February, 2010

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20
Feb 10

Con #01 Anatomy of a Con job

ANATOMY OF A CON JOB

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.” —George Orwell

If you look with your understanding, the crimes against humanity are written across the rotting visages of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Like a couple of aging prostitutes, these leading architects of twentieth-century evil still sell their wares to those with an insatiable lust for the power of the crown.

THE CLUB OF ROME

Birth Mother of the Environmental Movement

The moldy twosome have something else in common. Both have been active members of an international think tank from the dark side of the force called the Club of Rome. Founded at the Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy, in 1968, some of the other fraternity brothers and sisters include Al Gore, David Rockefeller, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

And there is no one better to give you the short version of the Club’s agenda than Gorby himself:

“The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘internal disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.”

Who let this guy out of Lubyanka?

Their more precisely stated goal is population control. The solution? Create an environmental catastrophe like, oh, say, “global warming” and blame it on the planet’s most heinous villain—man himself.

But I should let them tell it:

“In searching for the new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. . . . But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for cause. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changing attitudes and behaviors that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

Sounds like a good plan . . . if you’re Darth Vader.

In 1972, the Club took the world stage with the publication of a book they had commissioned to be written by a group of MIT scientists. It was called The Limits to Growth. Examining the planet’s population growth in relation to available resources, the report concluded that the planet would run out of resources sometime in the next 100 years, resulting in a catastrophic decline in population and industrial production.

As one reviewer put it, the authors examine

“. . . the impact of humanity on the world ecology and of steps taken toward remediating the accelerating approach to a train wreck that is mankind’s ill-managed and uncontrolled ‘footprint’ on this planet’s environment.”

Still, these trends and their consequences could be altered, it argued; we had to be less, do less and have less. The brand for this Orwellian path to planetary salvation was sustainable development.

Heavily promoted, the book reached opinion leaders in political, scientific and economic circles as it exploded around the planet like the Harry Potter of environmentalism. It sold 12 million copies in thirty languages despite the fact that the research had all the scientific rigor of a plagiarized term paper for a freshman biology class.

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” —Mohandas Gandhi

Assailed by top scientists, the research was shoddy in the extreme. Population expert and author Professor Julian Simon said, “The Limits to Growth has been blasted as foolishness or fraud by almost every economist who has read it closely or reviewed it in print.”

Yale economist Henry Wallich reviewed the book saying, “. . . the quantitative content of the model comes from the authors’ imagination, although they never reveal the equations that they used.”

But it is a PR world and with the publication of this book, the modern environmental movement was born. Midwifed to life in a blanket of deceit, it was yet hailed as the savior, not of mankind, but of the planet it claimed was being fried to a crisp by humanity’s toxic binge of carbon dioxide.

The scientific fraud is its own malice, but few were able to see the underlying strategy—that the book would serve as the foundation of a global public relations campaign that would mesmerize legislators, educators, and countless organizations of goodwill and would eventually set the stage for the biggest rip-off in human history. But I am getting ahead of myself.

This then was Con #1: The scientific basis of the book that launched the environmental movement calling for “sustainable development” and a reduction of man’s leper-like carbon footprint on the planet was, and is, a scam, a hoax, a falsehood—environmental snake oil.

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Which leads us to the second piece of the puzzle, Con #2. Who’d have thought that . . .

© 2010 by John Truman Wolfe. All rights reserved.

Global warming — 1 Comment
20
Feb 10

Con #02 OIL Is Not a Fossil Fuel, and it is “renewable.”

OIL

Is Not a Fossil Fuel

The immigration officer at Sheremetyevo took my passport and studied it for some time. He didn’t say anything; he just thumbed through the passport and then looked at a computer screen for a couple of lifetimes before stamping it and grunting me on to customs.

The KGB was still manning the borders the first time I went to Moscow shortly after the fall of Communism. Letting Americans walk freely into Mother Russia without official surveillance was driving the man crazy but he had to keep a lid on it.

In fact, Communism had been officially dead for only a few months when the shock troops of capitalism started storming the gates of opportunity in the former Soviet Union. The ghosts of Marx, Lenin and Stalin stalked the halls of the Politburo in horror as entrepreneurs from the United States, Japan and Western Europe tried to cut deals for every asset in Mother Russia that wasn’t nailed down. Banking, hospitality, timber and precious metals came under assault by peculiar partnerships of western capitalists and thugs from the once mighty KGB. During those early years, when Yeltsin (God love him) and his vodka were in office, it was a free-for-all.

The Oklahoma land rush of the 1890s had nothing on Moscow in 1992.

But even then, the oil industry stayed under control of the state—directly or indirectly. In fact, as recently as 2003, the bare-chested former KGB colonel and current premier—soon to be president of Russia . . . again—Vladimir Putin squashed a buyout deal between Russia’s Yukos and Exxon, the largest company in the world.

To understand the reason for this, we return momentarily to the early days of the Cold War when an isolated Soviet Union tasked their top scientists to identify the actual source of oil. Not a weekend homework assignment. After considerable research, in 1956, Russian scientist Professor Vladimir Porfir’yev announced that “crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial [originating with the earth’s formation] materials which have been erupted from great depths.”

If your eyeballs didn’t fall out when you read that, you might want to read it again.

He said oil doesn’t come from anything biologic, not, as conventional wisdom dictates, from the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and/or ancient plant matter. It comes from very deep in the earth and is created by a biochemical reaction that subjected hydrocarbons (elements having carbon and hydrogen) to extreme heat and intense pressure during the earth’s formation.

