• Environmental dreams turn to nightmare
By Victor Thorn
In Maryland, nine counties are facing what’s called a rain tax based on the square footage of pavement on their property. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to ban Styrofoam cups, whereas San Francisco no longer allows supermarkets to use plastic grocery bags. A couple in Idaho, Mike and Chantell Sackett, were forced to endure a Supreme Court battle against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after filling a hole with dirt and rocks on a lot they had purchased. Due to allegedly violating the Clean Water Act, the Sacketts faced fines of $75,000 per day.
In light of these onerous impositions, libertarian television show host John Stossel recently coined a term for these nanny state dictums and agency abuses at every level: “Green Tyranny.” During one telecast, Stossel aired the plight of a Utah resident that couldn’t develop his land due to tens of thousands of prairie dogs which were classified as endangered species. To this man’s dismay, he discovered that every prairie dog killed carried a $10,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence.
The lunacy doesn’t end in America. England’s Drax power plant, accustomed to burning coal, has been crippled by environmental regulations. Today, the plant managers have been forced to switch to a “renewable” resource, namely wood chips. An obvious problem has arisen, however. While the UK’s supply of coal is abundant, the country’s trees are limited. More importantly, studies have shown that trees as a fuel source release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than coal does.
The EPA, Housing and Urban Development and Department of Energy (DoE) have pushed their heavy-handed edicts to such an extreme that bureaucrats now want to conduct green-inspections on every home sold. Instead of realtors and private inspection firms dealing with potential buyers and sellers, the feds may determine if your roof, heating ducts, plumbing, electrical sockets and furnace meet their requirements. If they fail to pass stringent standards, be prepared to pay for upgrades that could reach five-figure sums.
To get an idea of how the green police think, last year senior EPA administrator Alfredo Armendariz was forced to resign after a videotape surfaced of him saying that polluters should be penalized the same way that Romans treated rebels thousands of years ago: via crucifixion. “You make examples out of people who are not complying with the law,” Armendariz threatened.
Green-Style Crony Corruption
By Victor Thorn
On May 9, AMERICAN FREE PRESS spoke with Marita Noon, executive director for Energy Makes America Great Inc. Noon has written 18 columns devoted to the subject of renewable energy boondoggles. AFP inquired about the environmental movement’s hidden agenda.
“The green energy corruption scandal is based on two lies,” she said. “First, an energy shortage doesn’t exist, because the United States has enough coal, natural gas and uranium to satisfy our electrical needs for centuries into the future. Even if an energy shortage did exist, no one can answer this question: How would wind and solar power help us get off Middle East oil, especially when they’re inefficient at producing electricity?”
Ms. Noon continued: “Lie No. 2 bolsters the assumption that climate change is a man-made crisis, caused by Americans driving SUVs. For some reason, environmentalists think that even if we were the only country doing anything about this so-called climate change, it would still be OK to destroy our economy. But if we eliminate lies No. 1 and 2, the whole premise for green energy crumbles.”
This topic prompted Ms. Noon to make another observation: “Last month, the European Parliament voted against salvaging their failing emissions trading scheme. That would be their version of Obama’s ‘Cap and Trade’ legislation. European lawmakers realized this blueprint was ruining their economy.”
Talking dollars and sense, Ms. Noon compared America to its top rival. “The Chinese are building, on average, one new coal-fired power plant per week, and they’re cleaner than anything we have in the U.S., because of improving technology,” she said. “By contrast, our country hasn’t constructed a coal-fired power plant in the last 30 years.”
When questioned about the quality of their environment, Ms. Noon answered, “The Chinese know they’ve ruined their rivers and air. They’re at where we were in the 1970s. Still, it’s slowly improving, and the Chinese aren’t willing to hamstring their economy by signing something like the Kyoto Protocol [an international treaty designed to reduce greenhouse gases].”
Ms. Noon next touched upon a sore subject at the Obama White House. “The Chinese are making a killing manufacturing solar panels that they sell to the U.S.” Indeed, after Obama’s green czars dumped $535 million in stimulus into Solyndra—a California-based producer of solar cells—it went bankrupt, a glaring example of failed crony capitalism.
On this note, Noon surmised, “Barack Obama is ideologically aligned with the green agenda, so they have to keep the public thinking that climate change is a crisis.”
