Agenda 21

Climate Change Fraud is Much Bigger Than it Seems!

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The Great Wind Power Fraud: Just the Tip of the Climate Change Hysteria Spending Iceberg

April 17, 2015 by

turbine fire 6

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The tip of the climate spending iceberg
CFACT
Paul Driessen
31 March 2015

Lockheed Martin, a recent Washington Post article notes, is getting into renewable energy, nuclear fusion, “sustainability” and even fish farming projects, to augment its reduced defense profits. The company plans to forge new ties with Defense Department and other Obama initiatives, based on a shared belief in manmade climate change as a critical security and planetary threat.

It is charging ahead where other defense contractors have failed, confident that its expertise, lobbying skills and “socially responsible” commitment to preventing climate chaos will land it plentiful contracts and subsidies.

As with its polar counterparts, 90% of the titanic climate funding iceberg is invisible to most citizens, businessmen and politicians. The Lockheed action is the mere tip of the icy mountaintop.

The multi-billion-dollar agenda reflects the Obama Administration’s commitment to using climate change to radically transform America. It reflects a determination to make the climate crisis industry so enormous that no one will be able to tear it down, even as computer models and disaster claims become less and less credible – and even if Republicans control Congress and the White House after 2016. Lockheed is merely the latest in a long list of regulators, researchers, universities, businesses, manufacturers, pressure groups, journalists and politicians with such strong monetary, reputational and authority interests in alarmism that they will defend its tenets and largesse tooth and nail.

Above all, it reflects a conviction that alarmists have a right to control our energy use, lives, livelihoods and living standards, with no transparency and no accountability for mistakes they make or damage they inflict on disfavored industries and families.

And they are pursuing this agenda despite global warming again beingdead last in the latest Gallup poll of 15 issues of greatest concern to Americans: only 25% say they worry about it “a great deal,” despite steady hysteria; 24% are “not at all” worried about the climate. By comparison, 46% percent worry a great deal about the size and power of the federal government.

But Climate Crisis, Inc. is using our tax and consumer dollars to advance six simultaneous strategies.

1) Climate research. The US government spends $2.5 billion per year on research that focuses on carbon dioxide, ignores powerful natural forces that have always driven climate change, and generates numerous reports and press releases warning of record high temperatures, melting icecaps, rising seas, stronger storms, more droughts and other “unprecedented” crises. The claims are erroneous and deceitful.

They are consistently contradicted by actual climate and weather records, and so alarmists increasingly emphasize computer models that reinvent and substitute for reality. Penn State modeler Michael Mann has collected millions for headline-grabbing work like his latest assertion that the Gulf Stream is slowing – contrary to 20 years of actual measurements that show no change. Former NASA astronomer James Hansen received a questionable $250,000 Heinz Award from Secretary of State John Kerry’s wife, for his climate crisis and anti-coal advocacy. Al Gore and350.org also rake in millions. Alarmist scientists and institutions seek billions more, while virtually no government money goes to research into natural forces.

2) Renewable energy research and implementation grants, loans, subsidies and mandates drive projects to replace hydrocarbons that are still abundant and still 82% of all US energy consumed. Many recipientswent bankrupt despite huge taxpayer grants and loan guarantees. Wind turbine installations butcher millions of birds and bats annually, but are exempt from Endangered Species Act fines and penalties.

Tesla Motors received $256 million to produce electric cars for wealthy elites who receive $2,500 to $7,500 in tax credits, plus free charging and express lane access. From 2007 to 2013, corn ethanol interests spent$158 million lobbying for more “green” mandates and subsidies – and $6 million in campaign contributions – for a fuel that reduces mileage, damages engines, requires enormous amounts of land, water and fertilizer, and from stalk to tailpipe emits more carbon dioxide than gasoline.

General Electric spends tens of millions lobbying for more taxpayer renewable energy dollars; so do many other companies. The payoffs add up to tens of billions of dollars, from taxpayers and consumers.

3) Regulatory fiats increasingly substitute for laws and carbon taxes thatCongress refuses to enact, due to concerns about economic and employment impacts, and because China, India and other countries’ CO2 emissions dwarf America’s. EPA’s war on coal has already claimed thousands of jobs, raised electricity costs for millions of businesses and families, and adversely affected living standards, health and welfare for millions of families. The White House and EPA are also targeting oil and gas drilling and fracking.

Now the Obama Administration is unleashing a host of new mandates and standards, based on arbitrary “social cost of carbon” calculations that assume fossil fuel use imposes numerous climate and other costs, but brings minimal or no economic or societal benefits. The rules will require onerous new energy efficiency and CO2 emission reduction standards that will send consumer costs skyrocketing, while channeling billions of dollars to retailers, installers, banks and mostly overseas manufacturers.

As analyst Roger Bezdek explains, water heaters that now cost $675-1,500 will soon cost $1,200-2,450 – with newfangled exhaust fans, vent pipes and condensate removal systems. Pickup trucks with more fuel efficiency and less power will nearly double in price. Microwaves, cell phones, vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, toasters, coffee pots, lawn mowers, photocopiers, televisions and almost everything else will cost far more. Poor and middle class families will get clobbered, to prevent perhaps 5% of the USA’s 15% of all human CO2 emissions toward 0.04% of atmospheric CO2, and maybe 0.00001 degrees of warming.

4) A new UN climate treaty would limit fossil fuel use by developed countries, place no binding limits or timetables on developing nations, and redistribute hundreds of billions of dollars to poor countries that claim they have been harmed by emissions and warming due to rich country hydrocarbon use. Even IPCC officials now openly brag that climate policy has “almost nothing” to do with protecting the environment – and everything to do with intentionally transforming the global economy and redistributing its wealth.

5) Vicious personal attacks continue on scientists, businessmen, politicians and others who disagree publicly with the catechism of climate cataclysm. Alarmist pressure groups and Democrat members of Congress are out to destroy the studies, funding, reputations and careers of all who dare challenge climate disaster tautologies. At President Obama’s behest, even disaster aid agencies are piling on.

New FEMA rules require that any state seeking disaster preparedness funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency must first assess how climate change threatens their communities. This will mean relying on discredited, worthless alarmist models that routinely spew out predictions unrelated to reality. It likely means no federal funds will go to states that include or focus on natural causes, historical records or models that have better track records than those employed by the IPCC, EPA and President.

