One of the problems facing the negotiators at Copenhagen is what to do with the mountain of carbon credits that Russia threatens to put on the market. In a news report late last month, the Washington Post noted that under the formula reached under the Kyoto Protocol, “Russia is expected to post the largest absolute drop in emissions from 1990 levels of any of the countries that signed the treaty. But the decline is almost entirely the result of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet economy rather than environmental measures by the government. Critics say Moscow doesn’t deserve to keep its carbon credits because it didn’t earn them with any special effort. ” The West could retrospectively compensate the Russians for the collapse of the Soviet economy.
“You’ve got an elephant in the room that nobody is paying attention to,” said Samuel Charap, a Russia scholar at the Center for American Progress in Washington, arguing that the Obama administration needs to take up the issue with Russia’s leaders.
The Investors Business Daily says that this vast pile of computational credits would make Russia “the Saudi Arabia of carbon credits.” “Russia’s greenhouse gas emissions plunged in the 1990s as its economy collapsed. Moscow now sits on a potential treasure trove of unused carbon emission permits it could sell to other countries.” Where on earth is the poor Western taxpayer going to get the money to pay for this act of poetic justice? A British peer believes he has has the answer. Just borrow the money.
“Borrow to the hilt to stop global warming, says Lord Stern”, according a report by the Telegraph. The British peer believes almost any price is worth it to save the planet, a project which may only cost $10 trillion dollars over the next 20 years.
The author of the 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling climate change said he was an expert in dealing with tough budgetary constraints and acknowledged that the current public debt was “worrying”.
But he believes that the irreversible nature of climate change means that extra pressures on the public balance sheet are justified.
“What I’m saying is that we should be prudent with public finances, but if we were to ask future generations: would you rather have a desecrated earth or more debt, then the answer would be they would like to have more debt,” he told The Sunday Telegraph, after giving a speech this week. “You can get out of debt, but you can’t get out of the other. It’s one of the few cases where there’s actually an argument for more borrowing. There’s a logical justification to it.” …
The International Energy Agency has estimated that the world will need to spend more than $10 trillion on low-carbon energy generation and efficiency measures by 2030.
What’s a few trillions between friends? Meanwhile the behavior of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper threatened to destroy that country’s image by balking at taking the plunge. “Canada’s name may be mud heading into Monday’s Copenhagen climate change talks” newspapers warned. Harper said he would protect his country’s interests, an act which provoked commentators to call him Darth Vader.
While the world talks of helping the poorest and least able countries cope with problems from emissions in the developed world, self-interest rules the day with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Tories.
“This may be a shock,” Harper said last month in the House of Commons, “but the negotiators Canada assigns to international negotiations (like Copenhagen) are there to represent the interests of Canada, not the interests of Mali.”
The assumption that Copenhagan serves the interests of Mali and that is somehow better than serving the interests of the Great White North seems self-evident to some. But it’s unclear that the Third World countries are any keener on cutting emissions than Harper. The New York Times reported that “China, India, Brazil and South Africa this week rejected a Danish suggestion to set a goal of halving world emissions by 2050, saying rich nations which have burned fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution must first slash their own emissions. Many developing nations at preliminary meetings in Copenhagen on Saturday were lining up with the four in opposing the Danish proposals, delegation sources said. China is the top world emitter ahead of the United States, Russia and India.” Which means of course that in the interests of cutting emissions, the US must lead the way.
The logic behind China’s pollution pass may not be immediately self-evident until the concept of Climate Justice is understood. It’s a movement to make First World countries morally and possibly legally responsible for centuries of defiling the Earth. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said, “Climate justice demands that the industrialized countries meet their historic responsibility for the accumulation of greenhouse gases. They must lead in ensuring that global emissions peak by 2020 -and fall by at least 50 percent from 1990 levels by 2050″. They’re coming after your wallet and you are going to admit that you deserve it.
