The fatcat ecocrats exposed: Web of ‘green’ politicians, tycoons and power brokers who help each other benefit from billions raised on your bills
- Four of nine-person Climate Change Committee, official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions
Other industries would stand accused of damning conflicts of interest but when it comes to global warming, anything goes…
The Mail on Sunday today reveals the extraordinary web of political and financial interests creating dozens of eco-millionaires from green levies on household energy bills.
A three-month investigation shows that some of the most outspoken campaigners who demand that consumers pay the colossal price of shifting to renewable energy are also getting rich from their efforts.
Enquiries by this newspaper have revealed:
- Four of the nine-person Climate Change Committee, the official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until very recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.
- A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.
- £3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills. One of its biggest deals involved energy giant SSE selling windfarms to one of the new green funds, Greencoat Wind. The Green Investment Bank’s chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin, is also chairman of SSE. The bank says it ‘provided expertise’ to enable BIS to take a £50 million stake in Greencoat, which helped fund the SSE sale.
- The same bank’s chief executive, Shaun Kingsbury, is one of the UK’s highest-paid public sector employees. His £325,000 salary is more than twice the Prime Minister’s.
- Firms lobbying for renewables can virtually guarantee access to key Government policy-makers, because they are staffed by former very senior officials – a striking example of Whitehall’s ‘revolving door’.
Among the most astonishing features exposed by our investigation is the way in which vehement advocates for radical policies designed to curb global warming are making huge sums of money from their work. Here are some of the key figures among the new breed of fat-cat Ecocrats…
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Claude Harvey says:
Everyone is missing the crux of all this. Benefiting financially by promoting “good” is perfectly acceptable Otherwise, Al Gore would have long since been run out of town on a rail.
…Gore has been run out of town several times. That’s why he gave up his book signing and publicity tours, and he never appears to his adoring public without six bodyguards.
@Old England
“I wonder how many of you in the USA would be happy with a situation where the people you elect are unable to make laws for you but only able to implement laws issued by an unelected pan-american body?”
Sadly, we Americans may soon be finding out how that feels, as Obama, continuing the Bush Trans-Pacific Partnership effort, seems to be on track to fast track that uber-secretive ECONOMIC TREASON. (Fortunately, some of it was leaked to Wikileaks, and a mostly muzzled Rep. Alan Grayson managed to communicate the flavor of the anti-democratic POS). It’s been called “NAFTA on steroids”, but it’s really less about trade, than about regulation and governance. Apparently, plutocracy loving Obama, like Bush before him, feels that it’s Oky-dokey to place unelected corporate lawyer types above even the US Supreme Court, in settling trade disputes.
Now, some people may be less repulsed by having their former national sovereignty sacrificed to European style beauracrats than fascistic corporate lawyer types, but I say “flush all of them down the toilet”. Nation states can make agreements the old fashioned way.
The American middle class used to be #1. It’s now down to about #26, thanks primarily to globalization. TPP is a sort of logical end game to corporate, plutocratic rule. And is recognized as such not just by lefties, but righties, as well. E.g. the principal guy at Tea Party Nation, Judson Phillips, has come out against the TPP. He said,
“Perot was right. NAFTA was the first of a series of free trade agreements we signed. All of them have been disasters. Our trade deficits have shot up, our manufacturing base has been destroyed and the American blue-collar middle class is disappearing.
TPP is NAFTA on steroids. The only difference between steroids and NAFTA is that steroids do some good.
In March, the Korean Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Guess what? Our trade deficit with Korea has exploded since then. In May, our trade deficit with Korea had jumped to $2 billion, which is a 53.5% increase over what it was a year earlier. Meanwhile, thanks to this great deal, American exports to Korea are tanking.
…….
This is a 90% issue.
90% of Americans agree that we need to protect American jobs.”
Alas, 90%+ of Americans are asleep at the wheel…..
Bob Greene says:
December 15, 2013 at 6:07 am
I can’t find an estimate of how much global warming reduction created by the UK’s green energy revolution and how many pounds/degree the average consumer pays. I can find all kinds of warm, fuzzy save the earth links, but I can’t find any of the green energy supporters taking credit for any actual (or calculated) global temperature reductions. Since they do not, their polices are very likely producing miniscule results.
