by Warren Duffy
The APA’s “Glossary for the Public” document goes on to say that “some opponents of planning argue… that sustainable development… adversely affects not only an individual’s rights and freedoms but also true local control. Given such a perspective, it is imperative that planners frame discussions about sustainability, regionalism, livability and the like (see trigger words below) in a way that emphasizes the economic value, long-lasting benefits and positive outcomes that result from good planning and plan implementation.”
APA’s CEO Paul Farmer, who obviously understands the coming wave of public criticism has sent his talking points memo to hundreds of regional planners to arm them in public debate. “As planning and planners have become targets of suspicion and mistrust, it is more important than ever to avoid polarizing jargon, to focus on outcomes important to local citizens and to maintain a fair, open and transparent process,” Farmer’s talking points document states.
Still, citizens who have investigated these regional planning groups and their embrace of the ICLEI goals of “Agenda 21”and sustainability read Farmer’s words and strongly disagree. To the average citizen who learns his tax dollars intended for road repair and construction of freeways, are being diverted to pay for ICLEI membership and a U.N. environmental/globalism agenda, see nothing fair, open or transparent in any of the APA’s eco-babble.
CHAPTER 6
AL GORE’S ROAD SHOW: AN ENVIROMENTAL SNOW JOB
Before we connect the dots between globalism, regionalism, the United Nations, Agenda 21 and ICLEI, any comprehensive review of sustainable development’s growth the last 15 years would be found lacking if it did not include the “environmental skullduggery” of Al Gore. As reported earlier, his 1990’s book “Earth in the Balance” became a game changer in the campaign to popularize the pseudoscience of “Global Warming” and “Climate Change”.
Historically, when Al was defeated in the 2000 Presidential election by a few “hanging chads”, many believed he was cheated out of the presidency. With a giant block of public sentiment behind him, Al got a boost with his soon to be post-presidential careers as an environmental venture capitalist and a preacher of his “Global Warming” gospel. Al was a natural draw for earnest young college students who, by nature, mistrusted government institutions. A candidate swindled out of the presidency was someone they welcomed and earnestly listened to.
In 2004 while speaking on the UCLA campus in Southern California, Al drew the attention of an environmental activist in the audience, Laurie David. She was the wife of Larry David, renowned television producer of the shows “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. Mrs. David suggested for Al’s talk to reach a much larger audience it needed to become a major motion picture. With Laurie David as a member of the Board of Trustees for the aforementioned Natural Resources Defense Council, Al’s subject matter fit perfectly with Mrs. David’s and the NRDC’s agenda. Laurie’s use of her considerable connections in both Hollywood and New York and all the glitz and star power she could muster contributed to Al’s power point presentation becoming the movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”. An Oscar and Nobel Peace Prize followed and Al and “Global Warming” had hit the street running.
Candidly, behind every gleaming moment of Al Gore’s successes, there has always been a shadow of misfortune. Since his early days in politics to his most recent network television enterprise, miscalculation and mischief seem to follow him wherever he goes.
During his presidential campaign, one such bizarre incident involved a typical luncheon fund raiser at a Buddhist Temple in Hacienda Heights, CA, a small community just east of downtown Los Angeles. Among other guests, Al’s audience included the saffron-robed monks who take an obligatory vow of poverty as they become priests in their religious order. Yet somehow, Gore’s presidential campaign managed to collect contributions at the luncheon of more than $100,000.
An investigation soon followed. The monks were called before a Congressional Investigating Committee asking them who arranged the function and most important who donated all that money? As a result of the investigation, twenty co-conspirators (fortunately none of them Buddhist monks) went to jail for their part in the fiasco. Many suspected a sinister plot by the Chinese government to exert influence on America’s presidential election was somehow behind the scam. Al publicly mumbled something about “no controlling legal authority” and the mainstream media and the U.S. Congress gave Al and his presidential campaign a free pass.
Even Al’s Nobel Peace Prize was tainted, as he shared it with the now-disgraced U.N. organization, the International Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). You remember them, the U.N. scientists who cooked the “climate books” all those years in favor of “Global Warming”.
In England, Al’s film was shown in public school classrooms. English parents, skeptical of the outrageous claims Gore made in his film, demanded the schools stop showing his movie. When that failed, the parents filed a formal lawsuit with the London High Court and demanded Gore prove his environmental claims or admit they were false. Evidence from both sides was weighed at trial and the esteemed judge ruled, “The Armageddon scenario that he depicts…. is not based on any scientific view.”
The judge ordered whenever Al’s movie was shown to English school children, each impressionable child must be given a 77-page booklet detailing the nine specific central errors contained in “An Inconvenient Truth”. As Republican political analyst, Karl Rove, says with a chuckle, “Al doesn’t tell Whoppers, he tells double-patty with cheese, super-sized Whoppers.” However, do you recall reading about the trial in any national or local newspapers? .
“An Inconvenient Truth” has turned out to be, at the very least, “An Inconsistent Truth”. The public was sold a marvelous fictional account of impending disaster that rivals anything published since the fables of C.S Lewis, H. R. R. Tolkien and Harry Potter combined. Governments have accepted the eco-babble as fact and spent billions, if not trillions, of dollars to perpetuate environmental myths.
