Intercontinental Exchange has agreed to purchase the parent company of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the preeminent market for trading carbon credits. This is a market that exists solely to capitalize on possible federal legislation that would mandate reduced greenhouse gas emissions or the purchase of “pollution credits.”
Politicians created this market out of thin air by fiat, and not surprisingly, cronies of these politicians will be the beneficiaries. These climate change profiteers include Maurice Strong.
We know of the usual suspects who have invested, either directly or indirectly, in the Climate Exchange: Goldman Sachs, Al Gore, and Chicago’s Joyce Foundation (which made an investment when Barack Obama sat on its board), among others. Franklin Raines, while he headed Fannie Mae, purchased and patented the mechanism used for trading under the cap-and-trade system — an investment that could fare far better than the trillion dollars worth of bad mortgages he saddled Fannie Mae with.
But Maurice Strong … who is he?
Strong is Canada’s George Soros — a man of vast wealth who has parlayed his fortune into influence. Strong made his money in the Canadian energy markets and decades ago began a second career hobnobbing with diplomats and environmentalists.
Strong became a wheeler and dealer at the UN. He was close to several secretary generals, including, most recently, Kofi Annan. Strong found himself embroiled in the oil-for-food scandal when a check with his name on it, drawn on a Jordanian bank, was delivered to him by infamous South Korean businessman Tongsun Park (convicted of conspiring to bribe UN officials to rig the oil-for-food program for Saddam Hussein).
Strong made for the exits when Annan lost his post. But before his departure (Strong now resides in Beijing), he had left his mark at the UN by encouraging that body to promote the view that climate change is a crisis requiring governmental intervention. Strong, like Soros, has leveraged his wealth and connections to influence governmental policies around the world.
Strong was appointed secretary general of the UN Conference on Environment and Development — better known as the Earth Summit. But that was, bad pun intended, just the tip of the iceberg. He rapidly became a key player in a raft of groups that have perpetrated the climate change fraud. He helped create a byzantine structure for Ted Turner’s billion dollar gift to the UN, which Turner has been dishing out periodically from his UN Foundation (little known, or appreciated, is that Turner also funds purportedly independent environmental groups whose agendas benefit his own privately owned investments).
Strong is reportedly close to Al Gore, who may become the world’s first “green” billionaire. Strong has been called the godfather of the environmental movement — if so, Al Gore must be his godson and unworthy heir (Strong is 81).
While Strong was at the UN, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed. Reports issued under their imprimatur have been used to justify all types of political and industrial changes — all fruits of a poisonous tree. Those reports have only recently been publicized as being of questionable validity, but the damage has been done. And like most frauds, this has benefited the perpetrators at the expense of the people.
Joe Lieberman and John Kerry have introduced the latest version of a cap-and-trade bill. It will impose strict limits on carbon emissions and establish a complex regulatory scheme. If a business exceeds its limits, it will have to purchase additional credits from an exchange where the credits will be traded like a commodity.
It is telling that the Climate Exchange is headquartered in Chicago, one of the world centers of commodity trading.
Therefore, I found it quite intriguing that Maurice Strong is listed a member of the Climate Exchange board and will presumably benefit from the sale to the Intercontinental Exchange.
Among Strong’s peregrinations around international bodies has been a stint at the World Bank, where he was a senior adviser to then-president James Wolfensohn. While there, one of his colleagues was Mark Malloch Brown — a Brit with his own intriguing background. Brown was Annan’s right-hand man, but had to look for a new line of work after the oil-for food scandal hit too close to home.
Coincidentally, attacks later mounted on Wolfensohn’s successor, Paul Wolfowitz. These attacks came from left-wing partisans who targeted Wolfowitz for being too involved in the Iraq war and for being a George Bush appointee. There were reports that these attacks were being orchestrated by Soros, who was attempting to install Brown as president of the World Bank (see “Axis of Soros“).
Soros and Brown are ideologically compatible: they both despise Republicans and have a disdainful view towards American power. They are modern-day “progressives” who look upon the public purse as their own. Soros, the sugar daddy of the Democratic Party, clearly sees Democrats as his comrades-in-arms. (After all, they are the ones pushing the climate change fraud and the cap-and-trade scheme.) Soros buys additional influence by founding and funding influential think tanks like the Center for American Progress, which issue streams of reports stoking climate change hysteria and promoting green energy. Green indeed, for the climate change profiteers.
Wolfowitz was deposed, but Brown lost out in his bid to assume the presidency. Had Brown become president, he would have been ideally positioned to help Strong and Soros reap further government subsidies for pie-in-the-sky renewable energy ventures that could not survive without massive transfusions of taxpayer cash. Meanwhile, proven, cheap, and plentiful domestic supplies of clean-burning shale gas lie untouched, with Barack Obama and left-wing Democrats in Congress looking to derail tapping that energy.
The World Bank is already deeply involved in developing carbon trading schemes and is a member of the Climate Exchange. One can only imagine what more they would have been able to do had Brown’s efforts to worm his way into the presidency been successful.
What was Brown’s consolation prize? He lived at an estate — owned by Soros — while he waited in the wings for the World Bank post. When that plan went awry, Soros named Brown vice chairman of his hedge fund (despite no previous experience in the field) and of Soros’s Open Society Institute — an organization that can best be described as another Soros tool to bring about vast changes in societies around the world. These might be sinecures, as Brown awaits other opportunities to become a player in the world of geopolitics to benefit his friends.
What is Maurice Strong doing these days in China? He has a lot “going on” there, we have been told. Per Claudia Rosett and George Russell (“At The United Nations, The Curious Career of Maurice Strong“):
China is a special place for Strong, a self-declared, life-long socialist. It is the burial place of a woman said to be one of his relatives, the famous pro-communist American journalist Anna Louise Strong, a vociferous supporter of Lenin and Stalin until the mid-‘30s, and a strong booster of Mao Zedong’s China. Maurice Strong’s presence in Beijing, however, raises awkward questions: For one thing, China, while one of the world’s biggest producers of industrial pollution, has been profiting from the trading of carbon emissions credits — thanks to heavily politicized U.N.-backed environmental deals engineered by Strong in the 1990s.
Strong has refused to answer questions from FOX News about the nature of his business in China, though he has been linked in press reports to planned attempts to market Chinese-made automobiles in North America, and a spokesman for the U.S.-based firm that had invited him to speak in San Francisco, Cleantech Venture Network, says he has recently been “instrumental” in helping them set up a joint venture in Beijing. Strong’s assistant in Beijing did confirm by e-mail that he has an office in a Chinese government-hosted diplomatic compound, thanks to “many continuing relationships arising from his career including 40 years of active relationships in China.
China is also a special place when it comes to the environment. When the international community focuses on climate change, China, as a “developing nation,” often seems to get a pass. Instead, the focus has been on penalizing Western factories and businesses. This disparity would redound to the benefit of China. Even if China did agree to some measures to control its own massive pollution (it burns a great deal of dirty coal to power its growth), some incredulity would be warranted that China would ever abide by them.
Of course, China has benefited in other ways from the rush towards “green energy.” It is a major producer of windmills and is becoming a force in electric cars.
Has Strong, who has played such a large role in creating the environmental movement, figured out yet another way to gild his own lily and enrich climate change hucksters such as Al Gore, Ted Turner, and George Soros?
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