*****
The effect of CO2 on the climate has been described by distinguished climate scientists as statistically insignificant. “Statistically insignificant” means the effect of increases or decreases of atmospheric CO2 on the Earth’s climate is so small as to be irrelevant. Anyone telling you CO2 is a major contributor to changes of any sort in the climate is either using a flawed computer model or is lying.
In order to demonstrate how miniscule the effect of CO2 is on the climate, I will summarise the relevant calculations.
The total “Greenhouse effect” on climate by all 6 Greenhouse gases is 33.0ºC.
Non-water Greenhouse gases ~5% : 1.65ºC.
CO2 ~75% of total Greenhouse gases : 1.24ºC.
Man-made CO2 – under 7%* of the total CO2 : 0.087ºC
* This is being generous. Some calculations show man-made CO2 at about 3.2%, which would reduce the total man-made Greenhouse effect to 0.0405ºC.
What is the effect of all Britain’s entire CO2 emissions on the climate? This, after all, is why we are spending endless billions trying to “fight climate change.”
Britain’s total CO2 “effect” on the climate is 0.00174ºC
– or as expressed as millionths of a ºC is 1740 / 1 000 000ºC
…or to put it another way: If Britain became a barren, sterile, lifeless rock and produced no carbon dioxide at all (0 %) for the next 86 years, and assuming there were no change in CO2 emissions elsewhere in the world, then by 2100 the Earth’s climate would have cooled by 0.00174ºC.
*****
That’s what is being demanded from you; to corrupt climate science, wreck the economy, ruin the landscape and seascape, force millions into fuel poverty which kills over 30,000 British poor every year, and let’s not forget the millions of birds, bats and wildlife massacred by wind turbines annually and for what? So that in about 100 years the Earth’s climate could be an infinitesimal bit cooler. But let’s face facts here; whatever Britain’s CO2 emissions are it will make no difference whatsoever to the Earth’s climate. None. Zero. Nada. And that’s the truth. Anybody that tells you differently is either a fool or a liar. Hundreds of billions spend. Thousands of people and birds dead. Industry wrecked. Britain impoverished for generations by the poisonous lies of the so-called “greens.” All for nothing
Hope that answers your question.
Margaret Hardman: “I am happy to have shown up James Delingpole…”
Margaret dear, the only person you show up is yourself.
As for the Nurse – Delingpole interview, it seems you missed the part where Nurse and his colleague Dr. Bindschadler made a particularly egregious error concerning the climate science, as a result of which Dr. Bindschadler – in contrast to Nurse – had the good grace to acquire an ID in order to post a full apology on JD’s blog.
Funny how you Warmists inexplicably omit little details like that, isn’t it?
@Bob Greene, It was never about producing results (other than making scads of dough for the Green Industry). Even using Alarmomath, which itself isn’t based on anything real, the amount of “warming reduction” purchased by UK’s energy idiocy would be vanishingly tiny. The truth is though, that it’s all just highway robbery.
Anyone else notice the number of comments at the DM appears to have frozen? How very odd. Must be a surplus of fish and chips, hey Margaret? Hard to tell one woe man’s trough swill from another’s prime chowder nowadays, it all looks green just the same. I blame misapplication of the Stefan–Boltzmann law myself: Diffusion Delusion (aka. as thick as too short Plancks).
Globally, $359 billion was spent on climate change and green energy in 2012.
The US plans to spend $22.1 billion this year.
Who is getting the money?
– there are material suppliers and building contractors;
– there are a small number of working employees;
– there are somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 climate change academics; and,
– fees and commissions in an untold amount made by a untold number of people.
Who is supplying the money?
– there are investors in the energy projects, some ordinary citizens looking for a return, some larger institutional investors looking to make quick cash in addition to long-term returns;
– some of the funds are coming from foundations and oil companies; and,
– Most is probably coming from the taxpayer (and this is borrowed money given government deficits).
A nice tidy industry overall. Some people are getting very rich while others are losing their shirts.
But it is really a waste of society’s resources given how inefficient green energy is and how wrong the entire premise of climate change is.
@Old England
More Judson Phillips, of Tea Party Nation, on the TPP (= Economic Treason)
“This is an issue that crosses ideological lines. Conservative groups oppose this idiocy. Liberal groups oppose this idiocy.
I believe in a concept I call 90% leadership. While there are many issues we can disagree on, there are a lot of issues out there that 90% of Americans will agree on. So why aren’t we acting on those?
This is a 90% issue.”
