Climate Wars: Nick Stern Threatens U.S. With Trade Boycott
Ben Webster
The United States will be banned from selling goods to many countries if it continues to shirk its promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to the world’s leading climate change economist.
In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said that nations that were taking strong action on emissions could start imposing restrictions on “dirty” US exports by 2020.
Lord Stern, who advises several G20 leaders and is one of the key players in the international negotiations seeking a deal on emissions, made his comments ten days before the annual United Nations climate change conference opens in Cancun, Mexico. They reflect the feeling in many countries that a lack of action on emissions in the US is delaying progress in the talks.
…
Lord Stern said that Europe and the Far East (sic) were forging ahead of the US in controlling emissions and switching to low carbon sources of energy. They would not tolerate having their industries undermined by American competitors that had not paid for their emissions. “If you are charging properly for carbon and other people are not, you will take that into account,” he said. “Many of the more forward-looking people in the US are thinking about this. If they see a danger on the trade front to US exports that could influence public discussion.”
Asked what type of US products could face restrictions, Lord Stern said: “Aircraft, clearly, some cars, machine tools — it’s not simply what’s in the capital good, it’s what kind of processes the capital good is facilitating.”
Lord Stern said that a complete ban on some goods was also possible. He said the American people should overcome their historical antipathy to taxation and accept that emissions needed to be controlled either through a tax or a trading scheme.
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First off, no apologies please from you fine WUWT Brits because I don’t want to apologize for my idiot leaders here in the states, you are hereby absolved.
Second, R. DeHann, thanks for the video, oh my god! The very idea that those MPs on the video had no notion of your public debt is frightening. It reminds me of when Howard Waxman was asked if he thought that there would be a point of taxation at which people lost their incentive to produce wealth replied that he had never thought about that.
Third, if we don’t reign in this public spending/growth madness the whole notion of actually being able to do something about CO2 if it has to be dealt is mute, we’ll all be worried about eating.
Forth, expansion of national debt is the road to serfdom, you and I should never tolerate it nor tolerate idiots like Lord Stern.
Fifth, sorry for the ramble, can see straight after stuff like this.
Isn’t the US currency really backed by plutonium and tritium (not gold)? Would one really want to cool things off with a little nuclear winter? All it would take is a wacko taking over the U.S., Russia or China. We really need to work this all out together and forget the theats.
Nusquam Nihil says:
November 19, 2010 at 9:36 am
Or the equivalent: “Pound sand, my lord.”
Might I add, blackmail on a global scale? That’s not surprising–last thread I called it theft on a global scale!
And these are the jokers that want to be in charge of Global Governance. They must be taking lessons from the devil himself.
That Sword cuts both ways. I can see it now U.S. made sold to China, resold to UK. Does the he, Al, Soro and the UN think they can control a true free market? This will open up more Black Markets.
Funny, I was just thinking about how the American worker could probably use a good dose of protectionism right about now. Odd, though, I was thinking of it in terms of the Chinese and their currency protectionism. But no matter……
One of the many beautiful blessings that comes with being in America is the knowledge that there is very little we can’t provide for ourselves.
Metals in the ground, ………………………………………………..check
Natural fuel resources………………………………………………..check
Food………………………………………………………………………..check
Technology sufficient for social-economic advancement…check
Sufficient labor force…………………………………………………..check
playmates in a trade war………………………………………………?????
Anthony
Here’s a businessman’s take on Scotland’s current energy policy (Rupert Soames of Aggreko):
http://www.aggreko.com/media-centre/press-releases/speech-to-scottish-parliament.aspx
The contrast with economist Lord Stern’s approach to current US energy policy is total.
[Acknowledgements for the URL to ‘rentalpower’ commenting in Roger Pielke Jr’s blog]
Stephen Prower
Stevenage
Friday 19 November 2010
I suspect that it is all a distraction … trying distract from the size of the UK National Debt and the fact that the power might be off for people over winter …
Stern’s report was so rubbish that it seems he’ll actually want the world economies to contract through trade wars just to ‘prove’ he was right. As Professor Richard Tol expressed it: “If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a Masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a ‘D’ for diligence; but more likely I would give him an ‘F’ for fail…There is a whole range of very basic economics mistakes that somebody who claims to be a Professor of Economics simply should not make…Stern consistently picks the most pessimistic for every choice that one can make. He overestimates through cherry-picking, he double counts particularly the risks and he underestimates what development and adaptation will do to impacts.” If the report is so wrong, why not try to cripple the world to make it right?
