This is reminiscent of communist Russia with their disastrous five year plan, which while the plan encouraged industrialization, damaged Soviet agriculture to such an extent that it didn’t recover until after the Second World War. The plan was considered by the Soviet leadership so successful in this sense that the second Five-Year Plan was declared in 1932, lasting until 1937. (source: Wikipedia)
In the same vein, the US opens a new line of attack in the AGW battle, which I expect to damage both industry and agriculture:
Administration Releases 10-Year Global Change Strategic Plan
The Obama Administration today released a 10-year strategic plan for research related to global change, identifying priorities that will help state and local governments, businesses, and communities prepare for anticipated changes in the global environment, including climate change, in the decades ahead.
The Plan—released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), which for more than 20 years has coordinated Federal global change research— was developed collaboratively by more than 100 Federal scientists. It reflects extensive inputs from stakeholders and the general public, as well as a detailed review by the National Research Council, chartered by Congress to provide independent expert advice to the Nation. The Plan will be implemented through the USGCRP and the 13 Federal departments and agencies it represents.
“Human actions are altering the atmosphere, the land, and our oceans, placing new pressures on the Earth’s ecosystems and threatening the health and economic welfare of our Nation and the world,” said Tom Armstrong, Executive Director of the USGCRP. “High-quality and well-coordinated research is essential if we are to better understand and predict future changes, develop strategies to minimize our vulnerabilities, and adapt to changes that can’t be avoided.”
Federal research under the USGCRP has for two decades focused largely on detailed documentation of specific environmental changes by satellite and other Earth-observing technologies and the development of sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s climate system to predict how such changes will manifest in the near-term. In the ten years going forward that emphasis will expand to incorporate the complex dynamics of ecosystems and human social-economic activities and how those factors influence global change. By including these added dimensions, USGCRP-sponsored research will generate information of unprecedented practical use to decision-makers in a wide range of sectors including agriculture, municipal planning, and public works.
“It is no longer enough to study the isolated physical, chemical, and biological factors affecting global change,” Armstrong said. “Advanced computing technologies and methods now allow us to integrate insights from those disciplines and add important information from the ecological, social, and economic sciences. This new capacity will deepen our understanding of global change processes and help planners in realms as diverse as storm water management, agriculture, and natural resources management.”
The Strategic Plan describes four key goals for the USGCRP during 2012 – 2021:
- Advance Science: Advance scientific knowledge of the integrated natural and human components of the Earth system, drawing upon physical, chemical, biological, ecological, and behavioral sciences.
- Inform Decisions: Provide the scientific basis to inform and enable timely decisions on adaptation to and mitigation of global change.
- Conduct Sustained Assessments: Build a sustained assessment capacity that improves the Nation’s ability to understand, anticipate, and respond to global change impacts and vulnerabilities.
- Communicate and Educate: Broaden public understanding of global change and support the development of a scientific workforce skilled in Earth-system sciences.
Work towards these goals will help the USGCRP fulfill its Congressional mandate to “assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change,” as called for in the Global Change Research Act of 1990. To achieve these goals, USGCRP is developing an implementation strategy that will draw in part upon its expertise in conducting National Climate Assessments—broad assessments of global change impacts across U.S. economic sectors, the latest of which is currently under development.
In combination with USGCRP’s expanding communication and education activities, the new scientific findings and decision-support tools expected to emerge from the Strategic Plan will empower a broad range of stakeholders to make more informed and effective decisions as they prepare for and respond to the many dimensions of global change.
To learn more about USGCRP please visit: http://library.globalchange.gov/us-global-change-research-program-factsheet
http://www.globalchange.gov/whats-new/689-new-usgcrp-strategic-plan-for-2012-2021
Sinister is it not? And another example of the mask being allowed to slip a little further…
Q. Bolshevism or Nazism? Because Reading through the four dot-points I was expecting a fifth containing concepts with the sub-text of ‘Untermenschen’ and ‘Lebensraume’ … perhaps that’s for an update at the five year mark…?