As we revisit Al’s fantastic claims, more and more of them are being revealed as the hoax they truly are. First and foremost, the globe is not warming. In fact, as previously referenced, in 16 of the last 18 years the Earth’s temperature has remained more or less unchanged. Recently it has, almost unbelievably, started to cool. That cooling trend is now the major concern of virtually every climate scientist around the earth, the exact opposite of Al’s global warming scenario.
Second, remember Al’s claim that the Himalayan glaciers were melting and would disappear by the year 2035? Turns out that story was printed in 1999 in “New Science” magazine and was an off handed quote attributed to a pair of environmental hikers, not scientists, not scientific observers, but two hikers. The story appeared in print and fit neatly into Al’s “Global Warming” scenario, so he included it in his movie. For years, it was considered an indisputable fact. Now, the Himalayan glacier myth has melted but the glaciers are still there, as icy and cold as ever. “New Science” magazine has since retracted the story, but not Al or the mainstream media.
No doubt, we all remember those hopeless white polar bears in Al’s movie seen floating on a small chunk of ice. While there is good news for polar bear fans, there is bad news for the environmental alarmists. According to the America’s Fish and Wildlife Service latest polar bear census, the polar bears are multiplying abundantly. As a matter of fact, the natives who live in the Arctic wilds are asking the bears be removed from the “Endangered Species” list so they can be hunted, lest they over-populate the area and threaten the local citizenry.
One of the grandest claims made in Al’s film was rising ocean levels causing another ocean crisis. Because the glaciers and ice fields were melting, coastal cities around the world would be flooded within the predictable future. Las Vegas would become a beach front community and perhaps Pittsburg, PA as well. Rising oceans would surely inundate the populated islands in the South Pacific and the Caribbean. Flooding of the islands would forever
change civilization as we know it. All, of course, are foolish predictions that simply haven’t happened the way Al told us they would.
The oceans of the world are very accurately measured by ocean buoys that are strategically placed all over the planet. A colleague of mine, Lord Christopher Monkton (who served as Margaret Thatcher’s environmental advisor), sent me an email reporting that the oceans of the world “will rise about 1 inch (you read that right, one inch) during the next century” (yes, a one inch rise in the next 100 years). Lord Monckton is nothing short of a genius and his website is an encyclopedia of common sense environmentalism that doesn’t mince words. You will find it listed in the back of this book.
As Gore raked in massive profits from his film career and received global accolades for his courageous reporting about the earth’s impending environmental disasters, he began rethinking his career as an environmental advocate. He decided to purse a second career path, that of an “environmental investor”. In 2006, Gore was invited to join as full partner in the Silicon Valley venture capitol firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers (KPCB), who provided funding for a great deal of Silicon Valley’s pioneers. Many predicted Al would soon become the world’s first “Carbon Billionaire”.
Gore’s investments in an astounding array of environmental projects have indeed added to his incredible wealth. Unfortunately, that cloud of misfortune has followed Al into this newest career being known now as a “do as I say, not as I do” environmentalist.
Al owns four homes across the country. One is located in Arlington, Virginia across the Potomac River from the nation’s capitol and another located in Carthage, Tennessee in the district he represented as a U.S. Senator. He purchased a third home in Nashville with an expansive 20 rooms and 10,000 square feet of living space. But it has become nothing short of an environmental public relations disaster. The mansion reportedly uses more than 30 times the annual electricity than the average Nashville electric customer with not a single solar panel in sight.
A few years ago, Al bought his fourth home, best described as a mega-estate in Montecito, California. The asking price for the mansion was $8.8 million dollars. Not bad for a former presidential candidate who was hustling college speaking dates after his loss in the 2000 election. Pictures of the new Gore “California Palace” can be found online with not one visible solar panel anywhere.
To say that Al’s fortunes have increased significantly in recent years would be something of a gross understatement. However, during an August 2011 speech he delivered at The Aspen Institute in Colorado, the first visible chinks in Al’s always-confident demeanor were exposed.
Al began his talk slowly and somewhat defensively claiming that “special interest groups were paying pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists and put out the message, ‘this climate thing, it’s nonsense’. Manmade CO-2 doesn’t trap heat,” he said. And then he shocked the audience as he shouted into the microphone, “Bull-****!”
He continued his tirade, “It may be sunspots. Bull****!” It’s not getting warmer. Bull****!” “It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the G**-damn word ‘climate’”.
The man who once claimed he invented the internet soon found his unfortunate meltdown had gone viral.
As the year 2012 came to a close, Gore was finalizing the sale of his failing television network, Current TV, to a company backed by the oil-rich, Middle East nation of Qatar, a country that has become sickeningly wealthy by selling Al’s dreaded “fossil fuels” to the rest of the world. Remember, in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, he claimed fossil fuels were the cause of CO-2 emissions and they in turn caused global warming. Al, as an investor, not an advocate, is a 20% owner of the Current TV network. His take of the $500,000,000 deal netted Al a tidy check for $100 million.
