Obama’s Climate Change Initiative (Cap and Trade) = Friends In High Places?

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Key Obama Climate Change Exchange Being Swayed by Top U.N. Officials

Five members of the Chicago Climate Exchange advisory board are present or former top-ranking U.N. officials — including one who received $1 million from a convicted South Korean lobbyist in the Oil for Food scandal.

By Edward Barnes
Monday, April 20, 2009

A greenhouse gases trading system funded with the support of then-Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama, which is likely to play a major role in his $650 million cap-and-trade initiative, lists five present or former top-ranking U.N. officials on its advisory board who’ve had enormous influence over climate change matters — including one who received $1 million from a convicted South Korean lobbyist.

The most controversial figure of the five, Maurice Strong, was one of former Secretary General Kofi Annan’s key aides at the U.N. for years until the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal forced him to leave. Since then Strong has lived mostly in China. Calls to the exchange for comment about Strong’s role, and that of other U.N. figures, were not returned.

The Climate Exchange, which began operations in 2003, provides trading in carbon emissions and their offsets, along with those of other greenhouse gases, is among a group of companies and institutions that voluntarily participate in the program. It bills itself as the only voluntary, legally binding exchange of its kind in North America. Among its member companies are Ford, DuPont and United Technologies as well as a number of electric utilities; other participants include the City of Chicago and Miami-Dade County.

In the latest budget submitted to Congress last month, President Obama proposed backing cap and trade as the nation’s primary response to reduce global warming; a bill with that aim has also been submitted in the House of Representatives. Under the cap and trade plan a fixed number of carbon producing “permissions” would be made available to manufacturing and other industries each year; the totals would be reduced over time, forcing down the overall total of carbon dioxide emissions.

To meet their targets, companies would either have to cut production of the offending carbon-based gases or buy “offsets,” or credits from companies that do not reach their allowed levels or actively create projects that reduce carbon in the atmosphere. Offsets also include planting trees and other activities that remove carbon from the atmosphere. However it is used, the scheme is guaranteed to boost the cost of fossil and other gas producing forms of energy in the U.S., as well as the costs of every economic sector that relies on that energy.

The likelihood of cap and trade or a similar scheme being enacted got a significant boost last week, when the Environmental Protection Agency officially announced that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare via global warming, a prelude to official regulation of the emissions.

The Chicago Climate Exchange is the brainchild of Richard Sandor, an economics professor who has worked for the both the Chicago Mercantile Association and the Chicago Board of Trade. Known as “Mr. Derivative,” for his work in creating interest rate futures markets, Sandor first proposed the creation of the climate exchange in 2000, just before the signing of the Kyoto Accord on greenhouse gas reduction.

Initial funding of almost $1 million which was crucial to the exchange’s launch came in 2000 and 2001 from the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, whose board of directors, which approved the funding, included Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator.

Paula DiPerna, the Joyce Foundation’s president at the time funding was approved, became the Climate Exchange’s vice president by the time the foundation gave a second, and larger, tranche of money to the budding venture. Barack Obama, by that time an Illinois state legislator, was still on the foundation board.

Along with Maurice Strong, the other current or former U.N. officials on the climate exchange’s 18-member advisory board are: Elizabeth Dowdeswell, former head of the UN Environmental Program (UNEP); Rajenra Pachauri, head of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Michael Jammit Cutajar, former executive director of the U.N. Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC); and Thomas Lovejoy, former science adviser to UNEP and currently senior adviser to the president of the U.N. Foundation, which was originally founded with a $1 billion gift from CNN founder Ted Turner. The foundation calls itself “an advocate for the U.N. and a platform for connecting people, ideas and resources to help the United Nations solve global problems.”

On one level Strong’s involvement in the exchange is not surprising. He has been a player in virtually all the U.N.’s environmental initiatives over the past four decades. His work includes organizing the 1972 U.N. conference on the environment in Stockholm, which was a launch pad for the worldwide environmental movement, as well as the 1992 Earth Summit and the Kyoto Accords.

The New York Times once called Strong, a native Canadian, “The Custodian of the Planet.” In 1972 Strong also became the first head of the United Nations Environmental Program. In 1997, he helped Annan launch a program of internal reform of the U.N., and subsequently served as Annan’s special envoy to North Korea.

Strong left the U.N. under a cloud in 2005, after an investigation into the corruption ravaged Oil-for-Food Program revealed that he had received nearly $1 million in cash from Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman who was later convicted of conspiring to bribe U.N. officials who ran the program. Strong claimed that the money was an investment by Park in a company owned by Strong’s son. He admitted personally taking other money from Park but claimed it was for an “office rental.” After the revelations Strong resigned his last U.N. post as Annan’s North Korea envoy and moved to China.

Read the rest of the article HERE

 

Now ADD THIS: World Forum Initiative

STRATEGIC PURPOSE

The purpose of the Commission on Globalization was to undertake an inclusive and comprehensive multi-stakeholder inquiry into the nature and character of globalization; and to develop integrated thought and action leading to specific recommendations for governance and policy-making at a global level that promoted greater social equity, environmental stability, enhanced security, and sustainable economic growth.

The Commission served as an incubator, catalyst and integrator for innovative leaders and institutions working to bring greater equity, democracy and accountability to globalization and global governance.

Who attended you ask?

Washington, DC – A meeting of about 50 individuals drawn from civil society, the World Bank and the United Nations was convened at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on April 23 to discuss the Commission. The intent of the meeting was to solicit feedback and suggestions on how the Commission could best contribute to bridging the divide between the many voices in the globalization debate, and to proceed with establishing a common agenda that would foster a constructive spirit of dialogue and inquiry. Co-Chair Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the meeting along with John Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO, and Co-Chair Lori Wallach, Director of Public Citizen Trade Watch.