Russians referred to this oil (any oil, really) as “abiotic oil” because it is not created from the decomposition of biological life forms, but rather from the chemical process continually occurring inside the earth.

I know, easy for Porfir’yev to say. But it turns out it was more than just a theory.

Because shortly after the Russians discovered this, they started drilling ultra-deep wells and finding oil at 30,000 and 40,000 feet below the earth’s surface. These are staggering depths, and far below the depth at which organic matter can be found, which is 18,000 feet.

Interesting, eh?

The Russians applied their theory of abiotic deep-drilling technology to the Dnieper-Donets Basin, an area understood for the previous half a century to be barren of oil. Of sixty wells drilled there using abiotic technology, thirty-seven became commercially productive—a 62 percent success rate compared with the roughly 10 percent success rate of a U.S. wildcat driller. The oil found in the basin rivaled Alaska’s North Slope.

Let’s say they had a good hair day.

But it doesn’t stop there, not by a long shot. Since their earlier discoveries, the major Russian oil companies have quietly drilled more than 310 ultra-deep wells and put them into production.

Result? Russia recently overtook Saudi Arabia as the planet’s largest oil producer.

Maybe they are onto something.

Though there were papers written on this early on, almost all were in Russian and few made it to the West. And those that did were laughed at.

No more. With Russia’s rejection of the Exxon-Yukos deal (Putin did not want this technology and their abiotic oil experts exported to the West) and the access to information now available on the Internet, the word has begun to spread rapidly to the West. Still, it hasn’t taken hold yet.

Why not? This is huge. Oil is not a fossil fuel! And it’s renewable! Wow!

There are a couple of factors at play here.

Big oil has a vested interest in pushing the idea that oil is scarce, hard to find, and thus costly to produce—all of which, of course, means increased revenues and profits. This is a story in itself, but not the primary focus here.

More relevant to our story is the fact that a cornerstone of the environmental movement is this: oil is a fossil fuel, a fossil fuel that is scarce, and is in limited and ever decreasing supply. Moreover, its production creates carbon dioxide. Therefore its use, for virtually all productive purposes—agricultural production, real estate construction, auto, truck, train and air transportation, utilities, heating, cooling, communication, ad infinitum (all of them)—must be curtailed.

According to the thirty-year update of the book The Limits to Growth,

“A prime example of a nonrenewable resource is fossil fuels, whose limits should be obvious, although many people, including distinguished economists, are in denial over the elementary fact. More than 80 percent of year 2000 commercial energy use comes from nonrenewable fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, and coal. The underground stocks of fossil fuels are going continuously and inexorably down. . . .

“Peak gas production will certainly occur in the next 50 years, the peak for oil production will occur much sooner, probably within the decade.”

Scary stuff. Frightening. But as false as a hooker’s smile.

Oil is not a fossil fuel.

And it is “renewable.”

While I have never been a fan of Putin the Macho, the Russians have demonstrated the accuracy of their theory in the only place it counts—the oil field. Oil is not only abiotic, it continues to populate fields that were understood to be as dry of petroleum as a desert wind. In fact, some scientists believe it is the centrifugal force of the planet’s rotation that forces abiotic oil toward the planet’s surface on a continuous basis.

“There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” —the late Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post

So Con #2 is that oil is a fossil fuel (which it isn’t), that it is scarce and being depleted (which it isn’t), that it is nonrenewable (which it isn’t), and that, as a result, catastrophe looms (which it doesn’t) unless we drastically curtail our use of petroleum.

Lies one and all, which lead us to the granddaddy of con—Con #3:

© 2010 by John Truman Wolfe. All rights reserved.

Global warming — 2 Comments
20
Feb 10

Con #03 Global warming is a vast, strategic PR campaign.

GLOBAL WARMING—CLIMATE CHANGE

The heart-wrenching icon of a lone polar bear hovering in solitude somewhere in the rapidly disappearing Arctic has become the environmental movement’s most poignant pitchman.

The pitch, however, is bogus. The bears are booming.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Nearly everyone agrees that there are more polar bears now than when scientists first started counting: Estimates put the population between 20,000 and 25,000, up from several thousand 50 years ago. In Canada, where two-thirds of the world’s bears live, most populations have grown during the past two or three decades. Arctic residents say they are now bumping into bears wherever they turn.”

The polar bear “debate” cuts to the heart of the foundation on which the environmental movement rests: global warming.

While the Club of Rome’s clarion call for “sustainable development” in The Limits to Growth turned out to be more than a little thin on scientific credibility, and the theory that oil is a scarce and rapidly depleting fossil fuel is untrue, the holy grail of the environmental movement is Global Warming or, as they have renamed it due to the last eleven years of embarrassingly cooler temperatures, Climate Change.

It is the creed upon which the movement is built.

The scripture is as follows: The burning of fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide. This and other “greenhouse” gases create global warming, which will destroy the planet.

To wit, the production of these gases must be “capped.”

Legislation to suppress their use is a first step. Population control, a reduction of the planet’s population, is the real answer because man makes these gases. Fewer people mean less greenhouse gas. Less greenhouse gas means less global warming. Less warming means the earth is saved.

Amen.

Greenhouse gases, by the way, are any of the atmospheric gases, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide, that are said to contribute to the greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect is a name for the phenomenon outlined above whereby the earth’s atmosphere traps solar radiation and thereby overheats the planet. According to the theory, these gases in the atmosphere allow sunlight to pass through to the earth, but then absorb the heat radiated back from the planet’s surface.