Also, Americans who think that states have every right to legislate GMO labeling, would do well to note that state-level efforts to mandate GMO labeling will be superceded by TPP. Here is a link to a Bill Moyers interview of Yves Smith and Dean Baker, discussing TPP: http://tinyurl.com/k3p54hq
Corruption appears to be growing worldwide, control over the population is growing exponentially, the “NEW WORLD ORDER”, our Five Eyes” organization, continues to quietly speak about is becoming a reality right under our noses. statusquohastogo@gmail.com
Gosh, you might think that these were, like, really smarmy big bad oil company people. But, no…..
Except the oil company people NEVER used new government laws and regulations to directly take huge amounts of money from the poor, to give to the rich (themselves). Oil company people used their influence to prevent restrictions of various sorts, some of which might have been necessary, some over the top. I wouldn’t ever say that big companies with lots of money — in any field, just look at finance and banks before the Great Recession — us money to get politicians to do their bidding. And I wish government regulation had been tough enough to prevent the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such direct avarice, where the direct point isn’t to influence environmental regulations and such, but rather to use laws and regulations to directly enrich the people who voted for the laws and regulations.
Margaret Hardman says: December 14, 2013 at 8:47 pm
============
Corruption in high places is all fine and well only so long as the stink does not reach the public.
Zeke says:
December 14, 2013 at 8:28 pm
The Obama Administration is about to nominate 50 new judges. Just in time for this, Sen. Reid has taken the nuclear option, and removed the filibuster. This will allow for wildly activist judges to be appointed in the next few months to defeat legal challenges to many Obama policies and mandates.
The Administration is also ready to appoint 180 to positions in the major bureaucracies such as the EPA, DOE, HHS and IRS.
They need to all be scrutinized for precisely these green NGO and renewable energy connections. (emphasis added)
Now that the Democrats have abandoned the filibuster, it is up to the press to carefully vet these Obama administration appointees. If they do so, they will probably be amazed at the connections they uncover. Too bad the U.S. press has its collective nose so far up the President’s ____ that it will never happen. Maybe the British and Canadian press? Aussies? C’mon in, there’s a void to be filled here.
I may have a new word “enviromoniest”
It is odd. If I Google news Deben or Gummer, or climate change committee this story does not come up in the results. When I Google David Rose and Deben then I get this new related story from the Mail on Sunday http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2523758/MPs-Lords-lobbyists-advise-Ministers-eco-policies–cash-in.html.
The biggest story is Deben and his connections to the Severn Barrage which is not mentioned by David Rose at all, even though it was covered by booker 18 months ago. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9498568/The-tangled-tale-of-Lord-Deben-and-a-dodgy-Severn-barrage.html This story is HUGE, but was not picked up by media hacks.
I have come to expect stories run on Eureferendum or Booker take 18months to surface as scoops. This story is typical, and it is not being picked up by other news organisations. David Rose is by himself on this one, and is being ignored by the press pack. Their is a very bitter attack on David Rose by the Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/bob-ward/hypocrites-of-northcliffe-house_b_4440043.html
For what it’s worth (probably not much) I will will keep badgering away at my local MP about this.
http://www.parliament.uk/biographies/commons/albert-owen/1474
He lives only two miles from me and his office is a ten minute walk. I only see him in photographs where he is championing some “bold government initiative” or other.
The problem with Albert is that he thinks Botticelli is a type of pasta if you get my drift.
Why would a politician spend hundreds of millions of dollars to win an office that pays hundreds of thousands? It only makes sense if you include corruption in the equation.
Politics 101:
1. buy a big tract of worthless land.
2. give the politicians a minority share in your worthless property.
3. wait for the politicians to change the zoning on “your” property.
4. sell your now valuable land for a huge profit.
5. kickback a portion of the profits as political contributions to both parties to limit investigations. No party is going to want to antagonize a large donor.
Simply change “land” to any scam you can dream up. Give the politicians a share and they will change the laws to increase the value of their share, resulting in windfall profits for your share. Kickback a portion of your profits to both political parties so neither party will want to cause waves.
A pox on UNIPOCC!
(“O” stands for “On.”)
Rationalization of bad behavior is the hallmark of human psychology. The green movement creates a perfect space for these thieves to thrive in. What does Hardman possibly gain by defending these people? I don’t know but she’s on the wrong side of history.
Grant says:
December 15, 2013 at 8:55 am
Hardman possibly gain by defending these people?
=========
makes sense if she is one of these people. nothing to see, move along.