But a survey by the Sunday Telegraph revealed why Copenhagen was becoming such a hard sell. Almost half of the British public were unconvinced that human activity was responsible for climate change. This was despite the fact that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned that catastrophe impended unless the money was spent to avert it. This, despite the fact that 20,000 journalists, delegates and conference staff were jetting to the Danish capital to stave off excessive carbon emissions. This, despite the impressive fact that the conferences will use 1,200 limousines and 120 private jets simply to ferry participants. It is hoped among other things that Barack Obama will commit to reducing the US carbon footprint to the level of 1910, and on a per capita basis to 1875. Copenhagen itself is only a prelude to the 2010 Climate Summit in Mexico City. Climate justice indeed. The British survey showed that many were beginning to wonder whether this trip was really necessary:
Almost half of people in Britain believe there is no proof that global warming is caused by humans, according to a new poll. The survey revealed that 46per cent of those quizzed did not believe mankind was largely responsible for the global temperature rise. Some 39per cent of those questioned said climate change was not proven to be man-made – and a further 7per cent of pollsters believed that climate change was not taking place at all.
And despite a contrasting message from many governments, less than one in four voters believe climate change is ‘the most serious problem faced by man’.
That’s bad news for Gordon Brown who warned that “those being hit first and hardest by climate change are those who have done the least to cause it”. If “climate change” were a scam it would be even truer that the real assassins of the Third World – would be the actors working on the objects. Which actors, which objects? Just who are the villains? While figuring that one out, consider the tantalizing prospect of Russian carbon credits. Anyone interested?
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It’s Alive in Wonderland time…
Russia gets compensation for being the failed USSR just as it’s re-arming and taking other’s lands again…
I guess the next thing is to offer a national ID to a fake nationalistic people and promise them a state that is both contiguous and viable, even if it mean destroying a viable and contiguous state.
What’s next?
Just goes to show what this is really about: Embedded Communists in the West trying to bring the West down, Last time around they were taken by surprise but not now.
Just another front in the Col War (no pun intended).
Seriously, if the peoples of the West allow this treason, we deserve what happens.
It is insanity. At what should be a level of great accomplishment, we are letting a pack of Baby Boomer Communist plants, a pack of traitors who are in aggregate the largest and most privileged group of people in the history of the West, destroy us.
When will we rise up and call them by their true names.
This is one of the great insanities of History. What a failure of our civilization.
They will reverse all that has been accomplished that last 60 years.
They seek our destruction and humiliation.
The evidence and logic is that the real purpose of the whole carbon cutting scheme is to collapse economies. This Russian example is further support of that idea.
The legal definition of chutzpah is killing your parents and then demanding mercy from the court because you are an orphan. Russia now expects to be compensated for having built wasteful, oppressive, polluting factories that supported their capacity for totalitarian oppression at home and military intimidation abroad that collapsed after 70 years of abusing the gifts of God and Man and Nature. It would make more sense if the UN declared Lake Baikal a priceless international resource and charged Russia the cost of cleaning up their own mess.
New lies for old, abetted by scumbags and idiots who should be digging for gold with their bare hands in the Siberian wastes and sleeping on plywood.
The surest tipoff that this is a scam is Kofi Anan’s use of the word “justice.” Whenever I see that all the warning radars go off – I know the person using it has abandoned reasoned argument and is resorting to PC debate in order to tip the argument in his favor without having to use logic. Who could be opposed to “justice”? End of argument.
Phony statistics and now justice — further proof (if any were needed) that this is a religion, not science. F
Putin for President of the USA. If he was interested in being drafted I’m sure within a week his US birth certificate would be found in a court house and a hospital in Omaha.
That’s Smart Justice, like Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room.
The oldest accounting firm in the US followed them over the cliff like lemmings.
One for all and all for one but none for thee.
Why do I get the feeling that the middle-class of a baby boomer generation is being set up to become the pariah of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren?