6) Thought control. In addition to vilifying climate chaos skeptics, alarmists are determined to control all thinking on the subject. They are terrified that people will find realist analyses and explanations far more persuasive. They refuse to debate skeptics, respond to NIPCC and other studies examining natural climate change and carbon dioxide benefits to wildlife and agriculture, or even admit there is no consensus.

They want the news media to ignore us but cannot put the internet genie back in the bottle. The White House is trying, though. It even sent picketers to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s home, to demand that he knuckle under and apply 1930s’ telephone laws to the internet, as a first step in content control States must refuse to play the climate crisis game.

Through lawsuits, hearings, investigations and other actions, governors, legislators, AGs and other officials can delay EPA diktats, educate citizens about solar and other natural forces, and explain the huge costs and trifling benefits of these draconian regulations.

Congress should hold hearings, demand an accounting of agency expenditures, require solid evidence for every climate claim and regulation, and cross-examine Administration officials on details. It should slash EPA and other agency budgets, so they cannot keep giving billions to pressure groups, propagandists and attack dogs. Honesty, transparency, accountability and a much shorter leash are long overdue.
CFACT

Tip of the iceberg

Friend to Wind Turbine Victims, French Senator Jean Germain, Dies Mysterious Death

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APR
10

‘SUICIDE’ OF FRENCH SENATOR JEAN GERMAIN, FRIEND OF WINDFARM VICTIMS

Written by Mark Duchamp, World Council for Nature on 10 Apr 2015

French Senator Jean Germain, a friend of windfarm victims, has been found dead in what appears to be a suicide. He had made increasingly effective political opposition against ‘Big Green’ interests in recent times. His death may be considered suspicious. Jean Germain As UK national newspaper, The Guardiannoted:

“He is a martyr of the republic. He has been thrown to the dogs” said his lawyer (1).
Recently, Jean Germain had convinced his fellow Senators to propose an amendment doubling the setback between wind turbines and habitations to 1,000 meters. The French government, house of representatives and  wind industry are opposed to it.
In a country like France, a 1,000-meter buffer zone would make relatively few wind projects possible. But the majority of Senators thought the health of their constituents was more important.
Other French politicians who, according to the authorities, committed suicide:
 
– Pierre Bérégovoy in 1993, who “shot himself” – yet it turned out later that he had two bullets in his head (sic)  (2)
– Robert Boulin, who was found in a pond in 1979, with clear evidence of blows to the face – in other words, this Minister would have commited suicide by beating himself up (3).
– There may be more examples…
We are not implying that the death of Jean Germain is suspicious. We are just remembering that, in these matters, it may take years before the whole truth is known. Prudently, a number of media have been titling: French senator found dead in apparent suicide (4).
If you read French, see the moving letter from Pascale Hoffmeyer, WCFN’s Coordinator for Switzerland: “… the distress of giant turbines’ neighbours …” (5).
Contact:
Mark Duchamp      +34 693 643 736
Chairman
www.wcfn.org

Legislators Finally Realizing That Wind Power is Useless! Pull the Subsidy Plug!

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US “Wind Power States” Pull the Plug on Massive Wind Power Subsidy Schemes

April 6, 2015 by Leave a Comment

plug LifeSupportSlider

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This time last year, we took a look at the States in the US where $billions filched from power consumers and taxpayers have been thrown at wind power outfits, as a massive, and seemingly endless, stream of subsidies; and the skyrocketing power prices that have been the result:

Want skyrocketing power prices? Just add Wind Power

In that post, James M Taylor laid out the wind power driven blowout in power prices, noting that:

Skyrocketing Costs in Wind Power States

The 11 states that AWEA identifies as deriving more than 7 percent of their electricity from wind power are Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. AWEA says these 11 states have had slightly falling electricity prices since 2008, but official U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data show nine of the 11 have dramatically rising prices. Here are EIA’s data on changes in electricity prices for each of the 11 states since 2008:

Colorado – up 14%

Idaho – up 33%

Iowa – up 17%

Kansas – up 29%

Minnesota – up 22%

North Dakota – up 24%

Oklahoma – down 1%

Oregon – up 15%

South Dakota – up 26%

Texas – down 19%

Wyoming – up 33%

The objective U.S. Energy Information Administration data show nine of the 11 largest wind power states are experiencing skyrocketing electricity prices, rising more than four times the national average. Moreover, prices in eight of the 11 states are rising more than twice as fast as in the 39 states with less than 7 percent wind power generation.

James goes on to explain the two outliers, Texas and Oklahoma:

The Two Outliers Explained

Other important factors further rebut AWEA’s claims in the two heavy wind power states where electricity prices are not skyrocketing.

In Oklahoma, where electricity prices remained essentially flat, there is no renewable power mandate. To the extent wind power is produced in Oklahoma, market forces, rather than state government, determine its generation. AWEA curiously argues relatively stable electricity prices in a state without renewable power mandates justify AWEA’s call for renewable power mandates.

In Texas, economists agree, electricity prices have been falling in recent years as a result of the state’s deregulation efforts during the past decade. Texas coal power, natural gas power, nuclear power, and wind power are all experiencing declining prices due to deregulation. Yet AWEA falsely ascribes the state’s declining electricity prices to wind power.

AWEA’s self-serving formula uses Texas’ deregulation to hide the cumulatively skyrocketing electricity prices in the 10 other states that generate the most wind power.

Now, in a cry of “enough is enough”, numerous States, including Ohio, Kansas, New Mexico and West Virginia have either pulled the plug on their “Renewable Energy Mandates” (State based subsidy schemes) or are set on the path to do so. What’s spooked them into action is the fact that:

“Electricity prices in states with mandates are 40 percent higher than in non-REM states.”

Remember, as Ross McKitrick puts it: “wind turbines don’t run on wind, they run on subsidies” (see our post here).

With States chopping the massive and endless subsidies on which the wind industry critically depends, the wind industry will finally be put to proof on its wild claims about about being “competitive” with conventional generators (see this nonsense from ruin-economy and our post here). As the Americans say to the foolish and/or brave: “well, good luck with that!”

Here’s the Washington Times on the beginning of the end for BIG WIND in the US.

Pulling the plug on renewable energy: States with mandates suffer exploding electricity prices
The Washington Times
Sterling Burnett
29 March 2015

There is never a good time for bad public policy. For few policies is this more evident than renewable energy mandates (REM), variously known as renewable portfolio standards, alternative energy standards and renewable energy standards.

The first renewable energy mandate was adopted in 1983, but most states did not impose these mandates until the 2000s. Though the details vary from state to state, in general, renewable energy mandates require utilities to provide a certain percentage of the electric power they supply from “renewable” sources, notably wind and solar, with the required percentages rising over time.

