Burkeman in Los Angeles

Al Gore has sought to inject fresh momentum into the Copenhagen build-up, saying he is certain Barack Obama will attend and predicting a rise in civil disobedience against fossil-fuel polluters unless drastic action is taken over global warming.

Amid increasing incidents of climate protesters disrupting the operations of fossil-fuel industries and airports in Britain and elsewhere, Gore suggests the scale of the emergency means non-violent lawbreaking is justified. “Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play,” he says. “And I expect that it will increase, no question about it.”

Related

Radical Environmentalism: Gore Pushes Lawlessness to Save the Planet

Choice, Gore says it is crucial for Obama to attend Copenhagen in person, adding: “I feel certain that he will.”

He remains optimistic, he insists, that the US Senate will pass a climate change bill before Copenhagen – a move widely seen as vital for persuading the world, especially developing countries, that the US is serious about reducing emissions.

But Gore was speaking before reports this week that Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, would back Republican demands for a full cost analysis of any such legislation – a process that could take five weeks, postponing debate until after the Copenhagen summit.

On Thursday the UK climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, acknowledged that hopes were fading that Copenhagen would result in a full treaty.

Nevertheless, there are “surprises … in store” on a potential Senate bill, Gore says, citing confidential conversations between Democrats and Republicans in which he has been involved. This week Democrats made small but significant progress when they pushed the bill through a vital committee stage despite a Republican boycott.

Clouds hang over the global-warming alarmists

Associated Press | Nov 10, 2009

By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger

President Obama’s headed to Copenhagen next month to talk climate change. Al Gore’s headed toward profits that could make him the world’s first “carbon billionaire.” But where’s global temperature headed?

Nowhere, it seems.

The most reliable readings of the Earth’s temperature show that it peaked back in 1998. This was not widely reported in America, where the state of science reporting is dismal. But over in England, where they take that sort of thing more seriously, the British Broadcasting Corp. created quite a stir with an article headlined “What Happened to Global Warming?” In it, BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson gave a summary of the problems facing the alarmists: “For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.”

Hudson went on to cite numerous scientists skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic global warming. But perhaps the most damning observation came from a scientist who supports the theory. Mojib Latif is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group that set the panic off with its 1996 report on global warming. According to Hudson, Latif concedes “that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.”

Hmmm. Ten to 20 years is what I would call “the near future.” Didn’t a certain former vice president of the United States win a Nobel Prize by pushing a movie that told us that the melting of the polar ice would cause sea levels to rise by up to 20 feet “in the near future?”

Perhaps Al Gore was talking about a different future, one in which he gets rich off the panic he helped create. If the Senate passes that cap-and-trade bill that’s now before it, Gore stands to make a fortune through his stake in the investment firm he set up with former Goldman-Sachs exec David Blood to deal in carbon credits. So there’s a lot at stake in that Senate decision for the firm known to Wall Street wags as “Blood and Gore.” There’s even more at stake for consumers whose bills would go up by billions.

As for those senators, they’ll look pretty foolish if they pass a bill to curb global warming just as we enter a cooling trend. And Donald Easterbrook warns that is a distinct possibility. Easterbrook is a professor at Western Washington University who was quoted in that BBC article. When I called him at his home outside Seattle, Easterbrook informed me that we have just experienced the third coldest October in the past 115 years. There’s probably more cold to come, he said, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the climate will have little effect on it one way or the other. The reason? Contrary to popular belief, there just isn’t that much of it in the atmosphere.

“For every 100,000 molecules of air, only 38 are carbon dioxide,” Easterbrook said. The global-warming crowd likes to say that CO2 levels have risen 35 percent in the industrial era. “But 35 percent of nothing is still nothing,” says Easterbrook, and the increase in CO2 has virtually no effect.

The alarmists harp on that infinitesimal increase, he says, while they ignore the most prevalent greenhouse gas of them all — water vapor. Clouds reflect sunlight back into the sky. And that is at the center of a developing dispute among scientists. Easterbrook is on the side of a Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark. In the 1990s, Svensmark developed a theory that links cloud formation to sunspots. When the number of sunspots is low, more cosmic rays get through to the atmosphere. And these rays, Svensmark theorizes, are the primary cause of cloud formation. The clouds reflect more sunlight back into space. Earth gets colder.