Jim,
The term robber barons refers to a time in American history where political graft coincided with “robber barons” who would set up town and/or rob people blindly for pure profit. This was an era of no regulation. This era was most notably from 1866-1900 roughly. (US)
The account you give of the Rockefeller’s is for two reasons off-topic to that.
1) this happened after this gilded era.
2) This is one particular family/man.
But besides those facts, your so-called rebuttal has logical fallacies in it. The reasons above are enough to throw it aside because yes, they are logically unsound as an argument.
First, your straw man. Just because Rockefeller did good things does not mean he was not quote “a robber baron” as well. A man can later in life atone or perhaps feel bad about all the bad he did in life and do some good as well. You are misrepresenting the position of Gail here which is a logical fallacy known as a strawman. Those things you list that the Rockefellers did were all good, but nowhere did anyone say they were bad or that robber baron’s also did not do philanthropy….
There are also about 2-3 different logical fallacies which I could explain with your logic there, but there are much lower hanging fruit.
Temporal fallacy:
You confused time-lines like I said.
Rockefeller was perhaps a robber baron earlier in life during the time we were talking about, but later in life he atoned or attempted to by over-compensating and founding a bunch of charities.
Then there is the obvious fallacy from above just repeated to make it simpler to understand.
Robber barons are bad people, but Rockefeller did a bunch of good stuff, so therefore he is not a robber baron.
And I will repeat what you said earlier (the nasty parts)
_Jim says:
May 1, 2012 at 8:57 pm
You know, I wish you would get educated (outside the ‘loop’ you currently find yourself frequenting) read some actual history on the real origins and life/lives of “The Rockefellers”.
Please, I implore you, before total onset of dementia. (Verily you have a modern-day Rockefeller in the form of Bill Gates whose product you are no doubt using to read this, but I digress.)
I see a few ad-homs and a couple other red herrings thrown in there for good measure.
Nice attempt at rebuttal, but you failed. I think we would love to hear a real rebuttal on why Rockefeller or perhaps other robber barons are not really robber barons, but you did not provide a solid argument here at all. In fact, your argument is so weak I wonder why you bothered?
In debate, if you want to prove someone wrong, you often first prove that their original premise is wrong, like prove that he was not a robber baron as in during the time of robber barons circa 1865-1900.
That is where you should focus on. After reading a book on the copper wars up in Montana and the end of this era, I was rather surprised at what a lack of regulation could do for a small town as far as deaths from a smelter……and you might learn something just looking this up. Rockefeller himself was involved in this and was not really clean himself in this episode but neither was anyone else, so go figure.
To put it into perspective, more people died everyday in Butte then died in New York City during this time because no regulation on emissions and an uncaring management from Rockefeller on down did not care about the workers one bit. They just carted more in as they died.
benfrommo says: May 1, 2012 at 11:04 pm “more people died everyday in Butte”
I lived for a year less than a Km from a quite large Cu smelter that had no capture of SO2 emissions. I did not die, nor did my children of 2 and 8 years ages. Pray tell, just what emissions from a copper mine or smelter have been implicated in death rates of any severity? What is/was the causative agent? If there was such a causative agent, was it remediated? If so, was it by the producer or by a regulatory government? It’s a bit rich to think that companies purposefully go about killing people. It just does not happen that way. There’s always a road out of town.
benfrommo says:
May 1, 2012 at 11:04 pm
Regardless of the correctness or not of your rebuttal rebuttal, it should not be considered a smokescreen for the present-day robber barons who are the subject of this thread. Theyyyyyy’re Baaaaaaack!
RE
benfrommo says:
@ur momisugly May 1, 2012 at 11:04 pm
——————
I have a bit of difficulty with your reasoning for high rates of wroker injury and death regarding your statement:
“…This was an era of no regulation….”