At the height of the renewable-energy mania, 30 states and the District of Columbia had imposed REMs and another seven had established voluntary standards.

Renewable energy mandate proponents included environmental lobbyists with a hatred for capitalism and fossil fuels that make modern society possible, crony socialists who saw the mandates as way of strong-arming exorbitant payments from government and ratepayers alike, and paternalistic politicians who look down on people’s choices in the marketplace, believing they know best what sources of energy people ought to choose.

Green-energy advocates, crony socialists and government elitists have seen their fortunes wax and wane over five decades. Government subsidies for unreliable, expensive renewable fuels had risen, fallen, been scrapped and begun anew since the 1970s. The existence and amount of subsidies tended to rise in fall with various energy crises — crises often created by the same government that then proposed subsidies for renewable energy as the solution for the problems it created.

For 50 years, green-energy gurus in industry and the environmental movement have sold the snake oil that renewable power would soon be as cheap and reliable as coal, oil, nuclear and natural gas. The nation has been told the turning point has always been just around the corner, always requiring a little more public funding and tax breaks before we have abundant, cheap, clean, reliable energy materializing from thin air.

All these promises were false, and the public and more-honest politicians have seen through the sales pitch. Now, support for renewables is as unreliable as the energy it provides.

To guarantee a market for renewables, green lobbyists fought successfully for mandates ensuring green-energy producers a slice of the electricity market regardless of the price and quality of the energy they produced.

Energy prices skyrocketed, as predicted by numerous energy analysts.

Though cost is an important concern, it is not the only problem with renewable power sources.

Renewable energy is not environmentally friendly. Renewable energy mandates have turned millions of acres of wild lands and wildlife habitats into a vast wasteland of wind and solar industrial energy facilities. In the process, renewable energy facilities have condemned to death hundreds of thousands of animals, including endangered birds, bats and tortoises. Finally, the construction and maintenance of these facilities have polluted the air and water. There is nothing green about all this. Still, continuing high costs, not environmental concerns, may finally spell doom for the mandates.

Citing high costs, Ohio became the first state to freeze its renewable energy mandate. Under Ohio’s mandate, utilities would have been required to provide 25 percent of the state’s electricity from qualified renewable sources by 2025. Under a law signed by Republican Gov. John Kasich in June 2014, Ohio froze its mandate at the current level of 12.5 percent, halving the mandated level.

In January, West Virginia repealed its renewable energy mandate entirely, and the New Mexico House of Representatives passed a bill freezing the state’s renewable standards in March.

Kansas has also recently held hearings on repealing its renewable energy mandate, spurred on in part by a new report from Utah State University reporting Kansas ratepayers are paying $171 million more than they would without the mandate. These additional costs have resulted in a loss of $4,367 each year in household disposable income.

What’s true for Kansas is true for other states with renewable energy mandates. States with mandates experienced 10 percent greater unemployment, due to higher energy prices resulting from the REM, than states without mandates. In addition, the U.S. Department of Energy has found electricity prices in states with renewable energy mandates have risen twice as fast as in states with no renewable requirement. Electricity prices in states with mandates are 40 percent higher than in non-REM states.

With these facts, it is little wonder that states are doing a slow walk back from their previous support of costly, environmentally harmful renewable energy mandates. It’s a classic case of legislate in haste, repent in leisure.

H. Sterling Burnett is a research fellow on energy and the environment at the Heartland Institute.
The Washington Times

subsidies

If any further proof were needed for Ross McKitrick’s “wind turbines don’t run on wind, they run on subsidies” adage, this little piece from Associated Press should do the trick.

Plans pulled for 223-turbine wind farm in Central Oregon
The Associated Press
27 March 2015

BEND — Plans for a big wind farm in north-central Oregon have been scrapped, state regulators say.

The Brush Canyon Wind Power Facility would have had as many as 223 turbines in Sherman and Wasco counties, The Bend Bulletin reported Friday.

It would have been in an area of 76,000 acres, or 119 square miles.

The turbines that have spread across the windy Columbia plateau in recent decades have benefited from two government initiatives: requirements by West Coast states that utilities include alternative energy among their energy sources and a federal tax credit based on turbine production.

But in December, Congress let lapse the federal tax break enacted in 1992 to nurture the fledgling wind industry.

The Brush Canyon proposal had its origin like many in the Northwest, proposed by the North American arm of a European or Scandinavian utility company, in this case the German firm E.ON (EE’-ahn) AG.

“We don’t know why they pulled out, but it’s not unusual,” said spokesman Rachel Wray of the state Department of Energy. “We’ve had a number of projects pulled over the last couple of years. Some that had gone a ways through the process . and others that were a lot less far along. It really varies.”

Calls and messages from The Associated Press to the company’s Chicago office and German headquarters were not immediately returned.

In Central Oregon, some were happy and relieved at the decision, saying the project was far too big and disruptive.

Residents of the high-desert town Antelope were anticipating that construction traffic would increase traffic by 600 percent, Mayor John Silvertooth said.

“It’s like a doctor telling a patient he’s in remission, or waking up from brain surgery and hearing everything was a success,” he said.

Antelope’s population is now about 50. It was larger in the 1980s, and got a lot of attention, when thousands of followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh tried to establish a political power base on a commune that was eventually forced out.
The Associated Press

dirtyrottenscoundrelsoriginal

Stop Blowing Our Money Into the Wind!

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PSST! Want to Kill Prosperous Economies & Crush the Poorest? Then Keep Throwing $Billions at Wind Power

April 2, 2015 by

Josef Stalin

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The so-called “Greens” are not just delusional, they’re dangerous. Full of hate for human beings, especially the poorest of them, their “policies” – if they can be called that? – are more like malign manifestos, of the kind that would have made the Generalissimo proud.

In a brilliant essay, first published in the Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley lays “green” ideology to waste; and gives the nonsense of wind power special attention, observing that:

Wind power, for all the public money spent on its expansion, has inched up to — wait for it — 1 per cent of world energy consumption in 2013. Solar, for all the hype, has not even managed that: If we round to the nearest whole number, it accounts for 0 per cent of world energy consumption.

Matt goes on to dissect the greens’ favourite myth that economies can, somehow, rely on “hope and promises”; and ditch fossil fuels altogether.

Fossil fuels are here to stay
The Wall Street Journal
Matt Ridley
23 March 2015

THE environmental movement has advanced three arguments in recent years for giving up fossil fuels: (1) that we will soon run out of them anyway; (2) that alternative sources of energy will price them out of the marketplace; and (3) that we cannot afford the climate consequences of burning them.

