Did you know that Gensler’s policy changes are also responsible in large part for the implosion of Jon Corzine’s MF Global? I’ve told you about Corzine’s activities in chapter 4, but you need to know that between 2000 and 2005, Gensler was responsible for loosening the regulations guiding the types of investments futures brokers like MF Global could make with their customers’ money. These policy changes resulted in an environment where brokers could put their clients at much-increased risk, and they were instrumental in Corzine’s downfall.48
Now, Gensler is charged with regulating commodities trading. He’s supposed to do exactly what he wouldn’t do when he was part of the Clinton team in charge of regulating derivatives trading.
He’s the man Obama is depending on to “investigate” the role of commodities traders in the rise of oil prices.
I don’t trust him to uncover fraud.
I do trust him to carry out Obama’s continuing demonization of the oil and gas industry through attacks on commodities traders. The administration says he’s supposed to find them guilty of bilking the public, of making too much money at the public’s expense.
In fact, he’s supposed to take the spotlight off of Obama’s role as the true cause of rising oil prices.
The country is not buying Obama’s version of events, though.
Americans understand that Obama’s strategy to reduce prices is largely symbolic. The power-grabber in the White House rejects what he calls “quick fix” policies to lower oil prices while insisting that he’s focused on the long term.
In a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 71 percent of the people responding said they were being hurt by high gas prices, and 57 percent of them found fault with the way Obama was handling the economy. The signal Obama is sending is that “we’re not interested in producing oil and gas in this country,” according to Thomas Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy Research.49
That’s not something Americans want to hear.
What’s even more revealing, though, is how little Obama understands of the market forces that are at work in determining oil and gas prices. At the time the president went on his crusade to find fraud among oil speculators, oil supplies were at normal seasonal levels, not an indication that any sort of fraud was being perpetrated. As one industry analyst put it, “This is a transparently political fishing expedition that insinuates that fraud or manipulation is distorting oil prices without providing even the flimsiest factual basis for such a suspicion.”50
As I’ve told you, Obama and his henchmen are doing everything they can to keep oil and gas prices as high as possible. That’s why Obama is actually banking on Gensler to fail. The subversive in the Oval Office doesn’t want to bring down oil prices, and Gensler is just the man to make sure they continue to rise to unprecedented levels.
Rising oil and gas prices are part of their plan to make the United States a second-class nation. One way to do that is to push a “green” agenda, a political strategy that places the interests of environmentalists above concerns about our economic stability and our national security. To accomplish that he’s relying on the EPA.
The Environmental Protection Agency was the creation of the Nixon administration in 1970. It was put in place in order to reverse the effects of the pollution spawned by the postwar industrial expansion in the United States, but in the Obama administration, it’s been transformed into the governmental arm of the radical environmentalist movement.
Lisa Jackson, the current head of the EPA, likes to brag that she’s a “Shell Oil creation.” In fact, Shell Oil financed her undergraduate education at Tulane University through a scholarship they provided to her.51 She’s also a radical environmentalist. As the head of the EPA, she promotes “environmental justice.” That’s based on the idea that U.S. environmental policy disproportionately affects people of color, and we’ve got to shut down our energy industry so that minorities won’t be further harmed by pollution. Jackson’s idea of energy policy is to promote government-subsidized “green jobs” so she can create “environmentalists for life.” For her, the EPA is synonymous with the environmental movement, and she makes it clear that she will do whatever she needs to in order to implement policies that significantly impede the expansion of our energy industry.52
Financing Jackson’s education is one mistake Shell Oil would like to take back.
On April 26, 2011, Jackson’s EPA denied permission for the Royal Dutch Shell—Shell Oil’s parent company—to drill off Alaska’s northern coast.
The EPA’s reason?
After the company had spent some $4 billion in exploration costs and had gone through the tortuous process of applying for a permit to drill, the EPA found that they had missed something. They hadn’t considered the environmental impact of the emissions from an ice-breaking boat they planned to use in the operation. The pollution created by the vessel, the EPA insisted, might contaminate the air and put at risk the inhabitants of a small village about 70 miles away.53
That’s it.
That’s the reason Shell, which had jumped over every other hurdle the EPA put in its way, was denied a permit to drill off the coast of Alaska.
Decisions like this are characteristic of the dictatorial power this administration is wielding over the very industry that is the lifeblood of our energy production, the foundation of our economic well-being.
Obama tapped the EPA to take over this role when the Senate refused, in June 2009, to pass the cap-and-trade legislation that the House had approved in 2008. That legislation had been described as “a centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s ambitious effort to transform the way Americans produce and consume energy.”54
That should read, “President Barack Obama’s ambitious effort to intrude further into our lives and wreak more havoc on the U.S. economy through his radical energy agenda.”