Shazam! Global warming.

Sounds good. Cut CO2 and you save the world.

A clearly identified evil with an action plan to handle it.

Kind of like the Inquisition—fry the heretics, purify the faith.

Today, global warming heretics are burned in the media not at the stake, but the dogma is no less strident, no less authoritarian, and no less despotic.

SCIENCE SETTLED

Al Gore is the Moses of global warming. He, along with the high priests of the movement, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has pronounced that the science regarding man-made global warming is “settled.” There’s nothing further to discuss: global warming is real; man-made CO2 is the cause; carbon production must be capped. Done deal.

Al and the IPCC are simpatico on this—which is cool. Harmony in the ranks.

THE OREGON PETITION

But here’s the deal: 31,486 scientists have signed a document called the Oregon Petition lambasting the shoddy research behind global warming, stating quite simply that “. . . any human contribution to climate change has not been demonstrated.”

This is not a gang of political hacks, or George Soros–funded “activists.” No, the signatories include 3,667 atmospheric, environmental and Earth scientists; 4,796 chemists; 2,924 biologists and agricultural scientists; 903 math and computer scientists; and 9,992 in engineering and general science.

Of these, 9,029 have PhDs.

The petition states that there is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases is causing or will cause global warming.

It goes on to say that there is substantial scientific evidence demonstrating that atmospheric carbon dioxide produces countless beneficial effects on the plant and animal populations of Earth. (In one of Mother Nature’s most spectacular touches of environmental magic, plants convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into oxygen—you know, the stuff we breathe.)

SENATE COMMITTEE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

In March of 2009 the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works posted a report of more than 700 international scientists dissenting on the theory of man-made global warming. Several of those joining in on this report were current or former IPCC members.

Several other groups of scientists have issued statements blasting the lack of credible science behind the theory that man-made carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to global warming. Examples include the Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming, the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change, and the Heidelberg Appeal.

THE IPCC COOKS THE BOOKS

You will notice, if you read articles about the environment, that “facts” regarding global warming invariably cite the IPCC as their source

In short, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the planet’s opinion leader on the subject of man-made climate change.

Or at least they were.

On November 19, 2009, one of the largest scientific scandals in history exploded across the international media when thousands of internal e-mails were leaked exposing the organization’s blatant manipulation of climate data. The e-mails revealed that the IPCC had skewed bucketloads of climate information to promote the idea that global warming was a result of an increase in man-made carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

This wasn’t a bunch of stoners in a frat house passing the filched answers to the Geology 101 midterm around. These guys were recognized as the world’s leading “authorities” on climate change, caught red-handed in an intentional plot to mislead environmental groups, governments and the public at large about the current and future state of the planet’s temperature.

This brief excerpt from Canada’s National Post rather tells the story.

“The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

“The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

“The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world—Wikipedia—in the wholesale rewriting of this history.”

THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD

Like a cheap Las Vegas lounge act, the pernicious cult of climate change ideologues at the IPCC desperately tried to hide the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)—ditch it, make it disappear. This was the warmest period in modern recorded history and is very well known by climatologists.

Trying a page from Houdini’s playbook, the IPCC created a phony graph of historical temperatures that made the MWP—presto!—vanish.

Cute.

You see, during the MWP temperatures were much warmer than they are today. Agriculture flourished and the Norsemen, taking advantage of the ice-free seas, settled Greenland. There is no evidence of a rise in sea level at that time. None. And ice sheets around Greenland were largely absent. Greenland, get it?

Temperatures soared, but where was the man-made carbon dioxide? Oil had yet to be discovered, factories had not been constructed, and the first Model T was centuries into the future.

There followed a mini ice age, and by 1500 the settlements in Greenland were gone and the Thames froze all the way to London.

There was no “man-made” factor in any of this. These ebbs and flows of the earth’s temperatures were all a product of naturally occurring phenomena, which is discussed in detail below.

But as to the IPCC,

“Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.” —The Oregon Petition

FEARMONGERS

In fact, the same mindset that is now promoting the catastrophic consequences of global warming were using the same arguments, almost word for word, to promote the dire consequences of global cooling just a few decades ago.

In 1975, Reid Bryson wrote in Global Ecology:

“The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.”

Yeah, baby! CO2 is causing global cooling.

Or consider Kenneth Watt, writing on Earth Day in 1970:

“If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. . . . This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Good call, Ken.

There are more, but you get the idea.

These people, then and now, are fearmongers. They get some kind of perverse joy out of frightening people—in this case, frightening them into acceptance of the greatest con job of all time.

Listen to the climate chaos merchants reviewing a book by a global warming jihadist named James Hansen, who subtitles his book “The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity.”

“Dr. James Hansen is Paul Revere to the foreboding tyranny of climate chaos.” —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“With urgency and authority, Hansen urges readers to speak out—taking to the streets if necessary—to protect the Earth from calamity for the sake of their children and grandchildren.” —Kirkus Reviews

Calamity, chaos and catastrophe: the cocaine of the global warming media extremists.

STATS

The crisis and catastrophe crowd don’t like to talk about the fact that water vapor (not carbon dioxide) accounts for 95% of all greenhouse gases. This is naturally occurring water vapor—99.99% of “greenhouse gas” water vapor is natural. Only .01% (one-hundredth of one percent) of greenhouse water vapor is man-made.