I imagine that most people would agree with this and maybe I do to – but first I need to understand what you mean by “regulation”. Most people mean this to be workplace safety rules: imposed and policed by governments. If that is your meaning, then I disagree with you.
But what if many of the high rates of injury and death at that time were part and parcel of the dangerous nature of the work being conducted and that these risks were fully understood and accepted as the risks faced in conducting their work?
And what if many/ most of those injuries and deaths occurred due to the rudimentary nature of the technology, equipment, materials, techniques employed at that time (eg. wooden pulleys and shackles; natural fibre rope etc.).
Sure, with time technology, materials, terchniques improve with time and with them – so does worker safety.
Do we need to invoke “regulation” as being responsible for these improvements? I don’t think so. If we do then you are arguing that regulation is responsible for the technological improvements, is the driving force for invention of new materials etc.
See, thepropblerm with the “lack fo regulation” argument is that this assumes the employers are content to lose their workers. But this has only costs (not just financial) for employers who have to replace and train new staff and surely lose goodwill form surviving employees if they were really as cavalier as you imply. These things have high costs for employers and businesses.
Vitally important to keep in mind that technologies and techniques improve through time without having anything to do with governments or bureaucrats. But it does take time. Yet governments and bureacrats would certainly like us all to think that it is they who have improved our work safety and lives in every respect and therefore we need more government!
And if your argument is that it takes a regulatory stick to compel employers to look after their workers properly then perahps the real problem was then (and still is) due to the lack of legal protection for individual property rights? The reason I bring this up is that your comment about “lack of regulation” suits our governments very well to justify ever more government.
The same argument essentially is used by the supporters of big govt and eg., the EPA, to justify their diktats on pollution. It is essentially about control and socialism.
But free market capitalism holds private property rights as its central tenet. If these rights were properly protected and upheld then there would be no need for an EPA or workplace safety regulation. Pollution (I mean real pollution not the arbitrary Govt kind) is an affront to individual proprty rights. Real protections would be a sufficient stick to incentivise businesses to pursue a no pollution strategy.
These things should be the concern of a free society in a free market capitalist system without the interference of goverment planners and regulators. This is why we are finding our freedoms disappearing before our eyes… road to hell paved with good intentions and all that…
Gee… A Central Planning Document produced by a Government Central Planning Committee with a 10 year plan… Now what does that remind me off… Oh, right Socialism Central Planning…
We don’t need a hundred exorbitantly paid folks gazing at their navels to give us pronouncements from on high about what to do. Just give us the Emergent Behaviour of open free and fair markets and we’ll take care of it all ourselves.
How do we get these loons to go away and leave us alone?
_Jim says:
May 1, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Meanwhile, If the Rockfellers, were such robber-barons the ‘press’ of the day made them out to be…why did they engage in so much philanthropy over the years?
A combination of manipulating public perceptions and assuaging guilty consciences — good publicity about philanthropy goes a long way to counter muckraking reportage.
Patriarch John D. was said to be so tightfisted he once took a nickel out of his pocket and Miss Liberty blinked at the sudden bright light…
E.M.Smith says:
May 2, 2012 at 1:02 am
“How do we get these loons to go away and leave us alone?”
————————
I fear the same way it has always required in the past.
At least your lot avoided using five years as the unit of choice. Here in the UK we have our five year plans and go far beyond the USSR of proclaiming a second five year plan. We’ve got ’em from 2010 to 2050.
Department of Energy and Climate Change: Carbon Budgets explained.
For a taste of the mania see the various quotes on this page: UK proposes fourth carbon budget
If only this amount of time, effort and money could be directed at job creation.
Pointman
Friends:
I would be grateful if somebody were to explain what is being altered by this new “Strategic Plan” other than its having dropped the words “climate” and “warming” from US policy on the ‘global environment’.
For decades the US government has been spending over $2.5 billion p.a. on ‘global warming’ activities. The “Plan” indicates no change is intended to this rate of expenditure.