The radical environmentalists’ logic is straightforward: Making the cost of burning coal and oil significantly higher will encourage investment in new energy sources that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Obama buys into it. He’s said as much himself when he explained during the 2008 campaign that under the policies he was proposing energy prices would “necessarily skyrocket.”55
We should have listened more closely at the time.
We should have gotten the message.
What happened when he couldn’t pass his cap-and-tax legislation perfectly defines trickle down tyranny: He turned to the Environmental Protection Agency in order to bypass Congress.
He decided to legislate by presidential decree, using the EPA as his enforcer.
The Supreme Court backed him up. Their decision in the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA ruled that the EPA does have the power to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
The Clean Air Act itself is not quite so clear. For instance, it doesn’t recognize carbon dioxide as a pollutant that needs to be reduced. It lists carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, and lead among the primary pollutants that need to be cleaned up.56
And the United States has done an extraordinary job of removing them from the environment. By the year 2000, carbon monoxide levels were 31 percent lower than they were when the Clean Air Act was passed. Sulfur dioxide (27 percent reduction), particulate matter (71 percent), and lead (98 percent) have all been cleaned up as well.57
That hasn’t stopped the EPA from implementing regulations that now threaten to cripple the U.S. electric grid altogether.
You remember the freak snowstorm that slammed the East Coast in October 2011. More than 800,000 Connecticut residents were without electric power for nearly a month after that storm!
The reason?
Lisa Jackson and the EPA are doing Obama’s bidding in order to shut down the U.S. energy industry.
Buried in the mountains of regulatory documents compiled to make sure Americans don’t have enough energy to meet their needs is this: The EPA “is aware . . . that this regulation may detrimentally impact the reliability of the electri
c grid.” The regulation they’re talking about is one designed on the face of it to reduce the amount of mercury released into the air as a result of generating electricity. In fact, though, the regulation is designed to shut down coal-fired electricity generation.
In other words, it’s designed to reduce the electricity available to Americans in the name of preventing pollution.
It’s working. Just ask 830,000 Connecticut residents, or the people who were victims of the rolling blackouts in Arizona and California in September 2011.58
In fact, the EPA draft documents contained language that advised the people who run the grid, including regional transmission operators and state regulators, to start planning to construct new power generation facilities, because EPA regulations will soon cause many existing power plants to shut down. This language was edited out of the final draft of the document.
The EPA simply couldn’t let the fact that its new regulations threatened the lives and safety of millions of Americans slip out.59
It’s bad enough that this administration is reducing the electric power available in the name of preventing miniscule amounts of a contaminant to be released into the atmosphere. But it’s even worse that it’s doing even more harm in the name of preventing a benign gas—CO2—from being released into the atmosphere.
When are you going to wake up and realize that Obama’s energy policy has nothing to do with protecting the environment?
When are you going to understand that Obama’s energy policy is nothing more than another part of his multifaceted plan to take down America, to relegate us to second-class status among world powers?
The Myth of Global Warming
I’ve known for a long time that the foundation on which the idea of man-made global warming has been built is a complete fabrication, based on the phony “science” of corrupt researchers.
I’ve explained to you that it has absolutely nothing to do with what might happen if we continue to emit CO2 into the atmosphere and everything to do with the redistribution of wealth from richer nations to poorer.
Contrary to the EPA’s claims, CO2 is not a “greenhouse gas.” Carbon dioxide makes up only about three-tenths of one percent (0.03) of the earth’s atmosphere. It’s statistically insignificant in any calculation that might attempt to identify the causes of man-made global warming. Water vapor, on the other hand, is a “greenhouse” gas, but even so its effects on our climate are dwarfed by changes in the energy from the sun received on earth.60
One of the problems we face is that we shouldn’t be in the position of having to decide “greenhouse gases” need to be regulated in the first place.
That’s because, not only do greenhouse gases, especially CO2, not contribute to global warming, there’s no such thing as global warming in the first place.
Let me explain to you the real agenda behind this phony policy.
Ottmar Edenhofer is the co-chair of Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He helped organize that group’s 2010 UN Climate Change Conference, known as COP-16, held in Cancun, Mexico. In an interview prior to the start of the conference, Edenhofer explained that climate change has nothing at all to do with climate: “[O]ne must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. . . . One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.”61
But Edenhofer’s comments have much more than “economic” implications. What he’s really saying is, “Science be damned. We’re going to make sure the data support global warming no matter what, so that we can effect the transfer of wealth that we’re politically committed to.”
When climate science is no longer about the climate but rather about ways to engineer a massive transfer of wealth from developed nations, not to underdeveloped nations but into the pockets of globalists, then it’s no longer science at all but a ruse designed to achieve a specified outcome.