Good morning from Los Angeles!
Well, this raises an interesting question – what if we used *today* as a baseline for justice? Call it “climate realism”. Presume that would cut the Russian entitlement by huge, cost China huge, cost India some, save us and the Euros huge.
Just asking, I realize the entire cap and trade is silly, and there is likely no real problem to be addressed at all. Still, inquiring minds want to know. I’m sure the numbers are out there, but I never look at the climate literature.
–
Saw the ABC interview with Sec. Clinton and Gates this morning, hilarious (sic) to see Clinton trying to actually deal with problems instead of just running her mouth, and I’m afraid I saw the limits of Gates’ capabilities, when Stephanopoulos asked, “hey, if there’s only 100 active al Qaeda in Afghanistan, why does it cost us *another* $30b to chase them around?” His answer was some kind of hash of “Pakistan, defeated the Soviets, Taliban, blah blah blah”. Which was butchered code for, “we’re really fighting the religous and cultural tradition of jihad, that involves millions of supporters that we have to convince should try something else.” Talking about yer logic of enlightenment.
I guess this means we should call the UN carbon borkerage agency the Committe on Carbon Credit Preservation.
Really, the masks are slipping off a whole bunch of ugly things these days.
The Russians have long practiced covert interference in the energy policies of the West. The anti-nuclear power movement in the 70′s was secretly funded by the KGB.
The Russians have learned to subvert us using our tradition of free speech. The Islamists are learning to subvert us using our tradition of freedom of worship. Leftist want to suppress our goal-line defense – the right to bear arms.
It seems that the defenses of a free people designed into the Constitution are being used in the age of globalization to enslave the American people.
This need not be a case for isolationism. We do need to restrict the flow of immigrants and the foreign funding of interior political groups.
Slightly off topic:
Is Islam a threat to America?
We need more of this shouted out to America. the liberal lame media will not do it, so we have to depend on the net and small town journalists that have guts to print unpolitically correct facts and news.
Papa Ray
“what if we used *today* as a baseline for justice?”
Even better, let’s use this baseline for justice: “Get the f*ck out of my life, you meddling, power-mad leftie.”
From ‘theStar’ article on Canadian PM Stepehen Harper: “The [Canadian] government says it was put in this unenviable position by its Liberal predecessors, on whose watch emissions rose some 30 per cent above the mark Canada was to hit by 2012 under the Kyoto deal.”
What? Kyoto has been a failure? Countries committed to cut emissions and failed?
We are in a War Against Carbon Dioxide (smirk) and we are losing. Badly! So what is the Exit Strategy from this losing war? Enquiring minds want to know!
Looks like Canada’s Exit Strategy is to start looking after Canada’s own interests. China has explicitly said the same — they will be looking after the Chinese. Of course Russia is quite properly going to look after itself.
The EUnuchs have consistently pursued the hypocritical strategy of loudly proclaiming extravagant targets and then quietly ignoring them — they don’t even need an Exit Strategy.
Seems that the only people who need an Exit Strategy from this losing war are those too dumb to realize that they are being played for fools.
I don’t think I’m the first to notice, but sometimes watching the President in action is like watching episodes of Dr. Obama and Mr. Bush. Dr. Obama decrees an end to Gitmo, then drinks the elixir of actually being in charge and his inner Mr. Bush allows it to stay open. Dr. Obama decrees fair and public trials with the presumption of innocence for mass murdering terrorists, while the mischievous Mr. Bush calls for their execution — as if we are all Texans now. Dr. Obama sternly scolds hedge fund operators and speculators, while stimulus money sloshes around Wall Street like highly priced cheap wine and hookers at a drunken bankers bacchanal — with the Mischievous Mr. Bush leftist memory portrayed as maitre’d.
