Climate Prophets and Profiteers

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Bret Stephens:

The weirdest thing about John Kerry‘s weekend speech on climate-change—other than the fact that this is the same guy who in 1997 voted to forbid the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol—is that it begins by quoting something Maurice Strong said at the U.N.’s 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro: “Every bit of evidence I’ve seen persuades me that we are on a course leading to tragedy.”

Maurice who?

Mr. Strong, a former oil executive from Canada (he was Pierre Trudeau’s pick to run state-owned Petro-Canada in the mid-1970s), was for many years the U.N.’s ultimate mandarin. He organized many of its environmental mega-confabs, including the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the 1992 Rio summit, before rising to become Kofi Annan’s right-hand man. At various times Mr. Strong has served as director at the World Economic Forum, chairman of the Earth Council and the World Resources Institute, vice chairman of the Chicago Climate Exchange and chairman of the China Carbon Corporation, to name just a few of his many prominent affiliations.

In 2005 it emerged that Mr. Strong, who was the chairman of the U.N. panel that created the Office of the Iraq Program, had accepted a check for close to $1 million from a South Korean businessman named Tongsun Park, who in the 1970s had been involved in an effort to bribe U.S. politicians. Mr. Strong claimed that the check, from a Jordanian bank, was meant as an investment in a family company that later went bankrupt. Mr. Park (who also sublet office space from Mr. Strong) later went to prison for trying to bribe U.N. officials overseeing the Oil-for-Food program that was propping up Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Mr. Strong was accused of no wrongdoing and has denied involvement in Oil-for-Food. He left the U.N. that year and moved to Beijing.

Draw your own conclusions. Ask yourself: Is this a guy who deserves a shout-out from the U.S. Secretary of State?

When John Kerry speaks, people wonder: Is he seriously clever or totally oblivious? Profound or void? Detective Columbo or Chance the gardener?

The secretary devoted much of his speech to venting spleen at those in the “Flat Earth Society” who dispute the 97% of climate scientists who believe in man-made global warming. “We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific fact,” he said. Once upon a time people understood that skepticism was essential to good science. Now Mr. Kerry is trying to invoke a specious democracy among scientists to shut down democratic debate for everyone else.

This is of a piece with the amusing notion that the only thing standing in the way of climate salvation is a shadowy, greedy and powerful conspiracy involving the Koch Brothers, MIT’s Dick Lindzen, Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe and this newspaper’s editorial page. Oh, the power!

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Who would have thought that when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, people might still want to switch on the lights?

Global warming must have caused less sun and wind.

Liberal PBS Los Angeles station, KCET reports that all of the endangered desert tortoises displaced (and tagged) from the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating station in the CA Mojave Desert are missing.

Also they report that the 4,000 acre facility is burning birds to death as they try to fly over the place.

A small sample area is used for counting dead birds each month.
Some types: golden eagles, falcons, hawks, warblers, sparrows, grebes.
In October 56 bird and 6 bat bodies were found in that one small sample area.
(That was during a migration season.)
No extrapolation by Ivanpah or KCET about how many that means when multiplied by the size of the sample to equal the entire property.

Ivanpah delivers electricity for 4 times the cost of CA’s coal powered plants.
Obama has given this and all solar/wind power facilities a pass on this slaughter.

@Nanny G: If I remember this right, Syncrude was heavily fined for having a couple hundred ducks wallow in one of its settling ponds. This oil sands company had to hire biologists and PETA types for consulting purposes. They used explosive air blasts as a deterrence. Some of the ducks were saved. You should have seen the press crucify them. Renewable energy and non renewable birds. The message is good if its a left wing cause.

I thought the tortoises were euthanized for their own good. Kind of like the Barrel owls being slaughtered to protect the Mexican Spotted owls in CA.

Those who are profiting off of the climate change scam are “Climate Parasites”!
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/02/climate_parasites_the_answer_to_climate_change_deniers.html

@Randy: #5
Stuff like this has been going on since humans started roaming the Earth. Someone who has few, or no moral values will try to get others to believe something so that they will buy what the other person wants to sell them.

Has anyone else figured out that the only news media that isn’t owned by a corporation that also owns companies that make products that would replace oil or coal is Fox News. I’m guessing that none of those corporations own an oil company or a coal mine. The more people they can convince that oil or coal will cause global warming, the more money they will make off of the alternative products. As with most situations like this, all a person has to do is FOLLOW THE MONEY.