These days, not one of the three arguments is looking very healthy. In fact, a more realistic assessment of our energy and environmental situation suggests that, for decades to come, we will continue to rely overwhelmingly on the fossil fuels that have contributed so dramatically to the world’s prosperity and progress.

In 2013, about 87 per cent of the energy that the world consumed came from fossil fuels, a figure that — remarkably — was unchanged from 10 years before. This roughly divides into three categories of fuel and three categories of use: oil used mainly for transport, gas used mainly for heating, and coal used mainly for electricity.

Over this period, the overall volume of fossil-fuel consumption has increased dramatically, but with an encouraging environmental trend: a diminishing amount of carbon-dioxide emissions per unit of energy produced. The biggest contribution to decarbonising the system has been the switch from high-carbon coal to lower-carbon gas in electricity generation.

On a global level, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar have contributed hardly at all to the drop in carbon emissions, and their modest growth has merely made up for a decline in the fortunes of zero-carbon nuclear energy. (The reader should know that I have an indirect interest in coal through the ownership of land in Northern England on which it is mined, but I nonetheless applaud the displacement of coal by gas in recent years.)

The argument that fossil fuels will soon run out is dead, at least for a while. The collapse of the price of oil over the past six months is the result of abundance: an inevitable consequence of the high oil prices of recent years, which stimulated innovation in hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, seismology and information technology. The US — the country with the oldest and most developed hydrocarbon fields — has found itself once again, surprisingly, at the top of the energy-producing league, rivalling Saudi Arabia in oil and Russia in gas.

The shale genie is now out of the bottle. Even if the current low price drives out some high-cost oil producers — in the North Sea, Canada, Russia, Iran and offshore, as well as in America — shale drillers can step back in whenever the price rebounds. As Mark Hill of Allegro Development Corporation argued last week, the frackers are currently experiencing their own version of Moore’s law: a rapid fall in the cost and time it takes to drill a well, along with a rapid rise in the volume of hydrocarbons they are able to extract.

And the shale revolution has yet to go global. When it does, oil and gas in tight rock formations will give the world ample supplies of hydrocarbons for decades, if not centuries. Lurking in the wings for later technological breakthroughs is methane hydrate, a sea floor source of gas that exceeds in quantity all the world’s coal, oil and gas put together.

So those who predict the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuels are merely repeating the mistakes of the US presidential commission that opined in 1922 that “already the output of gas has begun to wane. Production of oil cannot long maintain its present rate.” Or president Jimmy Carter when he announced on television in 1977 that “we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

That fossil fuels are finite is a red herring. The Atlantic Ocean is finite, but that does not mean that you risk bumping into France if you row out of a harbour in Maine. The buffalo of the American West were infinite, in the sense that they could breed, yet they came close to extinction. It is an ironic truth that no non-renewable resource has ever run dry, while renewable resources — whales, cod, forests, passenger pigeons — have frequently done so.

The second argument for giving up fossil fuels is that new rivals will shortly price them out of the market. But it is not happening. The great hope has long been nuclear energy, but even if there is a rush to build new nuclear power stations over the next few years, most will simply replace old ones due to close.

The world’s nuclear output is down from 6 per cent of world energy consumption in 2003 to 4 per cent today. It is forecast to inch back up to just 6.7 per cent by 2035, according the Energy Information Administration.

Nuclear’s problem is cost. In meeting the safety concerns of environmentalists, politicians and regulators added requirements for extra concrete, steel and pipework, and even more for extra lawyers, paperwork and time.

The effect was to make nuclear plants into huge boondoggles with no competition or experimentation to drive down costs. Nuclear is now able to compete with fossil fuels only when it is subsidised.

As for renewable energy, hydro-electric is the biggest and cheapest supplier, but it has the least capacity for expansion. Technologies that tap the energy of waves and tides remain unaffordable and impractical.

Geothermal is a minor player for now. And bioenergy — that is, wood, ethanol made from corn or sugar cane, or diesel made from palm oil — is proving an ecological disaster: It encourages deforestation and food-price hikes that cause devastation among the world’s poor, and per unit of energy produced, it creates even more carbon dioxide than coal.

Wind power, for all the public money spent on its expansion, has inched up to — wait for it — 1 per cent of world energy consumption in 2013. Solar, for all the hype, has not even managed that: If we round to the nearest whole number, it accounts for 0 per cent of world energy consumption.

Both wind and solar are entirely reliant on subsidies for such economic viability as they have. Worldwide, the subsidies given to renewable energy currently amount to roughly $10 per gigajoule: These sums are paid by consumers to producers, so they tend to go from the poor to the rich, often to landowners.

It is true that some countries subsidise the use of fossil fuels, but they do so at a much lower rate — the world average is about $1.20 per gigajoule — and these are mostly subsidies for consumers (not producers), so they tend to help the poor, for whom energy costs are a disproportionate share of spending.

The costs of renewable energy are coming down, especially in the case of solar. But even if solar panels were free, the power they produce would still struggle to compete with fossil fuel — except in some very sunny locations — because of all the capital equipment required to concentrate and deliver the energy.

This is to say nothing of the great expanses of land on which solar facilities must be built and the cost of retaining sufficient conventional generator capacity to guarantee supply on a dark, cold, windless evening.

The two fundamental problems that renewables face are that they take up too much space and produce too little energy.

To run the US economy entirely on wind would require a wind farm the size of Texas, California and New Mexico combined — backed up by gas on windless days. To power it on wood would require a forest covering two-thirds of the U.S., heavily and continually harvested.

John Constable, who will head a new Energy Institute at the University of Buckingham in Britain, points out that the trickle of energy that human beings managed to extract from wind, water and wood before the Industrial Revolution placed a great limit on development and progress.

The incessant toil of farm labourers generated so little surplus energy in the form of food for men and draft animals that the accumulation of capital, such as machinery, was painfully slow. Even as late as the 18th century, this energy-deprived economy was sufficient to enrich daily life for only a fraction of the population.

Our old enemy, the second law of thermodynamics, is the problem here. As a teenager’s bedroom generally illustrates, left to its own devices, everything in the world becomes less ordered, more chaotic, tending toward “entropy,” or thermodynamic equilibrium. To reverse this tendency and make something complex, ordered and functional requires work. It requires energy.