Sometimes Mr. Bush pops up at the most unlikely of times — such as a speech on health care reform by Dr. Obama, when his managerial Mr. Bush suddenly announces that key parts of Dr. Obama’s reform are not part of his plan. We can forget the public option, Mr. Bush smirks, and go for cost containment…maybe! For Dr. Obama then wrestles the Managerial Mr. Bush back into his box.
At other times the malign Mr. Bush seems ready to dominate — almost. In a speech to the nation he calls for a surge strategy in Afghanistan modeled on the real Mr. Bush’s troop surge in Iraq. But the real Mr. Bush faced a Senator Obama prepared to undermine the Iraq strategy by proposing a 2008 date for defeat in Iraq. Similarly, the “Mr. Bush, the militant” of the President’s oration faces the professorial Dr. Obama, who proposes much the same — but not just in the same speech, in the same paragraph. His inner Bush is at the podium facing the cadets and the nation. Then, after a brief gaze towards the heavens, the wish and the wash of Dr. Obama takes over. Still, the Malign Mr. Bush was on stage longer and more dominant than usual.
Which raises a question, now that we face the Presidential trips to Oslo and Copenhagen. One wonders what mix of Mr. Bush and Dr. Obama will arrive. Will further self-flagellation be proposed? Will it be decreed that each lash of the whip rip the flesh and be tallied and measured? Will an international body of scolds not just be empaneled but empowered? Or will the goals be voluntary and the means of achieving them flexible? Will it be seven parts the puritanical Dr. Obama and three parts the mischievous Mr. Bush? What mix of bureaucrats and entrepreneurial buccaneers will the rhetoric favor? Stay tunned.
But before hoping for the primacy of President Obama’s inner Mr. Bush, we should remember that the real Mr. Bush resulted from a life well (even if at times mistakenly) lived. President Obama’s inner “Mr. Bush” comes from drinking an Elixir. So. Once again. Stay tunned.
I am shocked I tell you. Shocked! That anyone would imply that George Soros is a communist agent!
From “Washington Whispers” and others. If the Republicans win the House.
“Just think of having the subpoena power in 2011.” All the corruption involved in Climate Gate, conflict of interest in Obama care, the Justice Depart debacles, and on and on.
What is confusing is that some reports trace the first internet source of the CRU documents to a site in Tomsk, suggesting that is the work of the FSB or at least some Russians.
Yet if the Russians have such a great interest in carbon credits why would they seek to torpedo Copenhagen? Gazprom has a big interest in exporting natural gas that would benefit either with or without Copenhagen but mostly, I think with the emissions limits.
If we posit that Russian students at CRU or Russian hackers obtained the documents and posted them on the Tomsk site, could this be a sign of an internal Russian split? The carbon credits go to one faction but the Gazprom revenues go to another?
All budget savings and political credits are based on this old joke.
The boy ran into the house and said exitedly, “Dad, I saved a dollar today by running home behind the bus.”
The gruff father gave him the back of his hand. “Stupid child, you could have saved five dollars by running home behind a cab.”
hdgreene @ 16
I have seen the O = W meme bandied about by disappointed Lefties.
It is a variation of the “blame Bush” meme that has permeated the present administration’s pronouncements.
Obama is his own man. He is nothing like Bush (other than being a politico with all of the baggage that that entails).
Both men showed fiscal irresponsibility (although Obama brought it to an unprecedented level).
However:
Bush did not hate white (or black) people. Bush did not hate America. Bush did not try to weaken his country. Bush did not subvert the rule of law (to the extent that Obama has).
Again, the O = W meme is an attempt to excuse an evil man because others were bad.
Thank God for the Russians! Climate Gate could be the straw that broke the camels back. Now the public is awake, and the environmentalists get to wear this one. Thank those terrific Russian computer hackers. Hey, why couldn’t our guys have pulled this off?
#18 Whitehall
If you’re really very, very good at hacking, you can make it look like the hacking came from pretty much anywhere.
But nevertheless, why would the hackers get into the emails of the IPCC? Why would they read it back for years, unless perhaps they had been reading it all along. And why was it released when it was, just shortly before the Copenhagen green fest?