Carpetbagger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the United Kingdom, the term was adopted to refer informally to those who join a mutual organization, such as a building society, in order to force it to demutualize, that is, to convert into a joint stock company, solely for personal financial gain.
SAMURAI says:
December 14, 2013 at 8:08 pm
“The UK now has a Department of BS…..to manage their greenmail scam…
Well, at least they got the acronym right…”
Yes and the Minister “responsible” for the Dept of BS is a LIB Dem, one “Doctor” Cable. He;s the guy who thinks the Government should be him….and only him!
Allan MacRae says on December 14, 2013 at 5:54 pm
… but CO2 LAGS Temperature (in time) at ALL measured time scales …
Hypothesis:
Based on the preponderance of evidence, temperature drives CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature, so climate sensitivity may not exist at all at the “macro” scale, and may be utterly irrelevant to climate science except at the “micro” (and materially insignificant) scale.
Brian H says on December 14, 2013 at 7:47 pm
I’ve been muttering and shouting this since even before reading G&T, notwithstanding all the heavyweight Skeptic Lukewarmers who seem happy with the Arrhenius ECS formulations.
Allan again:
Hi Brian. I presume you mean G&T as in
Falsification Of The Atmospheric Co2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics, by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner, in IJMP(B), Vol 23, Iss 3, Jan 30, 2009, pp 275-364, doi:10.1142/S021797920904984X.
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S021797920904984X
I had not read the G&T and published my above hypo one year earlier than G&T in January 2008. I have no opinion on G&T and I do not need G&T to be correct from my hypo to be correct.
Let’s assume that CO2 IS a greenhouse gas and a bit more CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere may cause a bit of warming (all other factors being equal, etc.).
Nevertheless the only signal in the data is that CO2 LAGS temperature at all measured time scales, from ~9 months in the modern data record to ~800 years on a longer cycle in the ice core record.
On a seasonal time scale, it is also obvious that CO2 is driven by temperature, as evidenced by the seasonal CO2 “sawtooth” curve that is dominated by terrestrial photosynthesis of the larger Northern Hemisphere landmass,
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/carbonDioxideSequence2002_2008_at15fps.mp4
So CO2 may indeed be a minor greenhouse gas but this effect is overwhelmed by the greater reality that temperature drives CO2 due to natural processes such as photosynthesis, ocean exsolution, etc. etc.
I suggest it is difficult for people to accept my hypo because it is the opposite of what they have been taught.
Nevertheless I suggest it will be the new conventional wisdom in climate science in less than a decade.
Regards, Allan
Well somebody has to say it.
Climate of Corruption.
United Nations International panel of Climate Corruption.
Or International persons of Corrupt Climate
Needs more work…..
Allen McRae @9;24 am
Based on the behaviour of measured temps(that imaginary global average temperature), and supposed atmospheric concentrations of CO2(let us assume these are useful values), then; CO2 is a cooling agent, a warming agent or an agent of stasis, depending on the time period chosen.
I suspect you are correct, CO2 concentrations follow temperature.
But the opposite claim, which currently has political support, seems impossible on the face of the evidence.
This is comparable to claiming the normal cycles of nature are insignificant, that the magic gas dominates all other effects, except when it does not.
Oh sorry IPCC FAR 2007. Coulda, woulda, we don’t know, but we are CERTAIN.
The effect of atmospheric CO2 concentration increases is being imperially tested as time marches on, so far? Climate sensitivity of zip, not measurable at this time.
That would be classed as unproven conjecture in my view.
History, of the geological time indicates that past co2 concentrations at much higher levels were very beneficial to life, as we know it.
But the topic; Corrupt to the core, taxing air to save us from an invisible foe, plant food..
It was always about the money, that’s why they kept shouting: WE MUST ACT NOW! It’s always been a con job and I repeatedly called them climate criminals.
At long last real investigative reporting into the climate change scandal takes hold. This story is way bigger than the MPs expenses scandal as it involves billions of UK pounds. It’s time the Parliamentary ethics committee took a look as well as the public prosecutor’s office.
Here is the alleged climate worrier Lord Stern. I found this some time back when rebutting an interview article in which Lord Stern talked about special interests trying to block progress on ‘tackling climate change.’
He is just one among many who either benefit from their own advocacy or their spouses and other family members. It’s a bloody scandal that does not come as a surprise to many on WUWT.