The more energy you have, the more intricate, powerful and complex you can make a system. Just as human bodies need energy to be ordered and functional, so do societies. In that sense, fossil fuels were a unique advance because they allowed human beings to create extraordinary patterns of order and complexity — machines and buildings — with which to improve their lives.

The result of this great boost in energy is what economic historian and philosopher Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment. In the case of the US, there has been a roughly 9000 per cent increase in the value of goods and services available to the average American since 1800, almost all of which are made with, made of, powered by or propelled by fossil fuels.

Still, more than a billion people on the planet have yet to get access to electricity and to experience the leap in living standards that abundant energy brings. This is not just an inconvenience for them: Indoor air pollution from wood fires kills four million people a year. The next time that somebody at a rally against fossil fuels lectures you about her concern for the fate of her grandchildren, show her a picture of an African child dying today from inhaling the dense muck of a smoky fire.

Notice, too, the ways in which fossil fuels have contributed to preserving the planet. As the American author and fossil-fuels advocate Alex Epstein points out in a bravely unfashionable book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, the use of coal halted and then reversed the deforestation of Europe and North America.

The turn to oil halted the slaughter of the world’s whales and seals for their blubber. Fertiliser manufactured with gas halved the amount of land needed to produce a given amount of food, thus feeding a growing population while sparing land for wild nature.

To throw away these immense economic, environmental and moral benefits, you would have to have a very good reason. The one most often invoked today is that we are wrecking the planet’s climate. But are we?

Although the world has certainly warmed since the 19th century, the rate of warming has been slow and erratic. There has been no increase in the frequency or severity of storms or droughts, no acceleration of sea-level rise. Arctic sea ice has decreased, but Antarctic sea ice has increased.

At the same time, scientists are agreed that the extra carbon dioxide in the air has contributed to an improvement in crop yields and a roughly 14 per cent increase in the amount of all types of green vegetation on the planet since 1980.

That carbon-dioxide emissions should cause warming is not a new idea. In 1938, the British scientist Guy Callender thought that he could already detect warming as a result of carbon-dioxide emissions. He reckoned, however, that this was “likely to prove beneficial to mankind” by shifting northward the climate where cultivation was possible.

Only in the 1970s and 80s did scientists begin to say that the mild warming expected as a direct result of burning fossil fuels — roughly a degree Celsius per doubling of carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere — might be greatly amplified by water vapour and result in dangerous warming of two to four degrees a century or more.

That “feedback” assumption of high “sensitivity” remains in virtually all of the mathematical models used to this day by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.

And yet it is increasingly possible that it is wrong. As Patrick Michaels of the libertarian Cato Institute has written, since 2000, 14 peer-reviewed papers, published by 42 authors, many of whom are key contributors to the reports of the IPCC, have concluded that climate sensitivity is low because net feedbacks are modest.

They arrive at this conclusion based on observed temperature changes, ocean-heat uptake and the balance between warming and cooling emissions (mainly sulfate aerosols). On average, they find sensitivity to be 40 per cent lower than the models on which the IPCC relies.

If these conclusions are right, they would explain the failure of the Earth’s surface to warm nearly as fast as predicted over the past 35 years, a time when — despite carbon-dioxide levels rising faster than expected — the warming rate has never reached even two-tenths of a degree per decade and has slowed down to virtually nothing in the past 15 to 20 years. This is one reason the latest IPCC report did not give a “best estimate” of sensitivity and why it lowered its estimate of near-term warming.

Most climate scientists remain reluctant to abandon the models and take the view that the current “hiatus” has merely delayed rapid warming. A turning point to dangerously rapid warming could be around the corner, even though it should have shown up by now. So it would be wise to do something to cut our emissions, so long as that something does not hurt the poor and those struggling to reach a modern standard of living.

We should encourage the switch from coal to gas in the generation of electricity, provide incentives for energy efficiency, get nuclear power back on track and keep developing solar power and electricity storage. We should also invest in research on ways to absorb carbon dioxide from the air, by fertilising the ocean or fixing it through carbon capture and storage. Those measures all make sense. And there is every reason to promote open-ended research to find some unexpected new energy technology.

The one thing that will not work is the one thing that the environmental movement insists upon: subsidising wealthy crony capitalists to build low-density, low-output, capital-intensive, land-hungry renewable energy schemes, while telling the poor to give up the dream of getting richer through fossil fuels.

Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, and a member of the British House of Lords.
The Wall Street Journal

Matt Ridley

Australians Falling Prey, to United Nations, Agenda 21?

/ 1957chev / 2 Comments

Posted: 17 Mar 2015

Graham Williamson

Control of Australia’s environmental policies, including climate change, AG21 and sustainability is increasingly being exported to foreign countries, especially through the UN. Since this is all part of globalisation however, control of other policies, even including our human rights, is also being exported to the UN.

This exporting of control typically occurs gradually and involves various stages. Firstly, our government, on our behalf, signs various international treaties or agreements, which the instigators always rush to say are ‘soft law’ and ‘non-binding’. In reality however, although having no basis in law (and no justification democratically), our politicians, in their eagerness to invite the UN to interfere in Australian domestic affairs, effectively get around the law and democratic impediments by using the following means of ‘enforcement’.
  • International moral obligations and economic, or market mechanisms
  • Building reporting requirements and need for compliance reports into the agreement – Australia has agreed to send regular compliance reports to the UN to prove compliance with UN directives, not only in regard to AG21, but also human rights.
In reality there are many non-legal mechanisms to ensure compliance. These international agreements are however only the first step in a gradual process.
The next step in the process is to incorporate the UN’s directives into domestic laws. This process is ongoing, but already it is well advanced with hundreds of UN directives incorporated into local laws.
The end game in this process, is to incorporate UN requirements into enforceable international laws.  This process is intended to be accelerated in Paris this year.
The point must be made abundantly clear, that those who have been actively involved in this process, or those whose philosophy or ideology supports an abandonment of national sovereignty and democracy in support of globalisation, can be expected to strongly defend these changes.
For instance, In a personal communication Greg Hunt advised me that AG21 is a ‘non-binding’ international agreement which is therefore irrelevant. Similarly, Tim Wilson recently advised me, in regard to the exporting of control of human rights to the UN:

“UN treaties have no binding power. They are only binding to the extent that they are incorporated into Australian law. If it is not in law, it has no legal standing.”