Stern and the Grantham Institute he heads up (whose spokesman is the infamous attack-dog Bob Ward) are bankrolled by billionaire fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who also bankrolls WWF, Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists and a whole host of Green-hell advocacy groups, and the Obama presidential campaign. Grantham is about as deluded as it’s possible to be on the climate issue, but like Al Gore he’s sure to make as much money as he can out of it. He tells his investor clients (July 2010) “Global warming will be the most important investment issue for the foreseeable future. ” So gimme your money.
Grantham’s delusions are effusive in the same article: “I have a much simpler but plausible “conspiracy theory”: that fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. Why are we arguing the issue? Challenging vested interests as powerful as the oil and coal lobbies was never going to be easy. Scientists are not naturally aggressive defenders of arguments. In short, they are conservatives by training: never, ever risk overstating your ideas. The skeptics are far, far more determined and expert propagandists to boot. They are also well-funded…The obfuscators’ simple and direct motivation – making money in the near term, which anyone can relate to – combined with their resources and, as it turns out, propaganda talents, have meant that we are arguing the science long after it has been nailed down.”
Yeah, right. The science is settled and anyone who disagrees is in the pay of Big Oil. To try to redress the balance, Grantham pours hundreds of millions of dollars into ecofascist propaganda. Jeremy Grantham and his wife have bunged at least GBP12 million to the organization that Stern heads up, so they definitely want value for money. Stern has to keep ‘on message’ to keep the funds flowing and be seen to be doing a good job as chairman.
http://www.uni-protokolle.de/nachrichten/id/186585/
Lord Nicholas Stern receives Honorary Doctorate of the TU Berlin
Award ceremony was held on November 4th at the TU Berlin on the occasion of the first “Climate Lecture”. “October 21, 2009, the Academic Senate of the TU Berlin resolved to bestow the title of Honorary Doctorate on Professor Lord Nicholas Herbert Stern of Brentford.”
These lectures are organised in cooperation with Vattenfall Europe AG (wind turbines) and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. (Schellnhuber, Edenhofer, Rahmstorf and many more)
This took place a month before COP 16 in Copenhagen.
TU President Prof. Dr. Kurt Kutzler said: “Lord Stern’s innovative work and his successes in bringing climate change and related economics issues to the international agenda are driving further research and scientific expertise.
He is now a scientist, Kutzler again: “In his role as a scientist, Lord Stern has earned broad international recognition, particularly in the fields of growth and development theory, government policy, and the economics of climate change. His exceptional standing as a scientist is demonstrated in the numerous important books he has published, in addition to more than 100 expert articles.”
Prof. Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer (Redistributing Wealth, WUWT, Nov 18th), presented the address at the ceremony.
According to Edenhofer, “As a brilliant economist Nicholas Stern has not only made significant contributions to our understanding of climate change from an economics point of view, but to international climate policies as well. He has convincingly shown that investments in climate protection make good economic sense.”
According to Stern: “Ottmar Edenhofer is an internationally outstanding scientist in the economics of climate change. His expertise, experience, wisdom and judgement are of great value for the IPCC and especially Working Group 3 “Mitigation of Climate Change”.
All pals together.
It’s over Stern. You got that? IT”S OVER!
You ain’t getting that New World Order thing you have been working for your entire life.
You got that Lord Stern?
IT’S OVER! YOU LOST!
Lord Stern is a foot soldier in the Soros army, as is Jeremy Grantham of the Grantham Foundation, purveyors of the debunked CAGW scam. Here’s where they’re headed:
Woah!… Soros Group Says Obama Can Use Armed Forces to Push “Progressive” Agenda
Enneagram says: “BTW, it seems that in their effort for making Green airplanes they have exaggerated and made them from a wafered material: Aluminum-Carbon Fiber-Aluminum, in this order, which is : Conductor-dielectric-conductor = A flying condenser, ready to blow up… if there is some charge around.”