This fits in nicely with Easterbrook’s specialty, which is how ocean currents affect climate. “It turns out there is a correlation between ocean cycles and sunspots,” he told me. And the historical record shows many climate shifts that correspond to sunspot activity.

“There were 6,000 feet of ice here that all melted very suddenly 15,000 years ago,” Easterbrook said of his neck of the woods in the Pacific Northwest. “There have been big ups and downs throughout history. How do you explain them?”

Well, if you want to control people’s lives and/or make a lot of money, you explain them the way a lot of politicians do. As for the scientists, they’re divided. Most agree that, all things being equal, it would be better for man not to alter the atmosphere at all. But that’s an entirely separate question from just what effect that alteration will have on the climate.

And the answer to that question is: Nobody’s quite certain.

Except, of course, Al Gore.

Global Warming Buffs Baffled by Lack of Global Warming Over Past Ten Years

Stagnating Temperatures

Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

spiegel.de | Nov 19, 2009

By Gerald Traufetter

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

Related

Al Gore Proposes Using Supercomputer Projections to Scare People on Global Warming

Reached a Plateau

The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

“It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community,” says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. “We don’t really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point.”

Just a few weeks ago, Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius — in other words, a standstill.

The differences among individual regions of the world are considerable. In the Arctic, for example, temperatures rose by almost three degrees Celsius, which led to a dramatic melting of sea ice. At the same time, temperatures declined in large areas of North America, the western Pacific and the Arabian Peninsula. Europe, including Germany, remains slightly in positive warming territory.

Mixed Messages

But a few scientists simply refuse to believe the British calculations. “Warming has continued in the last few years,” says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). However, Rahmstorf is more or less alone in his view. Hamburg Max Planck Institute scientist Jochem Marotzke, on the other hand, says: “I hardly know any colleagues who would deny that it hasn’t gotten warmer in recent years.”

The controversy sends confusing and mixed messages to the lay public. Why is there such a vigorous debate over climate change, even though it isn’t getting warmer at the moment? And how can it be that scientists cannot even arrive at a consensus on changes in temperatures, even though temperatures are constantly being measured?

The global temperature-monitoring network consists of 517 weather stations. But each reading is only a tiny dot on the big world map, and it has to be extrapolated to the entire region with the help of supercomputers. Besides, there are still many blind spots, the largest being the Arctic, where there are only about 20 measuring stations to cover a vast area. Climatologists refer to the problem as the “Arctic hole.”

The scientists at the Hadley Center simply used the global average value for the hole, ignoring the fact that it has become significantly warmer in the Arctic, says Rahmstorf. But a NASA team from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which does make the kinds of adjustments for the Arctic data that Rahmstorf believes are necessary, arrives at a flat temperature curve for the last five years that is similar to that of their British colleagues.

Marotzke and Leibniz Institute meteorologist Mojib Latif are even convinced that the fuzzy computing done by Rahmstorf is counterproductive. “We have to explain to the public that greenhouse gases will not cause temperatures to keep rising from one record temperature to the next, but that they are still subject to natural fluctuations,” says Latif. For this reason, he adds, it is dangerous to cite individual weather-related occurrences, such as a drought in Mali or a hurricane, as proof positive that climate change is already fully underway.

“Perhaps we suggested too strongly in the past that the development will continue going up along a simple, straight line. In reality, phases of stagnation or even cooling are completely normal,” says Latif.

Part 2: The Difficulties of Predicting the Climate

Climatologists use their computer models to draw temperature curves that continue well into the future. They predict that the average global temperature will increase by about three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, unless humanity manages to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, no one really knows what exactly the world climate will look like in the not-so-distant future, that is, in 2015, 2030 or 2050.

This is because it is not just human influence but natural factors that affect the Earth’s climate. For instance, currents in the world’s oceans are subject to certain cycles, as is solar activity. Major volcanic eruptions can also curb rising temperatures in the medium term. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in June 1991, for example, caused world temperatures to drop by an average of 0.5 degrees Celsius, thereby prolonging a cooler climate phase that had begun in the late 1980s.

