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| Earth Day is Pay Day |
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This is Freedom Action’s ad running in Human Events and the Washington Examiner: For Some People Earth Day is Pay Day. To inspect the IRS Form 990s of these eight environmental groups (and other non-profit groups), please click here.  Click on image for larger view The image of environmental groups as grassroots efforts to stop toxic waste dumps and save habitat for endangered wildlife is a comforting one. But those days are long gone. Today, large environmental pressure groups are working closely with large corporations to get special deals for the companies in the name of global warming. Yet, the amount of warming such legislation would reduce is nil (0.09 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050.1) Instead, a $3 trillion derivatives market would be created. These companies along with big Wall Street firms would dominate this new government-created artificial market.2 Guess who stands to make hundreds of billions of dollars from it? That’s right—the same big companies3 that, together with their environmental allies, wrote the legislation4! And consumers will be stuck with the bill.5 In Green Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad, global warming believer Christine MacDonald exposes the ugly underbelly of these green groups. She details how ExxonMobil, DuPont, General Electric, Nissan, and Dow Chemical donate millions of dollars to top environmental groups and states: We need our environmental organizations more than ever today. But the biggest and best funded among them are failing us. By taking corporate dollars and giving corporate executives the keys to the boardrooms, these non-profit groups have abandoned their missions at a critical moment in history. 6 Click here to use Freedom Action's easy page to tell your Congressmen to stop the EPA's "environmentalism" from controlling our economy. Notes: 1 Using mainstream models and assumptions, Chip Knappenberger finds that in the year 2050 with a 83% emissions reduction (the aspirational goal of Waxman-Markey, the beginning steps of which are under vigorous debate), the temperature reduction is nine hundredths of one degree Fahrenheit, or two years of avoided warming. A more realistic climate bill would be a fraction of this amount. http://masterresource.org/?p=2355 2 Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic Senator from New York, stated, “According to financial experts, carbon permits could quickly become the world's largest commodities market, growing to as much as $3 trillion by 2020 from just over $100 billion today. With thousands of firms and energy producers buying and selling permits to emit carbon, transaction fees for exchanges and clearing alone could top nearly half a billion dollars…An infrastructure is already beginning to form, as entities like the New York Stock Exchange, J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and the new Green Exchange are developing carbon trading platforms or expanding their environmental trading desks.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704500604574481812686144826.html 3 See US Climate Action Partnership website. http://www.us-cap.org/ In December of 2009, Open Europe reported that under the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), oil and gas companies’ operations in the UK were granted a surplus of carbon permits worth €28.6m in 2008. For example, ExxonMobil received €4.3m and Total received €5.4m. http://www.openeurope.org.uk/media-centre/pressrelease.aspx?pressreleaseid=129 The Financial Times reported January 30 2008, ”European power is a great business... Under the European Emissions Trading Scheme, customers have paid for the permits the utilities require to produce carbon, despite the fact that, so far, the companies have received them for free. Between now and 2013 the number of permits granted will fall, and the proportion of free permits will be reduced to two-thirds. But Centrica, the UK's biggest residential energy supplier, estimates the windfall from free permits will still be worth €110bn for the European utilities.” http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1/325a804c-ced6-11dc-877a-000077b07658.html
4 A quote directly from the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 Draft Summary: “The global warming provisions in the discussion draft are modeled closely on the recommendations of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of electric utilities, oil companies, chemical companies, automobile manufacturers, other manufacturers and energy companies, and environmental organizations.” http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090331/acesa_summary.pdf 5 Peter Orszag, President Obama’s Director of Office of Management and Budget, said while at the Congressional Budget Office, “Under a cap-and-trade program, firms would not ultimately bear most of the costs of the allowances but instead would pass them along to their customers in the form of higher prices. Such price increases would stem from the restriction on emissions and would occur regardless of whether the government sold emission allowances or gave them away.” http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=89 6 Green Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad, page 236. http://www.amazon.com/Green-Inc-Environmental-Insider-Reveals/dp/1599214369 |