Graphite (carbon fiber) is more conductive than Germanium or Silicon. Your condenser wouldn’t store energy. Also, it would be easy to ground the inner and outer layers. If the structure is riveted, you wouldn’t even need to add grounding straps.
Can’t imagine ANYONE in their right mind choosing Brentford as the seat for their lordship – with apologies to the good citizens of that borough, its a fairly uninspiring West London suburb, a mixture of residential roads and carpet warehouses…
Anyway – his Lordship is clearly off his trolley, and if this sort of outburst is the ‘official’ line, it only goes to prove that UK government ministers have a long way to go before they grasp reality…
I’m sorry US readers, but we in the UK didn’t get the chance to elect this pompous oaf who claims to represent us. We need a revolution to purge these stupid and insufferable people.
Let ’em do it. We’ll be the only ones left standing.
Actually we in the UK have a much better one. Rhymes with ‘anchor’.
Just like the apparent US Boycott of French goods in the wake of the Gulf war, you remember – when the French actually INCREASED exports to the US, this one means nothing to most people.
Stern is an idiot.
Who will be ignored.
sagi says:
November 19, 2010 at 10:05 am
“Inbreeding within this class has apparently taken its toll.”
Not much class here, he has only been a Lord for 3 years, got the prize from Gordon Brown for the Stern Review. He will never face an election but gets to vote on legislation. Our upper chamber is now mostly political appointees and failed MP’s.
The latest load of Lords includes the Tory Party treasurer who has given £2m to the party in the last few years. Three main parties in the UK are the same, all dyed green. And they tell us we live in a democracy.
Lord Stern sounds more like Howard Stern.
It’s only fitting the group giving the Greens so much strife is called The Tea Party.
History repeats itself. No taxation without representation.
Our muskets are much better now and we have more of them just like before.
I seem to recall an iconic, or perhaps fictitious, newspaper headline:
FOG IN (ENGLISH) CHANNEL: CONTINENT ISOLATED
But our glorious leaders never learn.
Looks like King George III was prescient:
“I can never suppose this country so far lost to all ideas of self-importance as to be willing to grant America independence; if that could ever be adopted I shall despair of this country being ever preserved from a state of inferiority and consequently falling into a very low class among the European States. “
Lord Stern is (forgive the profanity) a Dickhead. In our last election in the UK we traded a lot of neutered europhile Socialists for a bunch of Green tinted Liberal and Tory-lite europhiles. Brussels and the IPCC call the shots and all our MPs/Lords have to go along with whatever they say having given away almost all of our legislative and some of our judicial powers already. Poll after poll shows that the majority of English men and women want out of the failed European Union, mainly because we were never asked if we wanted to be in it in the first place. We were sold and voted for a ‘common market’ back in 1973, a trading union and nothing more. What we got is an an unwieldy, crooked, money wasting, lopsided federation of mostly Socialist governments and the biggest, most corrupt bureaucracy in the western hemisphere.
nb: A Tory is a bit like a Republican or at least they used to be, these days in the UK it’s hard to tell one party from another when it comes to climate change and the E.U.S.S.R.
“In ten years it will be emitting even more and exporting even more goods. Will Lord Stern suggest barring the importation of Chinese goods then ?”
He will not. Because his goal is not to limit the CO2 emissions but to establish socialism and “global governance” in the Western word. For that goal to be achieved, ‘global warming’ aka “climate change-climate disruption’ nonsense is as good as any other excuse (‘economic injustice’, ‘poverty’, Ozone hole, invasion of Martians, whatever).
Stern is a Brit synonym for arse; Lord Stern talks out of his.
There simply aren’t enough [snip]s in the known universe to cover everything I want to say about that idiot. Unfortunately for me, I live in the UK.
Hey, Guys. Please don’t blame England because of what this raving lunatic has said. Most of us are completely on your side. He shames us.