But the Mount Pinatubo eruption happened too long ago to be related to the current slowdown in global warming. So what is behind this more recent phenomenon?

Weaker Solar Activity

The fact is that the sun is weakening slightly. Its radiation activity is currently at a minimum, as evidenced by the small number of sunspots on its surface. According to calculations performed by a group of NASA scientists led by David Rind, which were recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, this reduced solar activity is the most important cause of stagnating global warming.

Latif, on the other hand, attributes the stagnation to so-called Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). This phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean allows a larger volume of cold deep-sea water to rise to the surface at the equator. According to Latif, this has a significant cooling effect on the Earth’s atmosphere.

With his team at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Latif has been one of the first to develop a model to create medium-term prognoses for the next five to 10 years. “We are slowly starting to attempt (such models),” says Marotzke, who is also launching a major project in this area, funded by the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology.

Despite their current findings, scientists agree that temperatures will continue to rise in the long term. The big question is: When will it start getting warmer again?

If the deep waters of the Pacific are, in fact, the most important factor holding up global warming, climate change will remain at a standstill until the middle of the next decade, says Latif. But if the cooling trend is the result of reduced solar activity, things could start getting warmer again much sooner. Based on past experience, solar activity will likely increase again in the next few years.

Betting on Warmer Temperatures

The Hadley Center group expects warming to resume in the coming years. “That resumption could come as a bit of a jolt,” says Hadley climatologist Adam Scaife, explaining that natural cyclical warming would then be augmented by the warming effect caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

While climatologists at conferences engage in passionate debates over when temperatures will start rising again, global warming’s next steps have also become the subject of betting activity.

Climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf is so convinced that his predictions will be correct in the end that he is willing to back up his conviction with a €2,500 ($3,700) bet. “I will win,” says Rahmstorf.

His adversary Latif turned down the bet, saying that the matter was too serious for gambling. “We are scientists, not poker players.”

Not finding any, Gore airbrushes in hurricanes for his new book

wattsupwiththat.com | Nov 19, 2009

Al Gore’s new book had a problem – no big hurricanes since Katrina to put in the book to look “threatening” to the USA. Any imagined link between hurricanes and global warming has evaporated.

Solution: the artists airbrush.

Not a lot of hurricanes here

Now with 4 scary hurricanes – hey where’s the ice?

Full Story

Top climate scientists discuss hiding contrary data, marginalizing dissenters

Hacked e-mails reveal global-warming fraud?

Top climate scientists discuss hiding contrary data, marginalizing dissenters

WorldNetDaily | Nov 20, 2009

Officials at a key global warming research center in the United Kingdom have authenticated a series of e-mails and other documents apparently taken from their computer system by a hacker, but they cannot explain what scientists in internal exchanges meant by references to a “trick” that would “hide the decline” of global temperatures nor by instructions to delete contrary data.

Author James Delingpole writes in a London Telegraph column the most damaging revelations indicate climate-change scientists may have “manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.”

According to the Australian Investigate magazine, the 62 megabyte Zip file with documents, e-mail exchanges and other information from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit apparently was posted by an unidentified hacker on a Russian web server.

One e-mail said: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd (sic) from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Another expressed internal doubts: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

Further, an e-mail exchange suggested the suppression of information: “Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.”

“And, perhaps most reprehensibly,” Delingpole writes, “a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.”

He cites an e-mail: “This was the danger of always criticizing the skeptics for not publishing in the ‘peer-reviewed literature.’ Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board …What do others think?”

Myron Ebell, of the GlobalWarming.org website where “cooler heads prevail,” said the e-mails are “shocking.”

“Its kind of interesting to learn that petty politics seems to be more prevalent in the scientific community than in the political community,” he said.

The documents, he said, “raise a huge number of questions about the integrity of a lot of people in the alarmist community.

“What I’ve seen there is a very strong effort to manage the issue by scientists and not as a scientific issues. It’s very improper,” he said. ” One of the criticisms is that we need scientists to be scientist, and policy can be handled in public debate.”

Delingpole observes the world “is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called ’skeptical’ view is now also the majority view.”

Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, confirmed to Investigate magazine the documents appeared authentic.

“It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and e-mails,” he said.

“It’s completely illegal for somebody to hack into our system,” he told the magazine

But Jones denied there was any attempt to mislead or conceal.