The statements of both Greg and Tim are notable not for what they actually said, but rather for what they chose to exclude.
Greg of course, being both a politician and a lawyer, as well as having a background in the UN, is well aware of the international mechanisms which are used to ensure compliance with UN agreements. He is also aware that increasingly, Australian domestic legislation is based upon the dictates of the UN. He must also be aware that for two decades his political colleagues have been compiling expensive compliance reports to convince the UN we are complying with their requirements. And although he claimed the Commonwealth has nothing to do with local Councils, he must also be aware the Commonwealth has been funding AG21 implementation by Councils and has even produced a Local AG21 instruction manual.
Although he is aware of these facts he chose to exclude all this information when questioned. (bold added)
As noted above, Tim also tried to dismiss concerns about the UN controlling human rights on the basis that UN human rights agreements are non-binding. Like Greg though, Tim chose to exclude many pertinent facts from his answer.
But even as Tim was answering, the HRC has  submitted a report to the UN alleging a violation of the UN Convention against Torture by the Australian government. Although this referral to the UN, and the response of the UN, are claimed by Tim to be irrelevant and inconsequential, Australia has been criticised by the UN for an alleged breach of the convention. Even worse though, the HRC also recommended, in their submission:

“That the government ensure domestic implementation of Australia’s international human rights obligations in law, policy and practice

So as Tim, a human rights Commissioner with the HRC, says there is no need to worry, UN human rights agreements are non-binding, at exactly the same time the HRC is lobbying the government to ensure UN human rights provisions are made even more enforceable by being enshrined into Australian law. Interestingly, according to Article 29(3) of the UN Declaration of Human Rights:

“These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”

This is just one of the UN controlled human rights that the HRC is seeking to further enforce upon Australians, but when I questioned Tim to see if this is one of the ‘rights’ he supports for all Australians, he declined to answer.
One of the main human rights Australians need to protect our democracy is the right to make an informed vote for genuine alternatives. But the right to make a democratic vote, which includes the right to be correctly informed and the right to choose from genuine alternatives, is NOT protected in the Constitution. Clearly, a vote for bipartisan collusion, or a vote made in ignorance of the true covert agenda, is not a democratic vote. This right to make a democratic vote should surely receive top priority for Constitutional reform, but it seems it is not even part of the HRC’s agenda.
Interestingly, Tim Wilson would also be aware that, rather than consolidate our human rights as birthright or god given constitutionalised rights, the Australian government announced in 2010 that they will continue to export the control of the human rights of all Australians to the UN, requiring all legislation to be consistent with UN requirements. According to the Australian Human Rights Framework:

“Since its election, the Australian Government has acted to reinvigorate Australia’s engagement with the United Nations. We have issued a standing invitation to the UN to visit Australia to examine the protection of human rights here, sending a clear message that we are committed to our international  obligations and relationship with the United Nations. The Government is committed to restoring Australia’s reputation as a good international citizen……… 

The Government will introduce legislation requiring that each new Bill introduced into Parliament, and delegated legislation subject to disallowance, be accompanied by a statement which outlines its compatibility with the seven core UN human rights treaties to which Australia is a party.”

While this change was announced by the previous government, such changes are continuing, and are not reversed by successive governments. The general direction remains the same.
Interestingly, while the right to make an informed democratic vote is not part of the HRC’s agenda, recommended constitutional changes to support one particular race (aborigines) are part of the HRC report to government.
Now, as the OIC assumes the largest voting bloc in the UN, and attempts to control freedom of speech by outlawing criticism of Islam, we need to extremely vigilant  about who we are placing in charge of our human rights.
When fellow Australians, who we assume are on our side, glibly dismiss concerns by stating international agreements are non-binding, it is pertinent to request a more proactive response in support of Australia, and Australian values.
The direction in which Australia is going is perfectly clear. Australians deserve the truth, a genuine democratic choice. It is simply not the Aussie way to sell your friends and neighbours out behind their backs.
Any system built upon deception, disloyalty, and abandonment of democracy, will have dire consequences. (bold added)

New Movie, Kingsman: The Secret Service – about the Elitist, Narcissistic Nature of Climate Alarmists!

/ 1957chev / 1 Comment

Kingsman: the most subversive anti-AGW movie

Anthony Cox

Some movies are unintentionally anti-AGW because they are so pretentious like Atavaror just plain stupid like Noah.

Some are subtle and sly in their critique of AGW like Interstellar, a great movie orCaptain America: The Winter Soldier another great piece of cinema.

But there is nothing subtle or sly about Kingsman: The Secret Service; this movie presents in Technicolour the awful nature of alarmists; they are elitist, narcissistic and misanthropic. And riddled in hypocrisy.

The villain is Valentine, played by Samuel Jackson. Valentine is another tech billionaire who despises his fellow man for causing AGW. His solution is to kill off 99.9% of the human population.

His sales pitch to the rich and famous is classic alarmist agigprop. Valentine tells them that humans are a virus raising the temperature of the living Earth. If the virus isn’t destroyed the planet’s fever will worsen and either the planet will fight back and kill the disease of the disease will kill the planet.

The idea that humans are a disease or parasite has underpinned the AGW narrative and is espoused by all the leading AGW scientists and particularly AGW’s many rich supporters like Bill Gates.

In Kingsman Valentine is seen convincing Obama of his vision which is ironic since Obama’s chief scientist, John Holdren, is an avid supporter of forced reduction of humanity. In real life Obama would have taking no convincing.

Valentine, as the archetypal rich supporter of AGW,  has a tenuous hold on real life. He thinks he is living in a movie and can’t stand the sight of blood even though he is prepared to kill billions.

Valentine is the perfect portrayal of the elitist loon who supports AGW. He has made his vast wealth from his society and now as a matter of vanity will destroy that society. The thought that his lifestyle will cease when the society is destroyed doesn’t enter his thinking. This is cognitive dissonance on a grand scale.

Valentine implants chips in the chosen ones so they can resist the doomsday device he has perfected.

In a delicious twist all the elistists, including Obama (and Prince Charles) literally lose their heads when the device backfires.

The movie wittily portrays the religious nature of AGW belief when Valentine tests his device on a bible bashing Southern Baptist church. The message is plain: when religion claims to be fact trouble is inevitable. This is what has happened with AGW: it is religion masquerading as fact. Armed with the pseudoscience of AGW rich crackpots like Valentine can live out their dreams. At the end Valentine can’t tell reality from his ego generated bubble of fantasy.

The movie offers no formal solution to the blight of public corruption by the AGW scam and relies on a steadfast and very aggressive secret organisation to violently eradicate the AGW zealots and hypocrites.

We should be so lucky in the real world.

DEBUNKING THE SCAM….