With this in mind, Ms. Noon described what she refers to as the “crony corruption” process. “The government wants a certain percentage of our economy to be green,” she said. “But since all these specialized products do not currently exist, Obama gave tons of money to companies to make them. It should come as no surprise that the owners of these corporations were huge Obama campaign donors.”
The end results, regrettably, were entire industries based on illusion. “The only reason wind power has survived is because of government funding,” said Ms. Noon. “The minute government money goes away, so does the wind industry. Plus, windmills kill an enormous amount of birds and bats. Since there are less bats to eat bugs that kill crops, farmers must spray more pesticides. How does any of this make ecological sense?”
Green Means Color of Money for Obama Backers
By Victor Thorn
To get a better understanding of how the global warming movement actually fronts as part of an elaborate scam, on May 9 AFP interviewed Christine Lakatos, a researcher and founder of The Green Corruption Files blog.
“In 2009, the current administration devoted $100 billion of the stimulus package to their green agenda,” said Ms. Lakatos. “90% of all guaranteed loan programs went to Obama cronies who helped with his campaign. Oftentimes, the White House went directly over the heads of various agencies to OK these loans.”
To prevent any confusion, Ms. Lakatos highlighted the following point. “Under Obama’s stimulus program, green jobs—or any jobs, for that matter—weren’t a priority. Political payback for campaign promises was the priority.” As verification of this claim, on December 14, 2008, Larry Summers, Obama’s National Economic Council director, wrote in a secretive 57-page memo, “The stimulus package is a key tool for advancing clean energy goals and fulfilling a number of campaign commitments.”
Curious about where this money wound up, AFP looked to Ms. Lakatos for answers. “Under Obama’s green agenda,” she said, “much of the funding went to Wall Street bankers such as Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Citibank secured $12 billion and put some of their people in the White House, while three Goldman Sachs executives served as campaign bundlers. Other recipients included millionaire environmentalists like Chicago’s Penny Pritzker, venture capitalists like Al Gore, and corporations such as General Electric, whose CEO Jeffrey Immelt sits on Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.”
Ms. Lakatos identified one final piece of the puzzle. “George Soros’s people helped write the stimulus package, then Soros went on a stock buying spree of companies—many of them green-related—that received stimulus money. Soros was Obama’s green agent. Worse, dozens of people appointed to the DoE all worked for or had connections to Soros.”
The deception couldn’t be clearer. “This is extreme crony capitalism promoted under an umbrella of saving the planet. If billionaires really believed in green energy so much, why don’t they use their own money to fund it instead of our tax dollars?” she said.
Globalists Green with Envy
By Victor Thorn
At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, global warming theory advocate Al Gore declared: “Americans are going to have to face a wrenching transformation of society.” But what precisely does Gore’s creeping prophecy entail? If we use the internationalist-oriented Agenda 21 as a gauge, Americans can expect a continuing push toward depopulated rural areas and tax policies that favor urban dwellers over suburbanites. This move would reduce commuting distances, even to the point of eliminating most usage of automobiles.
In a spring 2012 article, Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a mocking depiction of life under the constraints of Agenda 21. “Increasing numbers [of people] are crammed into urbanized ‘pack ’em and stack ‘em’ apartment complexes and forced to use mass transportation and live according to a collectivist ethos. Once the UN’s radical utopia is achieved, gun ownership will be forbidden.” From Lenz’s perspective, such fears merely exist as paranoid delusions of conspiracy theorists.
Environmental radicals envision a populace that eats less meat, doesn’t use petroleum and drastically reduces consumption in the name of so-called sustainable development.
“Sustainability” is an important concept to understand, especially in light of the woman who popularized the concept in 1987, Gro Harlem Brundtland, vice president of the World Socialist Party. With the dual goals of population reduction and social equity, Ms. Brundtland and her UN colleagues yearn for an age where private land ownership among everyday “commoners” has been disallowed. Instead, Harvey Ruvin, vice chairman of the Wildlands Project, proposed, “Individual rights will have to take a backseat to the collective.”
Even more extreme, Earth First’s Dave Foreman demands, “We must reclaim the roads and plowed lands, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres or presently settled land.”
Victor Thorn is a hard-hitting researcher, journalist and author of over 50 books.