If I had to bet the hacker heroes here were probably in the employ of the NSA or a foreign equivalent thereof, and there is a good chance that they acted without authorization to do so. From my viewpoint it stands to reason that the someone(s) who hacked into the IPPC (stealing not just the emails but the source code for the modeling programs) had been monitoring the IPCC bozos for a long, long time.
And that leads to another question–does the IPCC really back up their emails for that many years? They say they couldn’t back up their data sets, but they manage to back up their emails from long years past?
Don’t look now, but…
EPA Set to Declare Carbon Dioxide a Public Danger
There’s just too much stupid here for me to keep track of.
Toad @ 17
i was thinking the same thing. The list of perps is a long one. The NASA. EPA. How bout all those “experts” including Al Gore who testified falsely before congress. Imagine all those grants based obviously on phony data for untold billions to our conniving University and Academic frauds.
It could be a real treat, but will the Repubs have the fortitude to do it.
Tcobb @22,
The quandary of who in Russia would gain lead me to the same conclusion – it was someone else who planted the files to make it LOOK Russian.
I’m sure that someone is tracking this, Senator Boxer for sure, but it doesn’t really matter. I do hope someday we can give whomever did this our public thanks.
I just got back from a visit to a chain bookstore. All the books and magazines visibly boosting the global warming threat was amazing! I laughed at the thought of how many would be eating crow and how they will be losing creditability in the eyes of the informed public.
Looks like we’ll change our elites just in time. Of course the war is not over but this is shaping up to be a Midway, or a Gettysburg, or a Stalingrad.
If FSB/SVR, yet AGW is Leninist disinformation, a principle useful for subverting…everything…and providing a pretext for convergence…
…then probably released to provide reactionaries with ideological fuel, to intensify the conflict between political camps, to further destabilize the presumption of comity between domestic political rivals – as of course we ourselves are doing here – in order to maintain the course towards Crisis.
Otherwise Russian authorship of leak makes no sense. Russia knows – see Kyoto – it will not have to comply with any emissions convention. They also know such idiocies as “carbon credits” might possibly provide a lot of work for accountants and lawyers, but it will not be allowed to have any real effect on any bottom line, anywhere – not even on an illusory “line of credit” basis.
I presume the SVR reasoning is that belief in AGW is obviously irrational, so these emails will have little effect on believers, so it does no real damage to the AGW Line and its utility as a Leninist/Useful Idiot organizing cliche. This operatoin is something like secretly moving WMD out of Iraq then, just part of the Kremlin’s Invisible War.
“Though lauded for adopting wind power, its high recycling rate and its progressive policies, Denmark generates the most waste per capita in the EU and most of its energy still comes from coal.”
Source:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-copenhagen-climate6-2009dec06,0,1664916.story
Somebody’s gonna have to ‘splain to me how the Rooshins are going to break the international economic system with an excess load of “carbon credits,” what ever the %%%% they are.
The current economic misery was caused by a bubble in American house prices. At least a house has a utility value (warm in winter, keeps rain out, sleep without chiggers, etc.) A carbon credit has no utility that I can fathom. They dont carry them at the WalMart.
One of you RSG (Really Smart Guys) help me out here?
Now it says
“Your edited comment was marked as spam. If this is in error, please contact the admin.”
Grrrrr
Herb, let me give it a shot although I don’t qualify as a RSG. The Waxman-Markey draft legislation, which seems to be the acknowledged leader in the current legislative process, is modelled on the program that the EU has had in place for the past few years.
The gist of cap and trade is that an emitter can remain compliant with the law by either 1) reducing emissions from some previous date baseline to be agreed 2) buying credits from other emitters who have reduced their emissions below their new required level 3) using the credits “alloted” to them by the legislative process or 4) buying credits from outside of the US to be applied to one’s compliance requirements.