CO2 is a “trace gas” in air, insignificant by definition. It absorbs 1/7th as much IR, heat energy, from sunlight as water vapor which has 188 times as many molecules capturing 1200 times as much heat making 99.8% of all “global warming.” CO2 does only 0.2% of it. For this we should destroy our economy?

There is no possible “greenhouse effect” in an atmosphere. A greenhouse has a solid, clear cover that traps heat. The atmosphere does not trap heat as gas molecules cannot form surfaces as required for greenhouses. Molecules have to be in contact, as in liquids and solids like water and glass, to form surfaces.

The Medieval Warming from 800 AD to 1300 AD Micheal Mann erased to make his “hockey stick” was several degrees warmer than anything “global warmers” fear. It was the longest time, 500 years, of peace with great abundance for all.

Vostock Ice Core data analysis show CO2 increases follow temperature increases by 800 years 19 times in 450,000 years. That means temperature change is cause and CO2 change effect; not the other way around. This alone refutes the anthropogenic global warming concept.

Methane is called “a greenhouse gas 20 to 500 times more potent than CO2,” depending on who is raving, but it is not per the on-line absorption chart at the American Meteorological Society. It has an absorption profile very similar to nitrogen which is classified “transparent” to IR, heat waves and is only present to 18 ppm. “Green vegans” blame cow flatulence for global warming in their war against eating meat.

Carbon combustion generates 80% of our energy. Control and taxing of carbon would give the elected ruling class more power and money than anything since the Magna Carta of 1215 AD.

Most scientists and science educators work for tax supported institutions. They are eager to help government raise more money for them and they love being seen as “saving the planet.”

Google “Two Minute Conservative,” and you will be applauded when you speak truth at your next dinner party, barbecue or church picnic.

Ontarians paying for Power We Do Not Need & Can’t Afford. Wynne wants MORE!

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New York, Michigan and Quebec Thanks You

[ 0 ] February 21, 2015 |

screwed ontarioSo while we’re in one of the coldest winter cold snaps that Ontario has seen in a long time, we exported a whole bunch of power to neighboring jurisdictions last month.

I won’t go into yet another rant about the incompetence and absolute idiocy of the Green Energy Act,… suffice to say that what the month of January had in store for the Ontario taxpayer, is something more akin to an April Fools Day joke.

Parker Gallant is on top of this subject and has the smarts needed to figure out how much the Ontario citizens are getting hosed.

Yes, now in February, with temperatures falling into the -30s and beyond and when people are turning their heat down in order to afford their hydro bill – it’s nice to know that the citizens of New York, Quebec, Michigan and probably Manitoba got a nice big gratuity of electricity on our backs.

We exported over $164 million worth of electricity in January.  Problem is we only got paid $58.5 million for it.  Yep, we the Ontario tax payers and rate payers will be picking up the tab for the other $106.5 million. Rather nice of us, don’t you think?

Grandma and Grandpa can hardly afford to stay in their homes because they can’t afford their utility bills anymore, but hey, we have windmills.  Lots and lots of completely useless and expensive windmills.

The nice people with the big bloated windfarm contacts are happy too.  They’re getting paid big bucks for their investment.   We’re such nice people in Ontario.  Suckers, but nice.

The Utopia Experiment: The Inconvenient Truth/Reality of Greenism…

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Reblogged from Junk Science http://junkscience.com/type/link/

The inconvenient truth/reality of Greenism and its close relatives self-sustainability, simpler lifestyles and general hippie-ness. It short, it won’t work.

How do we know?  Courtesy of a group of bipedal lab rats headed up by oneDylan Evans, author of “The Utopia Experiment”.  Evans was apparently upset by a lack of challenge in his academic life and decided to play house, the rules being that there were no houses or tech or hygiene because society had collapsed. Rather than move to a more survivable locale (think Thor Heyerdahl with the little woman in Polynesia through his book Fatu Hiva – Back to Nature), Evans chose a little piece of Heaven on the northern shores of the Black Isle, north of Inverness, Scotland to play post-apocalyptic eco-warrior king-guy.  In his own words from an article in the UK Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/31/i-quit-my-job-to-set-up-commune):

In early 2006 I was 39, living in Bristol and working at one of the best robotics labs in the world. I had become increasingly obsessed with what life would be like if civilisation collapsed, and thought that I could find out by setting up a community that acted as if it already had. I created a website called An Experiment In Utopia, and announced that I was creating a novel kind of community based on three main ideas. I wrote:

1. It will be a LEARNING COMMUNITY – each member must have a distinctive skill or area of knowledge that they can teach to the others.

2. It will be a WORKING COMMUNITY – no money is required from the members, but all must contribute by working.

3. It will be strictly TIME-LIMITED. This is not an attempt to found an ongoing community. The experiment will last 18 months. Members may stay for months, but may also come for as little as two weeks.

In a word, think of a cross between Plato’s Academy and The Beach.

After you’ve probably hurt yourself from shaking your head throughout the Guardian article, prepare for sore stomachs brought on by the laughs in the insightful review and comments in the Spectator (http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9435652/they-sought-paradise-in-a-scottish-field-and-found-hunger-boredom-and-mosquitoes/) .

Had Evans and his merry band found a copy of Fatu Hiva (mine was a gift from a former teepee-dwelling personage heading back to the East Coast after suffering disillusionment brought on by Wyoming’s weather after mid-September) and studied it closely, they might have saved themselves some discomfort, halitosis and a nasty rash:

The book begins with Heyerdahl’s optimistic idea that paradise could still be found. By the end of the book, Heyerdahl bitterly concludes:

There is nothing for modern man to return to. Our wonderful time in the wilderness had given us a taste of what man had abandoned and what mankind was still trying to get even further away from. Progress today can be defined as man’s ability to complicate simplicity. Nothing in all the procedure that modern man, helped by all his modern middlemen, goes through before he earns money to buy a fish or a potato will ever be as simple as pulling it out of the water or soil. Without the farmer and the fisherman, modern society would collapse, with all its shops and pipes and wires. The farmers and the fishermen represent the nobility of modern society; they share their crumbs with the rest of us, who run about with papers and screwdrivers attempting to build a better world without a blueprint. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatu_Hiva_(book))

And yet the “no-carbon/low carbon/save the Earth/it’s our fault” drumbeat continues to reel in marchers of a very different type (apologies to H.D. Thoreau, who did it right – right close to town).

“Agenda 21” The Reason for the “War on Carbon Fuels”!