Glen Beck revealed publically that his communications company, Mercury, offered to buy Current TV from Gore. Apparently, Beck’s conservative viewpoint didn’t fit Gore’s agenda. According to a press release from Gore, following the transaction, Al Jazeera television seemed a better fit. By the way, this is the network in the Middle East that once posted beheadings by Al Qaeda terrorists, but yet seemed more aligned with Gore’s philosophy of hard hitting television news reporting.
The transaction has fallen under a tad bit of scrutiny from the mainstream media. In a recent interview on NBC’s “Today Show”, Matt Lauer suggested Al was guilty of hypocrisy. Al said he understood the view point but disagreed with the reasoning.
Al is a wealthy man, but must be unhappy with his film completely discredited, full of factual errors and his Nobel Peace Prize shared with a bunch of U.N. sponsored scientists who have been found wanting. The mainstream media continues to beat his “environmental drum” as though nothing has happened while our local, state, federal and international governments continue to use his fanciful conclusions as the basis for economic policy and massive investments of scarce public tax dollars.
His phony globalist environmental agenda continues to be foisted on our local communities in the name of the United Nation’s “Agenda 21” ICLEI programs. However, as American citizens are getting informed they are beginning to push back.
Recalling the John Birch Society ‘70s slogan, “Get the U.S. out of the U.N.” coupled with decades of Americans demanding “Get the U.N. out of America”, now more than ever both have become a renewed rallying cry across the nation.
CHAPTER 7
GREEN BACKS INVESTED IN GREEN ENERGY DISASTERS
Consider how far the goals of global environmentalists have crept into our federal government and the astounding number of greenenergy businesses that have been given federal loans from the U.S. Department of Energy and then quickly went bankrupt.
Solyndra is probably the best known example of green investment gone awry, though the business was only awarded a $535-million loan guarantee. To date, 36 firms that received federal assistance for their “green energy” projects have either gone bust, are preparing to enter bankruptcy or have begun laying off workers instead of growing green jobs.
Sunpower was a solar project that received $1.2 billion, First Solar received $1.46 billion and Brightsource Energy pulled in $1.6 billion—all from Uncle Stupid in D.C. Not including those three green investments, thirty three other projects received over $2,812,000,000 of wasted federal tax money. If President Obama’s second inaugural address is any indication, plans for dozens of “investments” into green projects are on the federal fast track before he leaves office in 2016.
Tax dollars have also supported electric car companies. The Tesla and Fisker electric car manufacturers have yet to become household names. Why? Because both have spent their federal money to create pricey, battery driven vehicles that buyers simply aren’t buying. Fisker alone received $529-million to mass produce an affordable all-electric car. Now they too have gone under, still owing $200 million to the American taxpayers, while two Chinese companies are in a bidding war to purchase them.
Speaking of Chinese companies, another one has swooped in and purchased the bankrupt American battery company A123 for a cool $260 million. A mere $249 million was awarded A123 in 2009 from the stimulus/taxpayers “green energy pot”.
General Motors (GM), now known affectionately as “Government Motors”, received federal bailout money and put their pricey, all electric Volt on the market. Although they have tried every imaginable marketing ploy, they have been spectacularly unsuccessful at creating buyers. Production has now been halted.
Millions more of our tax money has been invested in the construction of electric car-charging stations for the non-existent fleet of all electric cars. Tennessee is a perfect example of lots of charging stations with a handful of electric cars to service. In some states, gas station owners have been ordered by local, regional, state and federal officials to install electric car charging stations right next to their gas pumps.
Also, billions of tax dollars have been used to construct industrial
strength windmill farms and mega-solar plants. Promises at ribbon cutting ceremonies always sound great but delivering on them has been a long and difficult process. Those nasty unintended consequences that government has become so famous in assuring never disappoint with one problem, delay or closure after another.
In California, along a major desert highway leading to the state’s border with Nevada, several astoundingly large solar projects are under construction. Three are being built in America’s largest county, San Bernardino, where they cover an astounding 22,000 acres of desert land. That translates into 43 square miles.
The Ivanpah Solar Project is one of the three and includes a total of 170,000 garage-door-size solar mirrors. Each is automatically adjusted every ten seconds by a GPS system that tracks the sun. The mirrors reflect sunlight into three, 45-story water storage towers where the water is heated to 1,000 degrees. That hot water creates steam power that generates the electricity. When completed, the project will be the largest solar plant of its kind anywhere in the world. That claim is easily justifiable for one simple reason; no one has ever tried this complicated form of solar power generation before, anywhere.
Will it work? That’s anybody’s guess. But that much feared “law of unintended consequences” has already raised its ugly head in the Ivanpah construction project. For 220 million years, the desert has been home to the Desert Tortoise. No surprise, it is a species found on the environmentalist’s favorite, “Endangered Species” list. When it was learned several tortoises had wandered into paths of big and powerful earth movers and crushed, the project had a big problem. So far that “turtle crisis” has cost the company building the project more than $56-million to protect and relocate tortoises whose habitat has been invaded by the sprawling Ivanpah solar project.