The Chicago Climate Exchange is shutting down at the end of the year.
Nobody’s buying carbon credits.
Right now, days go by when not a single trade is done. When trades are done, carbon dioxide sells for just five cents a ton.
It’s over.
In related news, the Pixie Dust Exchange has plenty of eager sellers but still no buyers. And the opening of the unicorn exhibit at the zoo has been postponed indefinitely.
None of these things exist in real life. Except the Chicago Climate Exchange. It was given millions of dollars in start-up subsidies, including from Chicago’s Joyce Foundation when Barack Obama was a board member. Buying and selling imaginary carbon credits was going to lead us to a bold, green future, when people would pay billions — Al Gore said trillions! — to buy hot air.
If only Enron and Bernie Madoff had been smart enough to call their pyramid schemes “green funds.”
The Climate Exchange was created by a professor named Richard Sandor. In 2002, Time magazine called him a “Hero of the Planet” for that act.
But as the exchange’s own website suggests, companies bought and sold carbon as a public-relations exercise — to greenwash their operations in the eyes of the gullible media.
Big guns like Goldman Sachs bought a stake in the exchange hoping for far more. They were betting that with Obama in the White House, carbon trading would become mandatory under the Democrats’ “cap and trade” scheme. That was the plan Obama said would cause “the rise of the oceans to slow and the planet to heal.”
But that law died in the U.S. mid-term elections, the worst showing for Democrats since 1948. Carbon trading was one of the reasons: In a TV ad, Senate candidate Joe Manchin actually took a rifle and used the cap and trade bill as target practice.
And he won.
And he’s a Democrat.
Don’t worry about poor Prof. Sandor, though. The Investors Business Daily reports he managed to sell his stake in the exchange for $98.5 million.
Too bad the Exchange is being shut down. Because at five cents a ton, the entire oilsands(northwest canada), all 100 companies up there, could buy Al Gore’s good housekeeping seal of approval for just $1.5 million a year.
The exchange made it all seem so real. You could even buy or sell carbon dioxide with different “vintages” — that’s what they called hot air from various years — as if they were fine wines.
But $1.5 million is still a lot of money to spend buying an imaginary product — moral permission from foreigners to run our Canadian economy. That’s a lot less than the
$2 billion carbon sequestration scheme proposed by the government of Alberta — a plan to bury pixie dust, or hot air, or maybe both, in the ground.
All of Canada’s carbon dioxide emissions combined were 734 megatons in 2008. At five cents a ton, that’s just $36.7 million to buy an indulgence for the whole country — for every car, factory, airplane and farting cow.
Just $36.7 million? That’s not much more than the travel budget for the Canadian delegation to the Copenhagen Conference and other global-warming parties last year.
Sure, it’s a shakedown. But it’s a pretty modest one. Just $1.10 per Canadian to push the mute button for a whole year on hysterical global-warming activists? That’s a bargain.
As the unloved Chicago Climate Exchange dies, a dangerous myth dies too: That carbon credits are worth anything, and that somehow trading these worthless, imaginary credits, could replace the jobs we’d kill in real industries.
No; carbon credits are a tax, a tax on environmental hysteria and appeasement-oriented companies. If Goldman Sachs can’t make money off them, no-one can.
Next time someone tells you that we’re all going to get rich off some government green scheme, tell them you’ve got a little climate exchange to sell them, and you’ll throw in a unicorn too.
— Read Levant’s blog at ezralevant.com
ezra.levant@sunmedia.ca
From the Canada Free Press
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange—the rest of the story
By Judi McLeod Wednesday, March 25, 2009Good news to know that the truth will always out—even when you’re Barack Obama.
“Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now
Pushing Through Congress” is aFOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”
The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.
________________
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 lecturer 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.
What a flap when it was discovered that the senator from Chicago had nursed on Saul Alinsky’s milk, had his political career launched at a coffee party held by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, and sat for 20 years, uncomplaining in front of the “God-dam-America pulpit of resentment-challenged Jeremiah Wright.
Folk were naturally outraged that the empty suit who would go on to become TOTUS was spawned from such anti-American activism.
But the media should have been hollering, “Stop Thief!” instead.
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!
____________________________ And on an interesting note , this from Our Friends in Canada
Official Climate Science Ignores Essential and Critical Details Right At The Surface
By Dr. Tim Ball Thursday, November 11, 2010
Few people know that skin is an organ; even fewer know it’s the largest organ of the body. It is the contact, called an interface, between two completely different environments; the body and the world. It controls movement of gases, liquids and solids in both directions all the time. The surface of the Earth is similar as the interface between the atmosphere and the underlying surfaces. Accurate measurement and understanding of processes are critical to what is happening in the atmosphere, under ground and in the oceans. Unless we understand the dynamics across the interface we will not know what is going on above and below the surface.