Number 3 is the domestic political football. As WM is currently drafted, coal-burning utilities will basically get all of the credits needed in order maintain their normal operations. This is likely due to the need to get the Dems from the coal-producing and coal-burning states to go along (electrical utilities emit approx. 35% of US Carbon equivalents). Meanwhile, the petroleum refining industry is scheduled to get approx 5-10% of the credits that they need to cover their own manufacturing emisions, but also the larger component of vehicle tailpipe emissions (also about 30-35% of US Carbon equivalents). So the oil companies are being punished for being oil companies, while the Dems look after each other. So this will be a backdoor motor fuels tax.
Re 4, some amount of credits might be allowed in from other countries. These could include credits for reforestation in Indonesia, or it could include giving credits to industries in Russia and China who have already closed because they aren’t competitive. Money for old rope, as a Brit friend of mine would say. Can’t think of anything in the free markets where one gets paid for what they did 20 yrs ago, but there you have it.
Will it “break the international economic system”? Dunno and it all depends on how the rules get written. But it will minimally be a transfer of wealth vehicle from the US and Europe to most everyone else at a time when we least need to placing financial burdens on ourselves.
Sorry but that’s about as brief as I could be.
Wh@25: Of course the war is not over but this is shaping up to be a Midway, or a Gettysburg, or a Stalingrad.
Hopefully the Battle of the Bulge.
Get it over with.
#28 Herb
I don’t disagree with #30 Steeple above, but really its about rationing energy. Not rationing by price, which free markets are all about, but by government rationing in which the most coupons go to whom the government deems to deserve them the most.
In other words, if you are not politically connected you are f**cked. Steeple described the outer structure, I am describing the inner rationale for it.
Hey Steeple,
I used to drive a fuel guzzeler for work. Can I get a carbon credit because I no longer drive one? Can I get a carbon credit for no longer smoking? or how about mulching? Can I get carbon credits for letting stuff rot?
or would that be cross purposes, Like the Great Smoky Mountains or Los Angles?
How about carbon credits for disinviting Albert Gore to any climate conventions?
Is president Obama confused? This isn’t the Olympic city siting committee. No need to come in last, er at the end.
Wadeusaf
Tcobb is dead on. And so are you Wadeusaf; too bad you didn’t drive a Lada.
WadeUSAF at 33 is describing the world according to “negawatts,” that loony rationale developed by Amory Lovins. The notion is that in an increasing marginal cost market, one can transfer money from the bulk to the marginal consumer. That marginal consumer will drive up average prices for everyone so paying it to NOT use energy is really for EVERYONE’s best interest!
Extreme harm to our economy has been done by this notion. The man should be ridiculed but instead is given his own institute in Colorado by the US government.
Steeple: Thanks.
Thats what fascism is all about. In order to prosper, you keep your property and operate it the way the Govt tells you to. Now I understand why Immelt at GE has had his nose so firmly up the One’s ….
It also explains Comcast’s endorsement of Obammacare.
When the Govt controls everything corruption is everywhere.
I don’t mean to gloat, but at last, some enlightenment that the Russians are not plotting an Evil Empire comeback ala that “Homer Tide” episode of The Simpsons has displaced Cold War nostalgia at the Belmont Club. And that’s peachy.
Interesting that WaPost piece. Pravda on the Potomac has been one of the most wildly anti-Russian editorial boards in the States, perhaps at times worse than the Wall Street Journal which is in Khodorkovsky’s pocket. Maybe it’s been their op-ed contributor Anne Applebaum being married to the former Defense now Foreign Minister of Poland who used to work at AEI, Radek Sikorski. Or it’s just a legacy of the Cold War and all their State Dept. other U.S. govt agency sources.