But carbon dioxide is the anointed villain of the piece. It must really pack a punch, because CO2 only makes up 3.6% of greenhouse gases. And here’s the kicker, only 3% of the carbon dioxide—3% of the 3.6%—is man-made. This means .1% (one-tenth of one percent) is man-made CO2.

This, according to the harbingers of climate doom, is what is driving “climate catastrophe.” International conferences are called, governments allocate billions, and corporate PR departments gush over environmental agendas in a universal tsunami of green.

It’s as if someone had turned a programmed cult of global warming druids lose on the planet to shriek the horrors of carbon dioxide to a populace that doesn’t know or can’t confront the blatant lunacy of what they are saying.

In turn, the lapdog media regurgitates the chaos and calamity to millions. Their sole aspiration is to shovel as much death, destruction, filth and depravity into the public’s mind in the shortest possible time. Except somewhere in their collective soul they know . . . and they are sick with shame.

“We allow the most atrocious lies uttered by political and moral prostitutes to go unchallenged. These lies are endlessly recycled in the commercial media until they become ingrained in the public conscience as truth.” —Charles Sullivan, author and philosopher

Can I get an “Amen”?

THE SOLAR CONNECTION

I’m a California boy. I love the sun. During spring break in college, some friends of mine and I would body surf our way down the west coast of Mexico, turning coffee brown in the process, and return to campus as sun-baked bronze gods. The co-eds would swoon. . . . Okay, maybe not swoon, but getting dates was definitely easier.

It never occurred to me in those halcyon days that the sun might play a leading role in an article I would later write about global warming. But it does.

The fact is that Earth has experienced natural warming and cooling cycles all throughout recorded history—cycles that have driven temperatures much higher than anything we are experiencing today.

And what is the source of these fluctuations in the earth’s temperature? Water vapor? No. Carbon dioxide? Eh . . . sorry. Hair spray? You’re joking.

What causes temperature changes on the earth is . . . the sun.

Scientists have discovered that the sun has regular cycles of sunspot activity. Sunspots are regions on the sun’s surface of intense magnetic activity; the more sunspots, the more “active” the sun is.

Sunspots and solar radiation activity virtually parallel temperature changes on Earth. That’s right; it is the sun that is the source of global warming and cooling cycles—not mankind’s “carbon footprint.”

If greenhouse gases were the cause of global warming, how is it that from 1940 to 1975, when there was a dramatic increase in the production and release of CO2, the earth experienced a significant cooling period?

Warming periods on Earth are a direct result of an increase in solar radiation, which prevents cloud formation. Cloud formation has a cooling effect on the planet. This is further borne out by the fact that other planets in our solar system all appear to heat up at the same time. But they’re not driving Chevys on Pluto or burning coal on Mars.

This, then, is Con #3: Global warming is a vast, strategic PR campaign, nothing more. It is not a planetary temperature phenomenon. Sorry, Al.

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” —Bertrand Russell

So, what gives? Why all the misleading information and climate change hysteria?

Let me introduce you to Con #4. . . .

© 2010 by John Truman Wolfe. All rights reserved.

Global warming — 2 Comments
20
Feb 10

Con #04 Biofuel craze is destroying nature

BIOFUELS

A friend of mine drives around to restaurants late at night and collects used vegetable oil. He uses it in his diesel Mercedes that will qualify for Medicare next year. He has converted the Mercedes to burn vegetable oil as fuel.

One of the solutions to the “carbon crisis” is biofuels.

Biofuels are essentially fuels produced from plants.

There are two basic types of biofuels. Ethanol, which can be used as petrol and is made from corn, sugar cane, beets, wheat and other grains, and biodiesel which is made from oil seeds, tree nuts or waste oil (à la the Medicare Mercedes above).

Biofuels are supposed to be clean, convenient and carbon neutral. But don’t look too closely because the environmental consequences of their use are something out of a Stephen King novel.

DEFORESTATION

The planet’s tropical rain forests are being obliterated as if some frenzied Jolly Green Giant were running an immense weed wacker through the Amazon.

Biofuels are broadly promoted as a solution to the production of carbon dioxide. But a closer examination reveals that they damage the environment on two fronts: the first is massive planetary deforestation.

Tropical forests are the most powerful carbon reservoirs on the planet. In other words, they sequester and store carbon dioxide more effectively than any other resource.

Cutting forests down not only releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it eliminates them as both a carbon reservoir and a generator of oxygen. (Again, for those of you that slept through high school biology, or, like me, never had the guts to take it, plants use carbon dioxide and sunlight to make oxygen.)

But government mandates and corporate greed are pushing the cultivation of biofuels so intently that tropical forests are vanishing from the planet at an appalling rate.

The European Union, for instance, has mandated a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. This is to be partly achieved by mandating that 10 percent of vehicles be powered by biofuel. Financial incentives, which we examine in detail below, have driven global investment in biofuels from $5 billion in 1995 to an estimated $100 billion in 2010. Everyone from George Soros to British Petroleum and Shell Oil are players in this market.

As a result, vast amounts of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil have been destroyed for soybean and sugar cane cultivation. Brazil proudly announced last year that deforestation was on track to double that year.

A report by Friends of the Earth revealed that between 1985 and 2000, the development of palm oil plantations in Malaysia was responsible for the deforestation of 87 percent of the country’s forests. Eighty-seven percent! In fact, palm oil is now referred to as “deforestation diesel.”