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Strange Allies in the War on Carbon Fuels

/ February 17, 2015

big-oilGuest opinion by Viv Forbes –

What great cause could unite Prince Charles, President Obama, the Pope, the Arab Oil sheiks, the United Nations, the European Union, the Russians, the Chinese, Pacific Island Nations, most undeveloped countries, the glitterati of Hollywood, left-wing politicians, unrepentant reds, government media, the climate research industry, Big Oil, Big Gas and the Green Blob. It must be something posing a clear and urgent danger to all humanity?

No, the crusade that unites them all is the War on Carbon Fuels, focussed mainly on that most vilified target, coal.

The biggest group, and the generals in this war on carbon, have no real interest in the facts or science of global climate change – they see climate alarmism as a great opportunity to achieve their goal of creating an unelected global government. They have even laid out their plans in a document called Agenda 21.

This group naturally includes the United Nations and all of its subsidiaries, the EU, and left wing politicians and media everywhere. At a news conference in Brussels recently, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity, but “to change the economic development model” ie destroy what is left of free enterprise and private property. See:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/021015-738779-climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism.htm
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/10/10/shell-oil-lego-greenpeace-and-the-environmental-movement-s-war-on-capitalism/
The next big group of carbon warriors is the anti-western failed states who see this as their big chance to enrich and entrench their ruling classes with “climate reparations”.
Then there are the enviro-entrepreneurs forever seeking new crusades to energise their supporters and get the donations rolling in – Greenpeace, WWF, Get Up etc…
In the dark corner are the anti-human Malthusians and the Deep Greens who want to get rid of most of us other people – personified by the rich and powerful such as Prince Charles and Maurice Strong. They know that carbon fuels support millions of people by cultivating, harvesting, transporting, processing and storing most of the food that supports the cities of the world. Killing the use of carbon fuels will certainly achieve their goal of reduced world population.

See:
http://explosivereports.com/2013/01/12/prince-charles-openly-endorses-draconian-conclusions-of-new-population-study/

Naturally, government media usually support a bigger role for government, and all media like a scare story. Truth or logic does not matter greatly for most of them – just so long as they can coax a looming disaster story from someone. The daily diet of natural calamities soon heightens climate anxiety, which then motivates politicians to be seen to be “doing something”.
And then there are those who see that fighting carbon fuels also suits their pockets. As someone said “When placing a bet, the best horse to back is the one called ‘Self-interest’ – at least you know he is trying”.

For example, Shell, with its massive gas interests, was caught campaigning against coal fired power, the main competitor of gas in electricity generation. See:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/innovationchallenge/shell-admits-campaigning-against-coal-fired-power-plants/story-fn9dkrp5-1226770855004

Arab Oil interests were caught funding a film attacking their competitors – shale oil fracking in America. See:
http://dailysignal.com/2012/09/28/matt-damons-anti-fracking-movie-financed-by-oil-rich-arab-nation/

And a Russian oil company was exposed funding US anti-carbon green groups. See:
http://freebeacon.com/issues/foreign-firm-funding-u-s-green-groups-tied-to-state-owned-russian-oil-company/

The Chinese of course are great supporters of green energy as long as it is installed elsewhere – eg they supply the machines and solar panels and then welcome the factories forced from the host country by soaring electricity prices.
Gas, nuclear and hydro power will be the greatest long term beneficiaries of the war on coal. Initially they will be needed to provide base load and back up for intermittent green power like wind and solar. Then as green subsidies are withdrawn to appease angry taxpayers, the green play-toys will fail and grown-up generators will step easily into full time electricity production.

Finally, the government bureaucracy and the research grants industry justify their existence by “solving community crises”. They love “The Climate Crisis” because it can be blamed for any weather event anytime, anywhere. It is unlikely to be solved, no matter how many dollars are thrown at it – a problem that does not exist can never be “solved”. And the sinister “Greenhouse Effect”, like any good ghost, is invisible, mysterious in operation, debatable, and allows anyone to produce their own scare story.

Opposing this coalition of climate alarmists and opportunists is a rag-tag army of stressed tax payers and electricity consumers and a scattering of sceptical scientists and media researchers.
But the imposing alarmist empire has a hollow heart – the globe has refused to warm, the alarmist “science” is crumbling, their climate models are discredited, some researchers have been caught manipulating records and results, and the costs of green electricity are becoming obvious and onerous. The public is growing restive, governments can no longer afford the climate industry cuckoo in the public nest and the ranks of sceptics grow. Groups like UKIP in UK and the Tea Party in US have abandoned the war on carbon.

The climate revolt is spreading.

Disclosure: Viv Forbes is a shareholder and non-executive director of a small Australian coal exploration company. His views are not shared or supported by most Big Coal CEO’s.

Agenda 21 in Action….Landowners Forced to Defend Their Properties From Gov’t Interference!

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From David Honey
2131 King Street
St. Catharines, ON
L2R 6P7
Tel: (905) 380-3803

Letter to the editor:

On October 2, 2014, a group of landowners from the Niagara area approached the Regional Council expressing their concerns about how the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority (NPCA) has been overstepping their mandate and abusing their powers.
When the NPCA was first formed, their mandate was to control flooding and erosion on publicly-owned property. They were well-respected by the communities and they were doing a good job. In 1990, the Conservation Act was revised, and since then, the NPCA has been placing more and more focus on controlling what people do on private property. We have now reached a point where the NPCA’s abuse of power has resulted in many good, law-abiding citizens being dragged through court, losing their life savings and sometimes even their property, defending themselves against Conservation Authority fines and lawsuits.
In January of this year, more Niagara residents stood in front of the Regional Council’s Conservation Authority budget hearing, asking them to investigate and report on how many taxpayers’ dollars are being spent on litigation and appeals, and to have the NPCA’s $12 million budget slashed.
Last week, two dozen citizens who have been charged under the new Conservation Authority Act-often for simple offenses such as adding clean topsoil to their property-went to Regional Council hoping for assistance. When Council was asked what had been accomplished since the last meeting, with regards to helping these people, everything went quiet. Does this mean council has no intention of doing anything?
Regional Council has the right, and the authority, to control (and even dissolve) the NPCA. Surely, they can find the intestinal fortitude to reign them in and insist that this organization respect the rights of private property owners.
We need your help. Please contact your regional councillor and ask them to bring about change-to make the NPCA more transparent and more accountable for their actions. They need to stop abusing their power, stop bullying landowners, and stop spending millions of taxpayers’ dollars to drag citizens through court. Thank you.

David Honey, president
Niagara Landowners Association