“They’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years,” he said.

Jones said he could not recall what he meant when he wrote about a plan to “hide the decline.”

In the e-mail, dated 10 years ago, Jones wrote: “Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998. Thanks for the comments, Ray. Cheers, Phil Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit.”

The documents also included a message dated last month from Kevin Trenberth to Michal Mann about the “U-turn on climate” by Britain’s BBC News.

“Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).”

Despite the advocacy of a financially vested former vice president, Al Gore, and others, public opinion about whether mankind is causing an ultimately catastrophic rise in global temperatures is shifting.

Full Story

_______

Related Links

62 MB of Climate Gold

Hadley CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails

Mike’s Nature trick

Mike’s Nature Trick

http://wattsupwiththat.com/

http://www.climateaudit.org/

UNFPA Report Uses Popular Green-Environment Campaign to Promote Abortion

LifeNews.com | Nov 19, 2009

by Piero Tozzi

New York, NY (LifeNews.com/CFAM) — The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released its annual State of the World Population Report yesterday, linking efforts to promote “sustainable development” and affect “climate change” to its “reproductive rights” agenda.

Critics see the report as a thinly-veiled attempt to harness popular environmental concerns in service of population control.

The report, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate,” asserts that achieving “universal access to reproductive health” would both contribute to declines in fertility and “help reduce green-house gas emissions in the long run.” It calls upon nations to “fully fund family planning services and contraceptive supplies.”

Sounding alarmist, UNFPA claims that “The harsh realities of high per capita emissions among industrialized countries and swiftly rising ones among developing countries highlight the urgency of mobilizing all of humanity to stop collectively at the brink of this possible climate disaster zone.”

In a statement accompanying the report, UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Obaid avers that “rapid population growth and industrialization have led to a rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions. We have now reached a point where humanity is approaching the brink of disaster.”

Peter C. Smith of the International Right to Life Federation observes that agencies such as the UNFPA always need a “looming disaster” to secure their funding.”

Smith sees the “true looming disaster” as the “demographic implosion of the developed world” which is being exported to the developing world. The report touts declining birth rates in Japan and the European Union (EU) as positives and criticizes higher fertility in the United States (US).

In places, the report disavows overt population control arguments and acknowledges development specialists such as Bangladesh’s Atiq Rahman, who attributes climate change to “consumption patterns” rather than “demographic considerations.”

Yet it also asserts that “Each birth results not only in the emissions attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of all his or her descendents. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or planned births multiply with time.”

Further, the report states that “fear of appearing supportive of population control has until recently held back any mention of ‘population’ in the climate debate. Nonetheless, some participants in the debate are tentatively suggesting the need at least consider the impacts of population growth.” It points to an EU proposal “that population trends be among the factors that should be taken into consideration when setting greenhouse-gas mitigation targets.”

Critics also point to the report’s favorable citation of Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren, as signaling openness to coercive measures. In the 1970s, Holdren called for forced abortion and sterilization in his writings.

Concern over UNFPA’s role in facilitating China’s one-child policy, which is beset by allegations of forced and sex-selective abortion, contributed to a recommendation by the US State Department under then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to suspend funding of the agency.

In March of this year, the Obama administration reversed the Bush administration policy and directed that $50 million be given to UNFPA, despite continued concerns over its China role.

UN: Fight climate change with free condoms

AP | Nov 20, 2009

By MARIA CHENG

LONDON — The battle against global warming could be helped if the world slowed population growth by making free condoms and family planning advice more widely available, the U.N. Population Fund said Wednesday.

The agency did not recommend countries set limits on how many children people should have, but said: “Women with access to reproductive health services … have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions.”

“As the growth of population, economies and consumption outpaces the Earth’s capacity to adjust, climate change could become much more extreme and conceivably catastrophic,” the report said.

The world’s population will likely rise from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050, with most of the growth in less developed regions, according to a 2006 report by the United Nations.

The U.N. Population Fund acknowledged it had no proof of the effect that population control would have on climate change. “The linkages between population and climate change are in most cases complex and indirect,” the report said.

It also said that while there is no doubt that “people cause climate change,” the developing world has been responsible for a much smaller share of world’s greenhouse gas emissions than developed countries.