In Sumatra and Borneo, 4 million hectares of forest were lost to palm oil farms (9.8 million acres—almost twice the size of the state of New Hampshire).

As an added sucker punch to Mother Nature, biofuel-driven deforestation has also led to Holocaust-like species extinction. The forests in Malaysia and Indonesia are home to the orangutan, Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species, many of which are under serious threat of extinction from habitat loss.

And then there is this troubling little fact: while biofuels generate less carbon emissions than oil, they are doing so by replacing vegetation and soil that suck up even more carbon. In other words, the carbon absorption lost by razing the wilderness to cultivate biofuels is dramatically more than the gains achieved by using the cleaner- burning fuels.

The “inconvenient truth” is that the biofuel craze is destroying nature, and, incidentally, adding to the carbon dioxide on the planet, not decreasing it.

OCEAN POLLUTION AND DEAD ZONES

If you have ever walked by a body of water and noticed an acrid smell, felt your eyes burning or saw that it was blanketed by a thick red, blue or green plant covering, you’ve probably had an unfortunate run-in with an HAB, Harmful Algal Bloom.

In almost all cases, the production of biofuels is accompanied by the use of nitrogen, phosphorous, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, etc.

Nitrogen, along with other toxic materials, filters downward to the water table and finds its way to rivers, streams and eventually the ocean. There, the nitrogen and, to a lesser degree, the pesticides generate massive, abnormal and very toxic “algal blooms,” which rapidly decay into huge areas of oxygen-sucking dead algae. This is highly destructive of marine life.

Corn cultivation utilizes the greatest application of fertilizers and pesticides. No surprise, then, that the heaviest concentration of these toxins occurs in the U.S. corn belt. The result? Nitrogen and other toxins in the Mississippi River system have mercilessly poured into the Gulf of Mexico creating a dead zone of 22,000 square kilometers (8,492 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey). It’s not just the Gulf of Mexico. The number of oceanic dead zones has spread around the planet like an environmental cancer.

Since the onset of the biofuel craze in the 1980s, the number of dead zones has increased 450 percent.

But that’s not all.

Species Extinction

There are currently about 405 dead zones on the planet, the largest, 70,000 square kilometers (27,020 square miles—larger than the state of West Virginia), in the Baltic Sea. Species extinction is a direct effect of these zones. In the last ten years, 14,000 dead seals and dolphins have washed up on California’s coast and 650 gray whales have been found beached. In Florida, hundreds of manatees have been killed and 80 percent of the coral reef in the Caribbean has been smothered. Seventy-five percent of California’s fish-rich kelp forest has been ruined and the problem is beginning to affect the availability of seafood for human consumption.

About 1.7 million plant and animal species have been identified on the planet. According to some reports, species extinction is now occurring at the rate of about 20,000 to 30,000 annually. Whatever the number, the endangered species list increased 150 percent last year alone. The single largest reason for this is habitat destruction and pollution, most of which is a result of biofuel production.

Makes you feel warm all over, doesn’t it?

Oxygen Depletion

I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown rather partial to breathing. It brings a certain awareness to life.

So the fact that biofuel production is depleting the planet’s oxygen is more than a little troubling.

Sounds alarmist, doesn’t it? Perhaps even a bit conspiratorial. How could one of the most prolific solutions to global warming be destroying the planet’s supply of oxygen?

The oceans are the planet’s largest carbon sink. (The rain forests are the most effective carbon sinks; oceans are the largest.) It is the algae in the oceans that absorb the bulk of the earth’s CO2. That’s right; the earth’s primary CO2 sponge is the algae in the oceans.

The algae then convert sunlight and the CO2 in the ocean into oxygen.

Seventy to eighty percent (70%–80%) of this planet’s oxygen is produced by the algae in the oceans. Yet the nitrogen, phosphates and other chemicals pouring into the oceans around the world as a result of biofuel production are destroying the very element that produces the bulk of that oxygen—the algae in the oceans.

This is Con #4: Biofuels don’t reduce carbon; they destroy the rain forests and are depleting the very air we breathe. Which begs the question, have these people forgotten to pay their brain bills, are they just plain evil or . . . is there something else at play here?

And that brings us to the last piece of the puzzle and the final con.

© 2010 by John Truman Wolfe. All rights reserved.

Global warming — 4 Comments
20
Feb 10

Con #05 Global warming is an invention.

CARBON CREDITS

I know you are going to be shocked when I tell you that the banksters have their teeth in the climate change agenda like a pit bull on crystal meth.

You have heard the mantra “the planet is a space-borne oven that is melting the polar ice caps, destroying the polar bears and turning Des Moines into beachfront property.”

The solution? Pass laws that “disincentivize” the production of carbon dioxide by taxing its use. Oh, and turn the tax into derivatives so Goldman Sachs and friends can pig out. (See the chapter “The Goldman Connection” in my e-book Crisis by Design at www.behindthewizardscurtain.com.)

The marketing folks have branded this scheme “carbon credits.”

Kyoto Protocol

The skyline of Kyoto, Japan, is dotted with many of the country’s oldest Buddhist temples. One of these ancient shrines is built on a lake. The water in the lake is so pristine that the best way to tell the real temple from the reflection is to throw a rock in the water and see which of the images ripples.

This, an introductory allegory, is to make the point that things are not always as they seem, even in the land of many Buddhas.

