Guest essay by Dr. Tim Ball

If Obama’s policies on energy and environment were truly original they would be worth consideration, but they are not. He dismisses claims that

“The economy will lose millions of jobs and billions in growth.” He said, “Let’s face it, that’s what [critics] always say,” and “every time … the warnings of the cynics have been wrong.”

Wrong! They failed disastrously everywhere and every time they were applied. Figure 1 above shows a poster from Britain, one of several European nations on the path
Obama pursues.

Ironically, Maurice Strong, architect of the false claims of human produced CO2 causing catastrophic global warming/ climate change, provided a classic example.

Obama and other world leaders are basing their policies on the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was the climate science agency created by Maurice Strong through the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and presented to the world in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Figure 2 shows a simple flow chart of the structures created to control the political and scientific sectors to achieve a political agenda.

Figure 2

Strong chaired the Rio 92 conference and in the same year was appointed to Ontario Hydro. He became Chair and was given free rein by Bob Rae, socialist Premier of the Province. He set about applying the philosophy and policies enshrined in the UNEP program. These were designed to demonize CO2 as the byproduct of fossil fuel driven industries and nations. It was speculated by Strong in his comments to Elaine Dewar cited in The Cloak of Green (1995). He suggested,

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

Dewar asked why he didn’t enter politics to implement his plan. He essentially said you can’t do anything as a politician, but knew a political vehicle was required. He knew that convincing individual governments was almost impossible, as Kyoto negotiations proved. His experience told him the United Nations (UN) was his vehicle.

Dewar wrote that he liked the UN because:

He could raise his own money from whomever he liked, appoint anyone he wanted, control the agenda.

Dewar concluded:

Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the Global Governance Agenda.

Strong had similar powers and objectives as Chairman of Ontario Hydro and became the architect of that Provinces problems. A 1997 article titled “Maurice Strong: The new guy in your future” says,

“Maurice Strong has demonstrated an uncanny ability to manipulate people, institutions, governments, and events to achieve the outcome he desires.” It concludes, “The fox has been given the assignment, and all the tools necessary, to repair the henhouse to his liking.”

This applied to his UN role, but also to his Ontario Hydro role.

Under the guise of claiming Ontario’s debt was a result of expensive nuclear power plants he set about implementing an anti-fossil fuel agenda. One commentator referencing a later scandal involving Strong called “Hydrogate” says,

“Within no time of his arrival, he firmly redirected and re-structured Ontario Hydro. At the time, Ontario Hydro was hell-bent on building many more nuclear reactors, despite dropping demand and rising prices. Maurice Strong grabbed the Corporation by the scruff of the neck, reduced the workforce by one third, stopped the nuclear expansion plans, cut capital expenditures, froze the price of electricity, pushed for sustainable development, made business units more accountable.”

Sounds good, but it was a path to inadequate supply. Key is the phrase he, “pushed for sustainable development”. In Strong’s, keynote speech at the Rio Earth Summit he said:

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.”

He’d already created mechanisms to eliminate fossil fuels and bring about reduction and destruction of western economies. Ontario was his personal application and they were a disaster.

Despite evidence of the failures, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki became involved and urged Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty to continue Strong’s disastrous policies. Suzuki was forced to resign from his own Foundation because his political activities violated his tax situation. As one commentator noted,

“The McGuinty government has a major electrical power problem, one created by its decision to use the power system as a political policy tool. This policy has resulted in the doubling of rates in Ontario to a level higher than in most U.S. states. Ontario’s former industrial advantage has disappeared, while the government has been pretending that nothing is wrong.”

Because of these energy policies Ontario’s economy continued to decline. The real impact of the decline is offset by the great Canadian socialist policy of equalization. So-called “have” provinces with thriving economies pay money through the Federal government to “have not” provinces. It was Ontario’s destiny as equalization covered political failures

If this continues – this is not hyperbole, this is a fact – Ontario will become a ‘have not’province in confederation. And it will be Premier (Dalton) McGuinty’s legacy that he in two terms took Ontario from being the strongest economic province in the federation to a ‘have not’ province.

Replacing nuclear and fossil fuel energies with alternate energies drives up the costs and creates a multitude of other problems. A US Senate report notes,

“Comparisons of wind, solar, nuclear, natural gas and coal sources of power coming on line by 2015 show that solar power will be 173% more expensive per unit of energy delivered than traditional coal power, 140% more than nuclear power and natural gas and 92% more expensive than wind power. Wind power is 42% more expensive than nuclear and natural gas power.” “Wind and solar’s “capacity factor” or availability to supply power is around 33%, which means 67% of the time wind and solar cannot supply power and must be supplemented by a traditional energy source such as nuclear, natural gas or coal.”

Changes in Ontario illustrate the problems. Wind turbulence restricts the number of turbines to 5 to 8 turbines per 2.6 square kilometers. With average wind speeds of 24 kph it needs 8,500 turbines covering 2590 square kilometers to produce the power of a 1000 MW conventional station. Ontario closed two 1000MW plants in 2011 – the Lambton and the Nanticoke coal fired plants. Besides the land, (5,180 km2) you still need coal-fired plants running at almost 100 percent for back up. Strong’s policies eliminate the back up, so you either have dramatically increased costs, inadequate power or both.

Source: Steve Hunter

In 2008 Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that the

“notion of no coal . . . is an illusion,” and he favored a cap-and-trade system. “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can,” “It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

It’s only valid if science supports the claim that CO2, because of human production, is causing warming or climate change. It doesn’t, so there is no scientific need to replace fossil fuels.

Focus on CO2 and the assumption an increase causes temperature increase are built into the computer models. William Kinninmonth, former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre explains,

“… current climate modeling is essentially to answer one question: how will increased atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (generated from human activity) change earth’s temperature and other climatological statistics?”…. “It is heroic to assume that such a view is sufficient basis on which to predict future ‘climate’.”

Indian Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said

“science is politics in climate change; climate science is politics” and we are being “led by our noses by Western (climate) scientists who have less of a scientific agenda and more of a political agenda.”

He should add that western politicians like Obama are promoting energy policies based on falsified political science and alternative energies that don’t work. Ontario, under the control of the grandmaster Maurice Strong, tried and they’ve already failed. It is unadulterated evidence that pursuing them still is purely political. As always the people will pay the price as they have in many jurisdiction beyond Ontario. An appropriate quote to explain such blind behavior comes from former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev; “Politicians are the same every all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.” Figure 1 cartoons the alternative energy bridge to nowhere in the UK.

I once said the Kyoto Protocol was a political solution to a non-existent climate problem. Obama’s energy policy is more of the same. It is more inexcusable because it failed everywhere it was tried, including by Maurice Strong, the father of the deception that global warming and climate change are a man made problem.