Science divides the world and its atmosphere into layers depending on what they are studying. For example, geophysicists start in the centre of the Earth with the Solid Inner Core extending through the Liquid Outer Core, the Mantle and the crust. Climate science identifies layers (Figure 1) but even at this point we begin seeing the limitations. The layers are based on energy from the Sun. They ignore volumes of geothermal energy that move through the crust, especially under the oceans where the crust is thinner and more perforated.
Simple, but major, differences between land and water illustrate the problems. Movement of heat from within the earth is different primarily because of circulation. Solar energy penetrates up to 50 meters into the ocean while it hardly penetrates the soil at all. It takes much more energy to raise the temperature of water than land, but it also cools much slower. Rates of evaporation that is molecules of water that are given enough velocity by heat energy to escape the surface, are also very different. There is an unlimited supply of molecules in the oceans. Since this is the major source of energy transfer to the atmosphere, it is critical to weather and climate.
Figure 1 shows atmospheric layers. It shows the boundaries (interfaces) above the surface, such as the Tropopause and the Stratopause but leaves out the major critical interface between the atmosphere and the earth. These boundaries separate by temperature, but you can use other measures. The term atmosphere is an example because it encompasses the entire region to the edge of space and is different from the lithosphere and hydrosphere. It also includes the thinnest but most important zone, the biosphere. It is a very narrow zone that contains virtually all life on the planet yet is mostly within a few meters of the surface. What happens here is critical to weather and climate as Rudolf Geiger (1894-1981) recognized in his remarkable work Climate Near The Ground, published in 1950. In weather and climate research it is akin to the Boundary Layer and an early book by R. E. Munn identified its dynamics and importance.
Figure 1: Atmosphere layers determined by temperature and pressure
A measure of the failure of modern climate science is that there is a Wikipedia entry forGeiger but it is a single line and asks for expansion.
His book has been updated and a sixth edition with two other authors is now available. Others like Sellers and Oke produced useful research, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ignore the entire issue. They make an incorrect understatement. Temperature changes are one of the more obvious and easily measured changes in climate, but atmospheric moisture, precipitation and atmospheric circulation also change, as the whole system is affected.
No, temperatures may be obvious but they are not an easily measured change in climate. The comment also fails to acknowledge that changes in temperature are a direct input to changes in the other variables.
Officially, but incorrectly, it’s called the surface temperature. Actually, it is atmospheric temperature in a ventilated box called a Stevenson Screen that can be between 1.25 and 2 meters above the surface. The significance of this is shown in a graph (Figure 2) of temperatures. Those at 2.5 centimeters are quite different in degree and daily range than even 1.2 meters. This converts to dramatically different monthly and annual averages that are climate. For example, one station in Ohio had a full 90 days difference in the length of the frost-free season at the ground or at 1.5 meters. A crop such as barley can grow in that length of time.
Apart from heat exchange at the surface there is the issue of evaporation. The atmosphere is heated in three different ways. First is conduction as molecules of air touching the surface are heated by direct contact. Second is convection as these heated molecules rise by convection or are moved away by the wind (advection). Third, and the most important but underestimated way, especially in the tropics, is evaporation. The latter is directly determined by temperature right at the surface not 1.5 meter above.
Figure 2: Daily range of temperatures at different heights in summer
Source: Oliver and Hidore, After Geiger 1950.
All the discussion and measures are about bare surfaces, but it is never that simple. Changes in the color and the texture make a difference. Most life forms are within that 1.5 meters; add vegetation and it changes the entire dynamics. In a bizarre instruction, an early technical report for the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said: in order to set up a weather station for a forest you begin by clearing a 200 meter site. Of course, you’re no longer measuring the weather or determining the climate of a forest.
Change wind speed, and the dynamics change becoming even more complicated. Vegetation makes it especially difficult over land. This is matched by the complications of changes in the ocean surface with everything from ripples to large waves altering the surface area and angle at which sunlight strikes. The list of complications goes on and on. For example, what happens to global energy when snow covers large areas of the northern hemisphere and varies in extent from year to year? Or how snow is deeper in vegetated areas? Do they consider the heat energy that passes through polar sea ice to warm the atmosphere?
Gases moving across the interface are critical to climate research. We have few and only recent measures. As a 2006 report noted, “In the last few years, more and more research has focused on the biosphere; particularly, on how gases which influence the climate are exchanged between the biosphere and atmosphere.” They were amazed to find how much methane was released from the rainforest.
There are virtually no studies for deserts, grasslands or tundra. For example, we know oceans are critical to amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Surface station numbers are inadequate and they’re not measuring what is necessary for understanding changes in weather and climate. But none of this is important to the IPCC who only wants the results to support the political conclusion. Go here for even more
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