In 1997, an international agreement was signed in Kyoto seeking to limit greenhouse gas emissions. It was named after the host city and carries a handle better suited for a Robert Ludlum novel: The Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol and a subsequent agreement called the Marrakech Accords set “caps” or quotas on the maximum amount of greenhouse gas a country could emit. In turn, each country was to then assign carbon emission “caps” or quotas to its own businesses and other organizations, which are referred to as operators.

Thus, every business in every country that signed the Kyoto Protocol is supposed to have an allowance of “carbon credits.” Businesses that exceed their allowance must buy some carbon credits. These can be purchased from “green” companies that have not used their allocation of carbon, or they can be bought on a “carbon exchange.”

Let’s take, for example, a furniture factory. The factory is emitting 125 tons of carbon dioxide per year, but its allowance is 100 tons. The factory must now cut its production to bring it into alignment with its 100-ton quota, or buy 25 credits from, say, a biofuel company that is producing “carbon neutral” fuel—an entirely different view of the biofuel craze.

As the population grows, as new companies are created and existing ones expand their productivity, the use of energy (and thus carbon-based fuels and emissions) will increase. The quotas for a country, however, will actually be lowered.

Of course, as carbon quotas (or caps) are lowered, the value of carbon credits increases.

You get the picture: the rules of supply and demand will prevail and the cost of carbon credits has a built-in price increase.

Cap-and-Trade Legislation

Moreover, while the U.S. did not sign the Kyoto Protocol, and Copenhagen turned out to be little more than a cacophonous blizzard of press releases, President Obama has committed to a goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to 17 percent below the 2005 levels this year and reducing emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

This is exactly what the “cap-and-trade” legislation that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in June of last year mandates. That’s right, the same circus act that brought you last year’s $1.5 trillion budget deficit has passed a bill to force you to use less energy—because CO2 is creating global warming.

Except, there is no global warming, temperatures have continued to cool over the last decade, and even if they hadn’t, man-made carbon dioxide has nothing to do with any kind of harmful climate change—nada, zero, zip.

Can you imagine what this kind of legislation would do to American industry and commerce?

To get the full magnitude of where this insanity is going, consider the British. The UK Secretary of State for the Environment has promised legislation there that will set legally binding lower carbon emissions of 60 percent by 2050. He has also conducted a feasibility study to issue carbon “credit cards” to every citizen under a nationwide carbon rationing system.

Under this plan everybody would get an annual allowance of carbon they could spend on products such as food, energy and travel. Individuals would have to swipe their carbon card every time they bought gas, paid a utility bill or booked an airline flight.

Go ahead, read that again. The words won’t change.

The British Parliament, which appears to be a collective mental disorder, has gone so far as to give local bureaucrats the power to enter a person’s home without a warrant to, among other things, check for refrigerators that do not carry eco-friendly energy ratings.

We have here a system literally going mad before our eyes.

Carbon emission limits, and the buying and selling of “credits” to deal with them (called Cap and Trade), are a solution created to deal with a catastrophic—though nonexistent—problem created by what is arguably the most well-orchestrated PR campaign in history.

The solution not only establishes a system of planetary economic control by setting carbon emission limits down to every business (and in the UK down to every citizen) but will make its creators and their allies rich beyond all imaginings.

On a tactical level, Cap and Trade does three things: it suppresses productivity and thus increases unemployment; it drives a biofuel agenda (for carbon credits) that is destroying the earth’s ecosystem, and, if continued, will destroy the very air we breathe; and it creates a massive new international Ponzi scheme that has the international banks orgasmic with delight.

Five “climate exchanges” have already been set up that deal in the buying and selling of carbon credits. The two larger exchanges are the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which is the only U.S. firm that claims to trade carbon credits, and Europe’s European Climate Exchange (ECX), which is half owned by CCX.

There is the stock market, where stocks and bonds are traded, and a commodities market where things like gold and silver and corn, wheat and soybeans are traded. Now comet the carbon exchanges where carbon credits in the form of derivatives will be bought and sold.

And derivatives sure did a nice job for us last year, didn’t they?

In short, derivatives are essentially contracts that package up some kind of product into a financial instrument that can be traded—bought and sold. A contract for 100 ounces of gold is a derivative, because the contract isn’t the gold itself.

Banks and other entities will be buying carbon credits, packaging them up, and selling them by the trillions. This is already well in motion in Europe, where carbon offsets have been being traded since 2005.

The carbon market is projected to be in the trillions, and will be turned lose in the U.S. the moment the Senate passes a cap-and-trade bill. That bill will have to be reconciled with the House bill and sent to President Obama, who has made this legislation a key policy initiative second only to health care.

Everyone is set up and ready to go. The big banks have been investing in carbon friendly enterprises—Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America and Citigroup are some of the players. Not to be outdone, the World Bank has joined the CCX and now operates a Carbon Fund for Europe that helps countries meet their Kyoto Protocol requirements.

Isn’t that special?

Major corporations, including the large oil companies, are strong supporters of cap-and-trade legislation and are members of these carbon exchanges as well. Why would an oil company be interested in this game?

As generators of lots of CO2, oil companies will have to buy a lot of carbon credits. If the price of oil skyrockets, they make handsome profits from the oil business. However, as the price of oil rises, so, too, will the price of carbon credits. You see, as oil gets expensive, people turn to less costly coal-fired energy. Coal generates roughly twice the CO2 of oil—which means the demand for carbon credits will increase to offset the coal emissions.

So the oil company scores both ways. Profit on their oil and profit from the increase in value of their carbon credit portfolio.