The “Plan” outlines the intended distribution of the expenditure over the period 2012-2021. But I fail to see any significant alteration of the distribution from what it was in 2011.
And a government can alter any government “Plan” at any time. This “Plan” is for a period that includes at least two elections. A “Plan” adopted now cannot fix what a future government chooses to do.
However, publication of such a “Plan” in the months prior to an election can be considered to be a policy statement for use in that election. The dropping of the words “climate” and “warming” in this “Plan” implies that publication of this “Plan” is merely a tactical adjustment of the wording of the existing policy prior to the forthcoming election.
So, can anybody tell me what is being altered by this “Plan”, please?
Richard
_Jim says:
May 1, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Gail Combs says on May 1, 2012 at 7:58 pm:
…
“The old company towns set up by the robber barons where workers were worse off than slaves. It is probably no coincidence that Maurice Strong has been linked to the old robber barron family, the Rockefellers, most of his life.”
You know, I wish you would get educated (outside the ‘loop’ you currently find yourself frequenting) read some actual history on the real origins and life/lives of “The Rockefellers”.
Please, I implore you, before total onset of dementia. (Verily you have a modern-day Rockefeller in the form of Bill Gates whose product you are no doubt using to read this, but I digress.)
Meanwhile, If the Rockfellers, were such robber-barons the ‘press’ of the day made them out to be (THIS should be your FIRST sign that all this nutty stuff was just the published ‘muck’ of the day and time, like Ida Tarbell’s articles in McClure’s), why did they engage in so much philanthropy over the years? A few major Rockefeller charitable ventures include:
1. Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, 1901 (later became Rockefeller University)
2. General Education Board, 1902. Phased out in 1965.
3. Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, 1909 to 1915.
4. The Rockefeller Foundation, 1913, remains one of the world’s leading philanthropic forces today.
5. University of Chicago. Rockefeller was also a generous benefactor of Columbia, Harvard, Spelman, Bryn Mawr and Yale.
A few places to start on an ‘education’ on the Rockefellers:
THE ROCKEFELLERS: How A Few Poor Germans Became An Immortal American Dynasty
The Rockefellers most likely immigrated from Germany to the U.S. in the 1720s. …. by no means did JD [Rockefeller] come from wealth.
John D. Rockefeller: The Ultimate Oil Man
Excerpt:
In 1855, Rockefeller found his first job, working as an assistant bookkeeper for less than four dollars a week. He showed a talent for detail and a strong work ethic from the beginning. In 1859, Rockefeller’s diligence was rewarded by being made a partner.
In that same year, oil was discovered in not-too-distant Titusville, Pennsylvania, touching off the growth of a new industry driven largely by the demand for kerosene for lighting. Rockefeller was immediately attracted to the oil business, but was repelled by the disorder of the wildcatters.
Papers of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
=======
Ah, to have such a high regard for a man who thought competition is a sin, you’ve obviously been well educated…
http://www.newswithviews.com/Spingola/deanna74.htm
“The super-rich hide their profits and ownership of mega corporations in “tax-free piggybank” foundations where they can buy, sell, hold real estate and securities. They pay no capital gains tax, no income tax and the funds just multiply. In addition, foundations finance like-minded non government organizations (NGOs). Foundation money established the National Education Association (NEA), a licentious lobby. The Rockefeller Foundation backed the Marxist educator, John Dewey. It gave substantial funding to institutes of higher learning, especially schools of education, buying and promoting a Socialist-Fascist mentality. Progressive, non-traditional education and permissiveness, with substantiating textbooks, was enthusiastically advanced with hundreds of millions of dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, a mere tentacle of the monstrous Rockefeller enforcement mob. “Those who control education will over a period of several generations control a nation.”[10]”
Foundations – moving money from one pocket to the other. If you’re not suffering from dementia and would benefit from de-programming, please do read at least this article, maybe you’ll see the disjunct, maybe not.