You heard me.
Climate science as it is practiced by the left is nothing but a ruse.
It’s a scam.
It’s designed to make sure that you forfeit any right you have to maintain control over the way you live your life.
Edenhofer’s admission that global warming is nothing more than a political issue totally undermines the “science” invented to justify global warming. The sole reason for the theory that man-made global warming exists at all is to help its proponents gain political and financial power over the money generated by capitalist economies.
But beyond that, the “science” itself is a hoax. As I explained in Trickle Up Poverty, the Climategate scandal, where it came out that the “data” that supposedly confirmed that there was such a thing as global warming were fabricated and manipulated, finally put a damper on the lies that charlatans like Al Goreleoni were perpetrating. As Ottmar Edenhofer’s words demonstrate, the people who perpetrated the hoax have admitted as much.
Global warming is indeed a man-made phenomenon. The men who made it were not the people burning coal, oil, and gasoline, though. They were the so-called scientists who concocted and altered temperature data over the past ten years in order to make it appear as if the rest of us were guilty.
The administration claims that there’s a consensus among scientists that global warming is a real and imminent threat to humanity.
That’s a lie.
When I hear the word consensus I simply point to the 9,000 scientists with legitimate scientific credentials who were among more than 30,000 people who signed a petition that said there was no such thing as man-made global warming.62
That’s what I call consensus.
But the evidence doesn’t stop with scientific “consensus.” A project called the CLOUD experiment, in which the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) built a chamber that exactly reproduced the earth’s atmosphere, demonstrated conclusively that cosmic rays from the sun—and not man-made activity—are the primary cause of climate change on earth.63
Global warming has been debunked as a serious threat to our economic well-being.
What has replaced it is the administration’s continuing insistence on making policy decisions based on the idea that we still somehow need to control carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Despite what Obama would like us to believe, it’s his own administration’s policies—overseen by leftist haters of capitalism like Lisa Jackson—that are causing the dramatic spike in oil prices, which in turn causes out-of-control increases in the price of gasoline at the pump.
Imposing those policies on the American people follows the leftist playbook. When the fabrication and manipulation of data that was the foundation of the man-made global warming myth was revealed, one of the perpetrators, Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia, Great Britain, “shaped” the news, lied to the news media, and obstructed requests for the data under the Freedom of Information Act.64
Jones was sticking to the plan outlined in a pamphlet titled The Rules of the Game. The pamphlet is nothing less than a collection of leftist talking points that were distributed to radical environmentalists about the energy issue. It explains how to misrepresent and obfuscate the issue of climate change in order to avoid public scrutiny.
Included in the “rules” for maintaining the fabrication that global warming is a man-made phenomenon are these:
“Be cool: Be sexy, mainstream, non-patronizing, brave—stand out!”
“Belong: Join a massive worldwide change, start positive conformity, join a success.”
“Only stories work: Empathy and emotions are powerful, use stories to hold people’s attention.”
“Change is for all: Break stereotypes, use inclusive language and images, push mass ownership.”65
Does this sound like a page from the Marxist playbook?
Something Barack Obama might say in one of his speec
hes?
That’s exactly what it is.
These “rules” are nothing more than the blueprint for furthering an expansion of control over the people by means of perpetuating the hoax of global warming that dwarfs anything in George Orwell’s 1984.66
The U.S. Congress is an unindicted co-conspirator in the government’s takeover of the energy industry.
Congress v. the EPA
When the Senate decided not to vote on the Waxman-Markey comprehensive climate “cap-and-tax” legislation in 2009, they were aware of the threat that the EPA under Lisa Jackson might go ahead and implement the regulation of greenhouse gases without congressional approval. At the time, the president admitted that the cap-and-tax bill was dead, but at the same time he said that there was “more than one way to skin a cat.”67
That’s exactly what Jackson is preparing to do.
And that’s exactly what the Senate has voted to let her do. In April 2011, the House passed the Energy Tax Prevention Act, which would have denied Jackson and the EPA the ability to regulate carbon emissions, by an overwhelming majority, with 19 Democrats going along with every Republican in approving the measure. When it reached the Senate, however, the bill failed to pass. Senators debated on several proposals for limiting the EPA’s authority, but none was approved.
Although none of the Senate versions of this important bill was able to generate enough votes to pass, in the voting on all four measures taken separately, a total of 64 senators voted to approve at least one of the amendments. There is a majority in the Senate who want to deny the EPA this overreaching and dangerous authority, but the idiots in that chamber can’t find a way to do it.68
The failure cleared the way for another Obama growth-killing policy as Congress declined to step in to stop the Obama administration’s plan to increase the cost of energy in the U.S.
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