You see, this is a market that is created only if governments (or international bodies with the authority to do so) mandate emissions standards. By doing so, they instantly create a carbon market because many businesses will have to buy carbon offsets.

If governments impose a limit on carbon emissions, the market will come. If not, it won’t.

The carbon markets in Europe crashed after the Copenhagen conference failed to establish legally binding emission caps for the major industrialized nations.

You see how this works?

And remember, the emission standards do not increase with population growth or increases in the number of plants or factories or their output. They are capped and are then lowered. Therefore carbon credits will continue to rise in price, as the supply will steadily decrease, driving higher demand. Escalating profits are built in if governments mandate the standards.

And standing on deck to become the first carbon billionaire is none other than . . .

Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.

It is not hard to imagine Al Gore in a minister’s collar.

After all, he went to Vanderbilt Divinity School when he was a young man—an act of “purification,” his wife would later say.

And he has called greenhouse gases “a moral issue . . . deeply unethical,” which must be why he warns of environmental Armageddon with such a religious zeal:

“. . . unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes, including more and stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina. . . .

“Today, we are hearing and seeing dire warnings of the worst potential catastrophe in the history of human civilization: a global climate crisis that is deepening and rapidly becoming more dangerous than anything we have ever faced.”

What do we do, Brother Al? How do we solve “the worst potential catastrophe in the history of human civilization”?

“Cap and trade, my son, cap and trade.”

There’s just one little point that should be known about Brother Al’s sermon: if governments mandate the cap-and-trade legislation he is advocating, Al the Righteous, Al the Moral, Al the Ethical, stands to make billions.

You see, while he is pushing governments around the world to cap carbon emissions, which will force companies to buy carbon offset credits, he is also the chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM), which invests in . . . you guessed it . . . carbon dioxide offsets.

Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone lays out the structure beautifully.

“The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the `cap’ on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.”

A World Bank Private Sector blog regularly gushes about Brother Al, whose partners in GIM are those priests of Wall Street propriety, the suspender-wearing bankers from Goldman Sachs. Co-founder of the company is David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management; other former Goldmanite big shots include Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Assisting with the creation of Al’s ethical investment house was none other than the godfather of the Wall Street derivatives that fueled the global financial crisis and the star of the trillion-dollar bank bailout of 2008, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hammering Hank Paulson.

Goldman has long sought cap-and-trade legislation, having spent $3.5 million lobbying climate issues in 2008. And the bank owns a 10 percent interest in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), mentioned above. The CCX is the only U.S. firm that claims to trade carbon credits, and, as noted above, also has a 50 percent interest in its sister carbon exchange in Europe, the European Climate Exchange (ECX).

Members of the Chicago Climate Exchange, besides GIM, include Ford Motor Company, Amtrak, DuPont, Dow Corning, International Paper, Motorola and other tier-one carbon emitters. This gives them a “home” from which to buy their offset credits, but also the ability to invest in credits for the purpose of speculation.

If cap-and-trade legislation passes, the CCX’s business and income will soar. Its members will profit gluttonously.

And the biggest shareholder of the Chicago Climate Exchange? That’s right, Brother Al’s Generation Investment Management.

Amen, Brother Al. Amen.

People know that it is greed that runs through the veins of Goldman Sachs. They are in a class by themselves, plundering the financial markets like pirates of old. But what about Al the Ethical?

Do you think there’s a conflict of interest in his incessant warnings of the greatest catastrophe in human history if Congress does not legalize carbon restrictions, when his investment company is the largest shareholder in the only U.S. carbon exchange and that same company invests only in carbon offset opportunities?

You think perhaps that Al has taken on the color of his predatory partners?

Another one of Gore’s partners in GIM (this one, silent) is Maurice Strong, a man many credit with being the godfather of the environmental movement. Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange and is known to have—what shall we call them?—extreme environmental views.

Strong once told a reporter the plot to a novel in which the rich countries of the world refused to sign an agreement that reduced their impact on the environment. In order to save the planet, a small group of world leaders decide that the only hope for mankind is for the industrialized civilizations to collapse.

Strong’s allegedly fictional plot is echoed in real life by extremists of the environmental movement. Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies at Stanford, said, “A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”

And Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund, said, “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”

Fortunately, these are not the views of most environmentalists. Most environmentalists are caring people who see our waterways turning toxic with chemical poisons, our rain forests being annihilated, species going extinct by the thousands, and are concerned enough to want to do something about it.

The problem is that they have been fed deceitful and highly misleading information and are seeking to implement solutions to a problem that does not exist, solutions that are making things infinitely worse.

There ARE critical environmental problems on this planet which, if not reversed, can cause devastating consequences. But global warming is not one of them and the solutions being pushed by vested interests are not only bogus, they are causing the very problems real environmentalists are concerned about.

This, then, is a brief summary of the key elements of the con job:

The Club of Rome’s theory of global warming and their deceptive call for “sustainable development” is based on junk science.

The global anxiety over depletion of the planet’s fossil fuels is based on a lie. Oil scarcity is a myth. Oil is not a fossil fuel and it is a renewable resource.

Global warming is an invention. The planet has been cooling for more than a decade, has experienced much warmer temperatures long before industrialization and man-made carbon existed—and carbon dioxide is what plants use to create oxygen.

Biofuels are not a solution to the planet’s environmental problems, but rather are highly destructive of life on Earth.