By September 2004, the following confirmed their commitment to serve on the Council of Co-Chairs:

The list includes:

Richard Sandor Chairman and CEO, Environmental Financial Products Research Professor, Northwestern University

George Soros Chairman, Soros Fund Management

Strobe Talbott President, The Brookings Institution

http://www.worldforum.org/init1.htm

Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange–the rest of the story

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit.  Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States.  That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower.  The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.

Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI).  MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste.  Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.

“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR.  “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”

(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is that every time someone picks up another Senate rock, another serpent comes slithering out).

“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale.  The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.

“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996.  But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding.  When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers–including Maurice strong–sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value.  On Oct. 20, 1996–a Sunday–the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.

“On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a share.  By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class action suit against the company and its directors.  Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with Maurice strong in another insider trading case, involving a Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was also a lead shareholder.  The AZL case closely mirrored Molten Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong’s role in scamming the value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before selling it off.

In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, who was found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.

These are the leaders in the Man-made Global Warming Movement, who three years later were to be funded by the man who was to become President of the United States of America.

If we follow the time line on where Obama was during the funding of the Chicago Climate Exchange, he was still a professor at the University of Chicago Law School teaching constitutional law, with his law license becoming inactive a year later in 2002.

It may be interesting to note that the Chicago Climate Exchange in spite of its hype, is a veritable rat’s nest of cronyism. The largest shareholder in the Exchange is Goldman Sachs.  Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is its honorary chairman, The Joyce Foundation, which funded the Exchange also funded money for John Ayers’ Chicago School Initiatives.  John is the brother of William Ayers.

[snip]

The same Chicago Climate Exchange promoting public rip-off was funded by Obama before he was POTUS.

Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-generating hoax, Obama is working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress.

Obama was never the character he created for himself in the fairy-tale version in “Dreams of My Father”.  He’s the agent of Change and Hope for cohorts making money down at the Chicago Climate Exchange.

The Barbarians are pushing at the gate of the Global Warming fraud, and to borrow a line from children playing Hide and Seek, Here they come, ready or not!

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/9629

 The Chicago Climate Exchange describes itself as “the world’s first and North America’s only active voluntary, legally binding integrated trading system to reduce emissions of all six major greenhouse gases (GHGs), with offset projects worldwide.”

Barack Obama involvement

Barack Obama was a member of the board of the Chicago Climate Exchange from 1998 to 2001.

Philosophy of Richard Sandor

A participant in a meeting between founder Richard Sandor and 40 potential investors described Sandor’s philosophy as follows:

Richard Sandor believes that the capital markets can solve global warming and make money doing it. He explained his theory on wealth creation, which grew out of the economic situation in the 1960’s. He said that fifty years ago, wealth was concentrated in the manufacturing industry. He explained that the ‘70’s were about commodities and then in the 80’s the market moved into the commoditization of financial products such as interest rates and derivatives. In the 90’s, he said, the commodities of information like Google and Yahoo ruled. What does he say about the 21st century? He believes that wealth will be created in the commoditization of air and water.

 

 http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Chicago_Climate_Exchange

So Obama who hails from Chicago, has/ had influence/participation in the Chicago Climate Exchange (Sandor, Soros, Strong,Gore) will insure his pals get $$$$$$ from Carbon Credits……off the backs of taxpayers and businesses…….

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST: THE EMANUEL CONNECTION!

   Monday, November 5, 2007

Emanuel Announces the Greening of the Capitol

U.S. Congress to Purchase Carbon Offsets from the Chicago Climate Exchange

   WASHINGTON, D.C.—Today, U.S. Representative Rahm Emanuel (IL-5) joined Dan Beard, Chief Administrative Officer of the House of Representatives, officials from the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), the City of Chicago, and fellow Members of Congress to announce the purchase of carbon offsets on the Chicago Climate Exchange to help make the U.S. House of Representatives carbon neutral by the end of the 110th Congress.

“Through the ‘Green the Capitol’ initiative, the House of Representatives joins Chicago in a commitment to energy efficiency and responsible stewardship of the environment,” said Emanuel.

Under the Leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA-8) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (MD-5), the House will become carbon neutral by purchasing wind power for the electricity used by the House, by substituting the House’s portion of the use of the Capitol Power Plant natural gas for coal, and to offset the carbon emitted from burning natural gas, the House will purchase carbon offsets.  After taking into account the other changes made under the Green the Capitol Initiative, the House is offsetting 30,000 tons of carbon through the purchase of carbon financial instrument contracts or carbon credits through CCX, totaling approximately $90,000.  Funding for the purchase of these carbon offsets is available in the Chief Administrative Officer’s Fiscal Year 2008 budget.

“Offsetting the House of Representative’s greenhouse gas emissions through CCX is a hat-trick for the Country – a win for the environment, a win for industry, and a win for our Nation’s expanding economy,” said Emanuel.

The City of Chicago is leading the way in transitioning to an eco-friendly world, bringing two solar panel manufacturers to the city, planning or negotiating the construction of over 2 million square feet of rooftop gardens, and more. The City of Chicago buys 5% of its power from renewable sources and was the first city to join CCX. CCX is a U.S. corporation that began trading in 2003 and is the world’s first and North America’s only active voluntary, legally binding integrated trading system to reduce emissions of all six greenhouse gases, with offset projects in North America and worldwide.  Other CCX Exchange Participants include the World Bank. 

Emanuel has worked with the Speaker of the House, the CAO, and other congressional leaders to include environmental initiatives such as purchasing offsets and green roofs on House Office Buildings in the Green the Capitol initiative.

 http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/il05_emanuel/greeningcapitol.html

I wonder how many shares of CCX Emanuel and Obama have in a “shadow” buyer? Someone say in the likes of George Soros?

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