As historians look back at the explosion of information technology we’ve experienced starting into this new century, they will likely agree that it is at least as important as the invention of the printing press and gunpowder were five hundred years ago. Those were transforming technologies that shifted power from the ruling classes of their time.
The printing press ultimately freed the common man from the monopoly the clergy and educated classes had on literacy. Gunpowder made any peasant with a blunderbuss the fighting equivalent of a mounted, armored knight, the previously invincible enforcers of Medieval order.
And today we have the personal computer and the internet breaking the stranglehold that centralized news and government agencies have had for so long on the distribution of information. In many instances, computer hackers are the guerrillas on the front lines of the fight to break free of the omnipresent propaganda that passes for news.
The particular incident that got me thinking about hackers, official lies, and centralized mendacity is coming quickly to be known as Climategate.
In case you haven’t heard about it, I’ll recap quickly. Hackers penetrated the computer servers of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), based at the University of East Anglia, in England. The CRU one of the leading climate research bodies in the world. CRU data is used by governments and the UN in formulating policy to fight global warming. CRU scientists have received many millions in grant money for their research. The CRU’s director is named Phil Jones. Mr. Jones’ emails figured prominently in the scandal.
The hacked emails and other documents show top scientists conspiring to alter data, which showed falling global temperatures, to show the opposite. Their purpose was to prop up the notion that humans are causing ‘global warming.’
Other documents in the hacked stash show a nasty, coordinated effort to marginalize climate skeptics. They show the use of CRU influence to keep truthful reports out of peer-reviewed journals, and reveal how CRU insiders conspired to avoid answering Freedom of Information Act requests.
Before they came to their senses and realized what was in the documents, CRU officials acknowledged that all the documents were genuine. They are now in full cover up spin mode and not nearly as forthcoming about what was revealed. But that kitty is out of the sack now.
Mr. Jones’ own emails are among the most damning. Here’s a sample from one in 1999 that has the potential to join “I am not a crook” and “I never slept with that woman” in the Corrupt Official Quotes Hall of Fame: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” (emphasis added, quoted in the London Tribune) He’s referring to the decline in global temperature.
There’s no question that Dr. Phil had a great incentive to “hide the decline” in global temperatures. He has personally received over $25 million in grants to fight global warming. And therein lies one of the main problems with global warming.
Global warming has a constituency. There are literally millions of financial and career beneficiaries of the official version of global warming, Al Gore not least among them.
Big lucrative lies take on a life of their own. At some point, shaky science or not, the lie becomes simply too lucrative to set right. The truth can't simply be ignored, it must be actively suppressed. The truth, however, has a tendency to poke its head up when least expected, no matter the efforts to bury it. Whether there was a conspiracy to create the enormous hoax that global warming became will likely never be known, but that an enormous hoax has been thrust on the world is in little doubt now.
That is not to say I expect the millions of beneficiaries of the global warming fairy tale to simply admit the truth and move on to pestering us about some other weighty world problem. Not at all.
The main stream media in the U.S. is hardly touching the story. But it is a global issue, after all, and elsewhere on the globe it is receiving a good deal of attention. According to commentator Andrew Bolt the scandal may be “the greatest in modern science.” James Delingpole has suggested it could be the “final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming.”
I surely hope so. And we’ll have hackers to thank for it.
Fast-forward to today. It’s early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm’s cohead of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade.
The new carboncredit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.
Here’s how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy “allocations” or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.
The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the “cap” on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.
Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigmshifting legislation, (2) make sure that they’re the profitmaking slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for capandtrade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank’s environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson’s report argued that “voluntary action alone cannot solve the climatechange problem.” A few years later, the bank’s carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that capandtrade alone won’t be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, “We’re not making those investments to lose money.”
The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utahbased firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There’s also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in greentech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energyfutures market?
“Oh, it’ll dwarf it,” says a former staffer on the House energy committee.
Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won’t we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but capandtrade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private taxcollection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it’s even collected.
“If it’s going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it,” says Michael Masters, the hedgefund director who spoke out against oilfutures speculation. “But we’re saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That’s the last thing in the world I want. It’s just asinine.”
Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn’t, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees — while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.
It’s not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there’s a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can’t really register the fact that you’re no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you’re no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.
But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It’s a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can’t be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can’t stop it, but we should at least know where it’s all going.
As I like to say “Veritas Odium Parit” (TRUTH BEGETS HATRED) why would all the “I know better than you” leeches want to give up the golden teat. I am sure the Snake oil Spin Squad will pad their response and spoon feed it to the stupid is as stupid does majority and its business as usual, crank up the treasury printing presses (Johan Guttenberg would be so proud) and feed the beast. Reminder there is a difference between genuflecting and bending over.
Right you are about the tools which have become available so the average man is no longer at the mercy of the select few. I love it! It is great to be alive and be witness to such glory.
Katha