Carbon credits are a vicious scam. Financial products made possible only by political mandates, they are based on a nonexistent problem and will destroy the economies of the world while making international bankers and the global elite rich beyond imagining.

While real environmentalists do not hold the draconian views of Michael Oppenheimer or Paul Ehrlich, if cap-and-trade laws are allowed to pass, their visions of an industrial apocalypse are all too possible.

SOLUTIONS

1. All effort should be made to nullify carbon credits on an immediate basis. This holds true whether on a local, national or international basis. For example, there is a cap-and-trade bill in the U.S. Senate that is high on the administration’s agenda.

Misinformed environmentalists or “environmentalists” that benefit from the carbon credit agenda are pushing this legislation with a passion born of ignorance or a blatant thirst for power and wealth.

“This system, which may sound market-friendly, is something only a bureaucrat could dream up. The twist is that the carbon market exists only because the government’s imposition of a cap creates an artificial scarcity in the right to produce energy.” —Deborah Corey Barnes, the PoliReport, Washington, D.C.

The damaging effect of such a law on the U.S. economy or the economy of any nation that adopts similar legislation is blatantly obvious and it should be derailed, or, if already passed, repealed. California, for example, has already passed legislation that mandates a 25 percent cut in emissions by 2020. No one has been corny enough to brand the legislation the state’s “economic terminator,” so I’ll do it here.

2. Countries should opt out of the Kyoto Protocol and nullify it, along with any actual agreements that were made in Copenhagen.

This similarly applies to all underdeveloped countries, though from a different perspective. The simplicity is that carbon credits destroy—economies, environments, and life. But third-world countries hold considerable leverage: if they opt out of the Kyoto Protocol and forbid carbon credits, it does not matter what laws are passed in the U.S. or EU, the carbon credits system will fall flat. It requires developing and underdeveloped countries’ cooperation, as they have the carbon offset resources (rain forests, etc).

It is important for them to understand that if they join the system and go for the quick buck now, they will make some short-term money selling credits; but as they gradually industrialize, they will have to buy them back—and what will the cost be then? The African Union has the capability to enforce this.

3. Biofuel production should be legislated against, as it is meaningless as a viable energy resource and because it creates more environmental destruction than all prior conventional causes.

4. Effective action is needed to actually protect the environment: Reduce the use of harmful fertilizers and gradually replace them with nonharmful products. (Eliminating the production of biofuel would cause the most dramatic and immediate improvement.) This would rapidly improve the condition of our rivers and oceans.

5. Deescalate deforestation by prohibiting biofuel production, which would also bring about the most immediate environmental improvement and species preservation.

It doesn’t take a great deal of insight to see the amount of control any governmental body could exert over a planet, a national economy, a business or a household by enforcing a system of carbon emission standards. This is, as one observer noted above, nothing less than complete control of the production of energy.

When Gorbachev, speaking for the Club of Rome, said, “The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘internal disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order,” carbon credits are exactly the kind of NWO he meant.

Because, in the final analysis, global warming is nothing more than a PR campaign for global government.

We must act quickly and decisively. The Club of Rome has a massive head start and control of much of the media. But neglect of our responsibilities here is not an option. Not if we value the power of choice, the freedom to produce, and economic self-determinism.

Let’s put this joker back in the box and keep it there. Civilization doesn’t need him.

© 2010 by John Truman Wolfe. All rights reserved.

THE FINANCIAL CRISIS — No Comments
9
Feb 10

Why is the current recession different from past financial crises?

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QUESTION: Why is the current recession different from past financial crises?

We have a seismic shift here. This is not an ordinary depression – recession – call it what you will.  This was a created financial catastrophe. The thing that might be difficult for some people to deal with – to confront – is the fact that it was created.  And that’s a matter of really looking at the research. It’s actually a matter of looking at what occurred.  Not listening to all the talking heads.

‘Cause CNN, MSNBC, FOX – it doesn’t make any difference. They’re full of people with opinions. But opinions and $3.25 will get you a “Grandé Decaf Latte” at Starbucks.  What you have to do is look at what’s occurring, what’s actually occurring.  And the fact of the matter is, is that the fiscal autonomy of the United States has been not only compromised, but has officially been dished off to another international agency.

THE FINANCIAL CRISIS — No Comments
6
Feb 10

Financial Crisis: What can we do about it?

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QUESTION: What can we do about this situation?

There are a couple things that people can do. One, in the book that accompanies the film there’s a chapter on specifically what people can do relative to their own financial futures.  What do you do when the US budget deficit is one and a half trillion dollars?  These figures are mind-numbing. They’re mind-numbing. A trillion and a half dollars.  This is the deficit. That means that the government (who does their financial planning backwards), they go, “Let’s see.  How much are we gonna spend this year?” “Okay, we’ll spend three and a half trillion.” “What’s our income?” “Uh… Two trillion?” “Oh, we’re short”. “We’re short a trillion and a half.”

This, by any viewpoint means there will… interest rates will go up because we’re going to have to increase interest rates to attract borrowers. It means more taxes. Without question. Without question it means these things. So, what does that mean to investors?  We cover that in detail in the book that accompanies the film.

Jumping up a level of responsibility, we cover in the book, and will in the film as well: specific things people can and should do relative to the government in this country, the communications that should go to Congress, so that they wear their hat here, so that they take responsibility for what they should be doing.  Because this agenda is rolling forward completely bypassing, not only the United States Congress, but the Parliaments around the world.  Because the agenda’s being run by central banks and by and large, central banks do not have to report to governments.