The fact that the Post didn’t mention Ukraine’s bid to include all its non-existent Soviet factories in the carbon credit trade is either par for the course (you know, blame Russia but never the Ukrainian elites whenever the gas gets cutoff!) or a tacit admission that as Russia goes, so goes Ukraine. While mentioning that the global gas glut could hurt Russia’s pocketbooks they don’t mention that it makes pipeline projects to bypass Russia like Nabucco even more commercially non-viable than they were to begin with (not to mention that whole thing about sending money to the mullahs instead of Moscow).
Kudos to Wretchard for noticing that the Russians aren’t 100% on board with the AGW scheme, even if some readers again presume it must be part of some diabolical Russian plot, as opposed to smart Russians just not buying or giving a damn (who minds warmer winters anyway?) about AGW.
Maybe he’s been watching some of the Russian TV networks on YouTube?
please delete this comment Wretchard, thanks.
In the early 2000′s Russia was very negative about joining Kyoto, Putin even observing that Russia would benefit from warming.
Suddenly, they turned around and signed on. The word at the time was the EU told them if they signed on they would be able to sell their carbon savings since the Kyoto base year, 1990.
1990 had been selected originally to help Europe by letting it claim credit for ex-Communist Bloc environmental improvements post 1989, for example getting Czech off lignite and E Germany off brown coal, Hungary off peat, already just about done by 1997 when Kyoto was signed. Savings in the bank just be updating ancient East bloc technology. Meanwhile 1990 was a recession year for the US, so US would be working from a depressed baseline (great negotiator that Al Gore).
Cutting in Russia on the same terms was a deal too good for Russia to pass up.
Now it looks like the bill comes due.
It would be beyond outrageous for the US to step in and bail out the EU, since Kyoto was designed to screw the US in the first place.
So, I figure, that’s exactly what Obama plans to do
Mongoose: “It is insanity. At what should be a level of great accomplishment, we are letting a pack of Baby Boomer Communist plants, a pack of traitors who are in aggregate the largest and most privileged group of people in the history of the West, destroy us.
“When will we rise up and call them by their true names?
“This is one of the great insanities of History. What a failure of our civilization.
“They will reverse all that has been accomplished that last 60 years.
“They seek our destruction and humiliation.”
Yes, yes, yes, and YES.
Article II, section 2, of the Constitution states that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.”
34 Senators say no and no matter what lofty promises Obambi makes to the EU, Russia and all the rest they will be null and void. Deader than dead. Stick a fork in it done. End of the silliness. Period.
So let’s all stop this gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts going on here. The Founders yet once again prove that they were the wisest of the Wise. Wilson couldn’t get his League of Nations through the Senate after WWI. Clinton/Gore didn’t even bother submitting Kyoto to the Senate knowing that it would go down in utter flames. So what chance does Obambi have submitting what is being proposed at Copenhagen?? It light of the recession (ummm, make that depression) and the continuing unfolding of Climategate I’d say a snowball in Hades has a better chance. What is amusing to me is that no one in media is even mentioning the trump card that the Senate holds over the farce going on in Copenhagen. Going to be interesting to watch the reaction when the Senate folds its arms and says, “Nyet!” As Hans Solo would said, “This is where the fun begins.”
Mr. X, you’re showing quite a bit of empathy for the Russian pov. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, (as Seinfeld would say) it’s just interesting.
I agree that Russia has never really bought into the whole “global warming” story. For the last few years it’s been one of the few places in the world that allowed open discussion of the theory that the sun may be more important to climate than CO2 – western academia gave the “cold shoulder” to most Russian academic work in response.
The story out from the UK this weekend and seemingly endorsed by the UN to explain the CRUtape letters is that “Evil KGB hackers” did it to try and intentionally damage the Copenhagen conference, because Russia wants global warming to happen because Siberia will be easier to live in. This is nothing but slander, especially when you note that the only “proof” they have is that the file came from a Russian FTP server, one which was available to *anyone in the world* with a computer.
In fact, Anthony Watts has posted a very good internal analysis of the zip file in question today, and the internal evidence suggests very strongly that this was an internal leak from a whistleblower at CRU.