Still, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, the U.N. Population Fund’s executive director, told a news conference in London on Wednesday that global warming could be catastrophic for people in poor countries, particularly women.

“We have now reached a point where humanity is approaching the brink of disaster,” she said.

In three weeks, a global conference will be held in Copenhagen aimed at reaching a deal to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which required 37 industrial countries to cut heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.

On Wednesday, one analyst criticized the U.N. Population Fund’s pronouncements as alarmist and unhelpful.

“It requires a major leap of imagination to believe that free condoms will cool down the climate,” said Caroline Boin, a policy analyst at International Policy Network, a London-based think tank.

She also questioned earlier efforts by the agency to control the world’s population.

In its 1987 report, the U.N. Population Fund warned that once the global population hit 5 billion, the world “could degenerate into disaster.” At the time, the agency said “more vigorous attempts to slow undue population growth” were needed in many countries.

According to Boin, “Numerous environmental indicators show that with development and economic growth we are able to preserve more natural habitats. There is no causal relationship between population density and poverty.”

In this month’s Bulletin, the World Health Organization’s journal, two experts also warned about the dangers of linking fertility to climate change.

“Using the need to reduce climate change as a justification for curbing the fertility of individual women at best provokes controversy and at worst provides a mandate to suppress individual freedoms,” wrote WHO’s Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum and Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan.

EU presidential candidate proposed “Green Tax” to fund “Welfare State” at secret Bilderberg meeting

In this Oct. 29 2009 file photo, Belgium’s Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy participates in a meeting prior to an EU summit in Brussels. Very soon, Europeans from Denmark to Bulgaria will wake up to the reality of having their very first president, one person world leaders can call when they want to talk to Europe. AP Photo

“New resources will be necessary for the financing of the welfare state. Green tax instruments are a possibility.”

Top candidate debates EU tax at elite dinner

EU Observer | Nov 16, 2009

by ANDREW RETTMAN

Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, a top candidate for the new European Union president job, laid out his views on future EU financing at a dinner of the secretive Bilderberg group last week.

The event took place at Val Duchesse, a former priory on the outskirts of Brussels, on Thursday (12 November), with guests including Belgian industrialist and Bilderberg chairman Etienne Davignon, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and luminaries from the worlds of international politics and business, according to Belgian broadsheet De Tijd.

The Belgian leader is reported to have said in a speech that: “New resources will be necessary for the financing of the welfare state. Green tax instruments are a possibility, but they are ambiguous: This type of tax will eventually be extinguished. But the possibilities of financial levies at European level must be seriously examined and for the first time the large countries in the union are open to that.”

Mr Van Rompuy’s official spokesman later told the Belga news agency that: “The Prime Minister … indicated that it is necessary to carry on thinking about structural financing at the European level.”

The leak to De Tijd, coming just days before the EU aims to choose its first permanent president, could damage Mr Van Rompuy’s chances.

Proposals about imposing fees on environmentally-damaging behaviour or skimming small levies off financial transactions have been mooted before. But the suggestion that the new EU president might interfere in national taxation policy is anathema to anti-federalists in EU countries such as the UK or Denmark.

Mr Van Rompuy’s participation at the Bilderberg dinner will also give ammunition to critics of the EU top job selection process, which takes place via confidential consultations between EU leaders and informal social events.

The Bilderberg group is an elite club of aristocrats, politicians and businessmen dating back to 1954, which likes to meet away from the public eye and which is widely disliked by pro-transparency campaigners.

EU parliament chief shows his cards

Meanwhile in a related development, European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek over the weekend backed former Spanish leader Jose Maria Aznar to take the EU president post.

“As far as I know, Aznar is not currently interested in this kind of position. But I think it would be good for the EU if he changed his mind and submitted his candidature,” Mr Buzek told Spanish daily ABC in an interview published on Saturday.

Mr Buzek met Mr Aznar along with the current Spanish government on a trip to Madrid ahead of Spain taking up the rotating EU presidency in January.

The conservative Spanish politician is from the correct political family according to the prevailing wisdom that the centre-right will take the EU president job while the centre-left will take the EU foreign minister position. But he was a firm advocate of the Iraq war, which remains a highly-divisive topic in the EU.