“The original Ruthless Rockefeller – John D. managed, by bribery, coercion, violence, dynamite explosions and sabotage to crush or control any and all local oil refining competitors within a year. Imagine, people using life-endangering explosives to further their own agenda! What a concept! The ultimate and most effective way to destroy competition is to use politics, the biggest of all businesses.”
“John D. Rockefeller, a Machiavellian monopoly capitalist, used the government to promote his interests and callously suppress or totally exclude healthy competition. The true role of a legitimate government is to protect the rights and property of all citizens. However, socialist-fascist public servants, complicit with big business for their own financial advancement, care little about their oaths to the Constitution or the citizens. “To control commerce, banking, transportation and natural resources on a national level, you must control the federal government.”[11] ”
“Rockefeller’s industrial espionage system was by far the most elaborate, most sophisticated and most successful that had ever been established.” … “For a long time the public didn’t realize how powerful he was because he kept insisting he was battling firms that he secretly owned outright.”
Remember that when you listen to Jay ..
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/02/29/rockefeller-gets-behind-obama/
So, are you in the family business? Just asking.
Not at all shy of telling us what they’re aiming for, David Rockefeller:
“We are on the verge of global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nation will accept the New World Order”
“Some even believe we (the Rockefeller family) are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it” -Memoirs, p.405
“We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promise of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The super-national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.” -Bilderberg Meeting, 1991″
These are the people creating the 10 year plan. Note how its phrased, an intellectual elite and world bankers, not the world bankers claiming to be the intellectual elite, but those who they support will certainly think themselves that..
There’s a very funny video of Gordon Brown in glazed eye mode spouting new world order memes one after the other not long after getting to be prime minister – not a mention in Hansard that he held any such ideas previously.
Here, if you’re ready for the next step: http://educate-yourself.org/ga/RF2chap1976.shtml
This confirms my opinion, often stated here, that we have no chance whatsoever of winning this battle let alone the war against junk climate science. Anyone who has the slightest optimism that the CAGW alarmist argument is being defeated (and that’s most here) is simply delusional. The Watermelons, Greens, The Team et al won the war long ago to the extent that anthropogenic global weirding, or whatever it’s called today, is the wholly accepted norm by virtually all governments on the planet (especially if left of centre redistributionists).
We need a new paradigm, one that reaches the citizenry and their representatives but is simple to assimilate. The empirical data v. computer models argument cannot work – we’re dealing with religion here so perhaps we need to look at e.g. how cult followers are rescued from their misplaced faith.
Until we find that (probably non technical) answer the alarmists will continue on their winning march to enslave us all – and the game will remain over.
_Jim says:
May 1, 2012 at 8:57 pm
“You know, I wish you would get educated (outside the ‘loop’ you currently find yourself frequenting) read some actual history on the real origins and life/lives of “The Rockefellers”.”
_Jim, you forgot to mention that David Rockefeller together with Zbigniew Brzezinski founded The Trilateral Commission, the original globalists.
Even the extreme left is not entirely happy with that:
” On the left, linguist Noam Chomsky argues that a report issued by the Commission called The Crisis of Democracy which proposes solutions for the “excess of democracy” in the 1960s, embodies “the ideology of the liberal wing of the state capitalist ruling elite”.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_commission
“It is no longer enough to study the isolated physical, chemical, and biological factors affecting global change,” Armstrong said. “Advanced computing technologies and methods now allow us to integrate insights from those disciplines and add important information from the ecological, social, and economic sciences. This new capacity will deepen our understanding of global change processes and help planners in realms as diverse as storm water management, agriculture, and natural resources management.”
Yet more computer models, all working on GIGO principles!
Somebody has called Bush The Elder a puppet of the Soviets above. This is kinda the wrong way around…
The first 5 year plan of the Soviets was created by Americans, especially the architect Albert Kahn (born in Germany), supported by Henry Ford. And much of it was also executed by American firms, as the bolsheviks didn’t have the necessary skills; having executed the skillful before.
