See also this related story from the Sacramento Bee: Carbon Markets Take Shape which outlines California’s agreement with six other Western states and four Canadian provinces released the draft of a plan to set up a vast market for greenhouse-gas emissions that aims to ease the burden of the war on global warming.
Starting in 2012, according to the plan, the members of the Western Climate Initiative would issue annual permits to firms that emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
From MarketsMedia Online:
Fund Eyes Global Warming Assertions
By Ed Zwirn, Staff Writer
A politically conservative publicly traded mutual fund has petitioned the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue interpretive guidance that would “warn registrants against making misleading statements pertaining to global warming and other environmental issues.”
All of the “potentially false and misleading statements” cited in the letter written by the Free Enterprise Management Fund tended to validate either the global warming hypothesis in general or the premise that human activity is its primary cause.Toyota motor Corp. was taken to task for having stated in a report, “When we drive a vehicle, it consumes fossil fuels and emits CO2, a major contributor to climate change.”
Similarly Caterpillar was quoted as saying that “we must take action now (to reduce carbon dioxide emissions) or risk serious harm to our planet,” and Goldman Sachs was quoted as saying “by now, the dynamics of global warming are widely known, and we find no reason to dispute the scientific assumptions.”“False and/or misleading statements on material matters may violate the anti-fraud provision of the federal securities laws,” said Steven Milloy, one of the fund’s portfolio managers. “Statements by registrants on global warming and other environmental issues could be considered material.”The petition asked that the SEC therefore issue guidance that “statements to the effect that ‘the science is conclusive,’ ‘the debate is over,’ and that ‘human activities are definitely causing global warming’ should be avoided.”To back up its assertions, the petition cited several reports that it said tended to shed doubt on global warming and its causes, arguing that they tended to “expose the above-mentioned registrant statements (and probably many others) as false and misleading.”These included a much-circulated July report by the American Physical Society claiming “a considerable presence within the scientific community who do not agree with the (U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”
Also cited was the IPCC itself, which was quoted as predicting that “global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade.” Read the rest of this entry »
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