“I expect all the bad consequences from the chambers of Commerce and manufacturers establishing in different parts of this country, which your Grace seems to foresee…. The regulations of Commerce are commonly dictated by those who are most interested to deceive and impose upon the Public.” – Adam Smith, 1785 letter. In The Correspondence of Adam Smith.

By Robert Peltier

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454, aka Waxman–Markey) was narrowly adopted by the House of Representatives on June 26. As has become standard practice, few legislators were familiar with the final 1,428-page bill, given all the horse-trading hours before the final vote.

Waxman–Markey was a low point in the political process, but what made passage possible was worse: highly organized support from some quarters of the electric utility industry and a lack of protestation from much of the rest.

Some industry parties believe that their lobbyists successfully watered down an extremely disruptive legislative draft to the point that the final was merely distasteful. But compared to killing the bill, which could have been done had the industry been so minded, getting “a seat at the table” resulted in passage.

I remember when ”getting a seat” in legislative negotiations included infiltrating and defeating bad proposals. Today, it means ensuring your company gets a piece of the political pork. Such “rent-seeking” substitutes political capitalism for principled free-market capitalism and leaves virtually all of us poorer.

Read the rest of this piece at MasterResource.

By Marc Morano

A public appeal has been issued by an influential U.S. website asking: “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers.” The appeal appeared on Talking Points Memo, an often cited website that helps set the agenda for the political Left in the U.S. The anonymous posting, dated June 2, 2009, referred to dissenters of man-made global warming fears as “greedy bastards” who use “bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool” to “distort data.”

The Talking Points Memo article continues: “So when the right wing f***tards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events – how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?”

Read the rest at Climate Depot.

By Marlo Lewis

Most media coverage of H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act  of 2009 (ACES), focuses on the bill’s cap-and-trade program and the free rationing coupons (emission allowances) that the bill’s co-sponsors, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), had to hand out to utilities and other interests to secure their support for the legislation.

But the cap-and-trade program occupies only one of four of the bill’s main sections (”titles”).  Other titles contain a host of mandates and “incentives” (carrots and sticks) to reshape energy and transportation markets.

Read the rest of this article at Open Market.

by Wes Vernon

The late Natalie Grant Wraga once wrote, “Protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West and all it stands for. Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values.”

And who was this person?

Natalie Grant Wraga (who died in 2002 at age 101) was an internationally-recognized expert on the art of disinformation. In her Washington Post obituary, Herbert Romerstein — veteran intelligence expert in the legislative and executive branches of government — described Grant/Wraga as “one of our leading authorities” on Soviet deceit.

In a 1998 article appearing in Investors Business Daily (IBD), reporter John Berlau wrote that some of the most respected scholars on Soviet Intelligence have credited this woman with teaching them how to penetrate desinformatzia, Moscow’s term for its ongoing operation to deceive foreign governments.

John Dziak — onetime senior intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) — is quoted by IBD as saying were it not “for someone like Natalie, we would have had more failures, and the Soviets would have had more successes.”

Which leads us where?

In many of her writings, she dropped her last name and wrote under the byline Natalie Grant. That takes us to the spring 1998 issue of The Register. Therein, Grant identified Green Cross International (GCI) as a Non-Government Organization (NGO) founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, the last communist dictator of the Soviet Union. The aim of GCI was worldwide enforcement of a rigid environmental agenda.

Concurrent with the advancement of GCI, there was the birth of yet another NGO called the Earth Council, chaired by Maurice Strong, a key environmentalist mover and shaker at the United Nations. According to Wikipedia, Strong — a Canadian — describes himself as “a socialist in ideology and a capitalist in methodology.” The bio also notes that “some consider Strong a frightening power seeker.” And then this: “He shares the views of the most radical environmentalist street protester, but instead of shouting himself hoarse at a police barricade at a global conference, he’s the secretary general inside, wielding the gavel.”

Meanwhile, about a dozen people participated in the organizing meeting of Gorbachev’s GCI, including then-U.S. Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.). The congressman had publicly stated that regardless of whether the allegation of man-made “global warming” was valid or exaggerated, the U.S. should proceed to take the steps required to fight it because those steps supposedly would benefit the planet. (As explained in last week’s column, the Cap and Trade — “Tax and Rob” — legislation aimed at carrying out the radical enviro agenda at a steep cost to American consumers and taxpayers was dropped like a hot potato in the U.S. Senate June 6, lest the great unwashed arise in anger and deliver an unwelcome verdict at the polls. It will be back in 2009. Connecting these dots is relevant. But I digress.)

The main organizing events

Other GCI meetings were to follow, including what Grant called “The Big Event — the Moscow Conference,” in January 1990. Then-Senator Al Gore was among the speakers. Only two years before, he had conducted hearings on Capitol Hill where the “global warming” theory was showcased.

 As the Moscow conference got underway, the Soviet Union was then on its last legs — down, but not yet out, you might say. Gorbachev, still the Soviet leader, voiced his government’s demand that the nations push for a nuclear test ban, an international environmental monitoring system, a covenant to protect “unique environmental zones” (a mindset that has since led to an international fight over UN efforts to disallow snowmobiles in Yellowstone Park on American soil), support for United Nations environmental programs, and a follow-up conference in June 1992 in Brazil.

Grant writes that while Gorbachev was expressing the “views” and “suggestions” of the Soviet Communist Party, those suggestions did not fall on deaf ears. “Before long, the activities of the movement began to reflect the communist ‘recommendations.’”

Now, why all this background?

On May 28, here in Washington, the featured speaker at the annual dinner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) was The Honorable Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic.

Klaus’s book Blue Planet in Green Shackles had just been released. As the Czech head of state put it at the dinner, the purpose of the book was to outline his firm belief that much of organized environmentalism is “an ideology I consider the most dangerous threat to freedom and prosperity in the current era.”

Read the rest of this article at Renew America.

Prominent scientist and global warming advocate David Suzuki has called for political leaders to be thrown in jail for ignoring the science behind climate change.   At a Montreal conference last Thursday, the prominent scientist, broadcaster and Order of Canada recipient exhorted a packed house of 600 to hold politicians legally accountable for what he called an intergenerational crime. Though a spokesman said yesterday the call for imprisonment was not meant to be taken literally, Dr. Suzuki reportedly made similar remarks in an address at the University of Toronto last month.

Read the rest of the story at National Post

Another U.N. conference began Monday in Bali to contrive another worldwide governmental “solution” for global warming. Beware when government wants to help. Be frightened when it’s a bunch of governments. Most will assume as true the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scare story that human-induced global warming is a certainty and poses catastrophic consequences — unless governments do something.

Read the rest of this opinion column from Colorado Springs Gazette