Hackers from Russia or anywhere else, for that matter, had nothing to do with it.
Mr X
I don’t mean to gloat
Yes you do you lackey of murderous fascist thugs.
Interesting that WaPost piece. Pravda on the Potomac has been one of the most wildly anti-Russian editorial boards in the States, perhaps at times worse than the Wall Street Journal which is in Khodorkovsky’s pocket. Maybe it’s been their op-ed contributor Anne Applebaum being married to the former Defense now Foreign Minister of Poland who used to work at AEI, Radek Sikorski.
It is more interesting that you crawled out to dump your bile on the same day that Anne Applebaum escaped an assassination attempt in Warsaw. Ms Applebaum is now under police guard and I wish her well. So here was another journalist that Putin and company attempted to add to the their long bloody list. So I am calling you out. This is no longer some debate about intellectual constructs and the habits of people in far away countries. This is war and you are an agent of the enemy.
To be blogged under the title “Putin’s Henchman.”
I see a giant double whammy with this carbon credit scam:
A few days ago I read somewhere (it may have been on this blog) that China intended to be a huge beneficiary of carbon credits, and is currently the leading (by a big margin) beneficiary of carbon credit schemes. Now Russia?
I’m always astonished at western politicians’ propensity for repeatedly passing the law of unintended consequences under different names for different venues.
Speaking of assassination attempts, if we were to pile all friends of AGW into one building then set it on fire, how big would the building have to be?
(Would that be wrong?)
1. More likely Russia would want Copenhagen to go forward since they’re sitting on this whole pile of post-1990 carbon credits.
2. The Russ aren’t stupid, at least at the govt level
. They know AGW is probably a crock, certainly not something to build a foreign policy on. The Russian internet site where FOIA_2009 first appeared was down in a day, which really doesn’t prove anything one way or another. They hardly have to do anything, the EU and much of the rest of “The West” seems intent on gnawing its leg off even tho it isn’t injured, they can just sit back and enjoy the show. They can sell carbon credits, natural gas, nuclear technology and key minerals, whatever way it goes.
3. My bet is still that CRU was assembling all this to respond to a FOIA, then decided to stonewall said FOIA, and someone who had been helping assemble the big zip file and still had access to it went rogue.
4. carbon credits are just the latest scam derivative instrument, meanwhile the US govt is inflating another MBS bubble.
5. Maybe the whole game at the highest level is just to create bubbles that insiders can get in on early and get a bit of advance warning before they blow, shedding a few $hundred million a year for supporting the political class which is taking such good care of them? Would hardly be the first time for such a symbiotic relationship.
A heuristic to apply to wretchard’s final question, “Who are the villains?”
Anyone who wants to decide how someone else should spend their money, by whatever method (taxes, regulations, structured incentives, whatever).
Wasn’t that easy? And it works for almost everything, not just climate!!
is mr. x an agent? could be. he certainly isn’t bad at the disinformation. stick around mr. x we need you for educational purposes. you have been recruited, sucka.
To Tarnsman at 44:
Today’s news shows that the EPA has declared CO2 a pollutant and will now regulate it with or without direct Congressional action. So by executive fiat, with support from an earlier SCOTUS ruling that CO2 could be regulated under the Clean Air Act, Obama will be able to display his power over US greenhouse gas emissions at Copenhagen.
The fastest way to overrule this is following the 2010 elections. Assuming that the Republicans gain the House but not the Senate, no appropriations need be made for rulemaking or enforcement. As a backstop in the Consitution, all appropriations must originate in the House.
Senator Inhofe was going to Copenhagen to demonstrate that Obama did NOT have the 66 votes to join in any future treaty crafted there. The EPA ruling will allow Obama to make executive agreements but not join in binding treaties.
“Stupid child, you could have saved five dollars by running home behind a cab.”
Thanks, I’d forgotten that joke.