“Between 1929 and 1932 he also directed the construction of 521 factories and the training of more than four thousand engineers in the Soviet Union as part of the Soviets’ First Five-Year Plan of industrialization. ”
http://www.answers.com/topic/albert-kahn
_Jim says:
May 1, 2012 at 8:57 pm
“4. The Rockefeller Foundation, 1913, remains one of the world’s leading philanthropic forces today.”
… and 350.org is their exclusive creation… go figure… How very nice of the Rockefellers to lobby for higher energy prices…
richardscourtney says:
May 2, 2012 at 2:14 am
So, can anybody tell me what is being altered by this “Plan”, please?
You missed the point. The plan doesn’t alter anything — the plan needs to *be* altered.
Altered all the way down to nothing…
richardscourtney says:
May 2, 2012 at 2:14 am
“So, can anybody tell me what is being altered by this “Plan”, please?”
_______
“In the ten years going forward that emphasis will expand to incorporate the complex dynamics of ecosystems and human social-economic activities and how those factors influence global change. ”
Not sure if that answers your question but what concerns me is: 1) the sheer breadth of that statement – what does it not encompass? 2) how the information (whatever it is) might be used in the future 3) that the US Govt believes it appropriate to spend vast sums of other people’s money on whatever it is this plan entails, and 4) that it reads like a piece of historical authoritarianism and what’s more, that seems to be the clear intention. So what’s the agenda?
The “plan” is precisely the kind of thinking which causes real harm.
“Climate policies that hinder or slow down economic development or increase the price of energy and food threaten to augment poverty and, as a result, increase net death and disease,” Dr Goklany said.
The increase in biofuel production between 2004 and 2010, for example, is estimated to have increased the population in absolute poverty in the developing world by over 35 million, leading to about 200,000 additional deaths in 2010 alone.
Full article here
http://thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/goklany-public_health.pdf
The road to “Green Hell” is paved with “good” intentions.
But if we [the skeptics] fail, then the whole world…, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Not my original, unfortunately.
they all belong to the fabien society, a wolf in sheeps clothing
Our computer models stink so lets make bigger computer models including things we understand even less like ecology. Idiots. Where have I seen that logic before. Oh yes Keynesianism in the west and communism in the rest. I really hope Obama takes his new slogan and marches “forward” off a cliff in november.
I must be out of date but I hear them use the term ‘global change’ rather than ‘global warming or climate change’. The term ‘global change’ is a much broader term, it can include change of anykind, like social, economic, political, not merely environmental change. Organizations which broaden their mission statement or broaden their business definition, usually do so because they are unable to reach their earlier targets or see a larger market for their business, and must innovate to reach them. But this change in terminology has a hint of policing or surveillance, as well as implied intervention built into it. I’ve never noticed this before.
Central Planning Committee.
Stop to see who their main “advisors” are on Climate change (this from their book, “Climate Change Science:
An Analysis of Some Key Questions, 2001”), found here: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10139
RALPH J. CICERONE (Chair), University of California, Irvine
ERIC J. BARRON, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
ROBERT E. DICKINSON, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta
INEZ Y. FUNG, University of California, Berkeley
JAMES E. HANSEN, NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York
THOMAS R. KARL, NOAA/National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, North Carolina
RICHARD S. LINDZEN, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
JAMES C. McWILLIAMS, University of California, Los Angeles
F. SHERWOOD ROWLAND, University of California, Irvine
EDWARD S. SARACHIK, University of Washington, Seattle
JOHN M. WALLACE, University of Washington, Seattle
Consultant
DANIEL L. ALBRITTON, NOAA/Aeronomy Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado
So there you have it. The 12 people that form the core of the National Research Council’s committee on Climate change – chartered by Congress to provide independent expert advice to the Nation.
These twelve. Independent. Expert.
At least they covered both sides of the arguement – having Lindzen and Hansen on the same committee. Must have been some real heated discussions there…