The speculation is set to see an end on Thursday (19 November) when EU leaders gather in Brussels to decide the top appointments. Other names in line for the presidency post include Dutch leader Jan Peter Balkenende and his Luxembourg counterpart, Jean-Claude Juncker.

Al Gore to become world’s first ‘carbon billionaire’

timesofindia.indiatimes.com | Nov 4, 2009

WASHINGTON: Former US vice president Al Gore, who has campaigned relentlessly on green issues, is on track to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire” amid claims of profiting from the climate change agenda.

Since he abandoned mainstream politics following his defeat in the 2000 presidential polls against George W Bush, Gore’s personal fortune has risen from 1.2 million pounds to an estimated 60 million pounds, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

It is claimed that the Nobel peace laureate is on course to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire” after significant investments in environmentally friendly projects like carbon trading markets, solar power, biofuels, electric vehicles, sustainable fish farming and waterless lavatories.

Global warming sceptics are not convinced about his “altruistic” climate change agenda. “Al Gore wants to become the first carbon billionaire and he is poised to do it,” Marc Morano of climatedepot.com was quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

“As much as Gore’s made now, it is going to be a piker league compared to what he is going to make in five years if all these new carbon trading mandates go through,” Morano claimed.

Glenn Beck and PETA: Eat tofu to save the planet

Strange bedfellows: Glenn Beck, PETA join forces to give Al Gore what for

LA Times | Nov 4, 2009

by Lindsay Barnett

A day has dawned that we never thought we would see: conservative Fox News commentator Glenn Beck (who recently shocked viewers with his throwing-a-seemingly-live-frog-in-boiling-water gag) has publicly expressed his admiration for controversial animal-rights group PETA.

All right, so Beck’s strange leap onto PETA’s bandwagon just so happens to give him some ammunition against another of his regular targets, former Vice President Al Gore.

PETA has long held that Gore, whose work on behalf of the environment is well-known and who has apparently become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” is remiss in failing to promote vegetarianism as an effective means of helping the environment.  (“Gore should have named his movie Sorta-Inconvenient Truths if he didn’t want to cover the environmental destruction that his meaty diet causes,” PETA blogger Shawna Flavell wrote earlier this year.)  Odd as it may sound coming from him, Beck says he agrees.

The Fox host explained last week that he’s “siding with PETA on this one — once again asking Al Gore: If you really want to save the planet, put down the cheeseburgers and pick up the veggie burgers. Time for soy milk and [Tofurky]. No more delicious chocolate cookies — how about a nice bean-thing. That is, if you want to save the planet.”  (Apparently Beck hasn’t tried the host of delicious and widely available chocolate cookies that are free of animal products, but we digress.)

“I’ve said before I disagree with PETA,” Beck continued, “but I respect them because they are not hypocrites: They say what they mean and mean what they say. I just disagree with what they say — except when it calls for Al Gore to eat tofu.”  To cement the point that he sides with PETA rather than Gore on this issue, Beck even invited PETA cofounder and president Ingrid Newkirk to appear on his program.  (Newkirk lost no time in asserting that “you can’t be a meat-eating environmentalist” before calling Gore a “baby” and “basically a steakaholic.”)

The media-savvy animal-rights group seems, predictably, over the moon about having Beck as a strange bedfellow. “Makes me wanna send Mr. Beck some vegan chocolate kisses,” another PETA blogger, Karen Bennett, gushed last week.  But others are less than thrilled; environment site Ecorazzi tweeted today, “I know PETA loves publicity, but Glenn Beck? Really? You have got to draw the line at conversing with this fool.”  PETA promptly tweeted the response, “We’ll do whtvr it takes 2 show ppl the connection between meat production and the environment.”

For his part, Gore addressed the meat-vs.-environment issue in an interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer this week, chuckling at a clip from Beck’s show before describing concerns over the meat industry’s environmental effects as legitimate.  Though not a vegetarian, he said, he is eating less meat than he used to.

“So, Tofurky for you? Thanksgiving?” Sawyer asked.

“I don’t … I don’t plan to,” Gore responded.  That’s no surprise to us, or, we’d wager, to Beck and Newkirk.