The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is attempting to do what couldn’t be done at the international climate change conference in Copenhagen last December: Transfer large sums of wealth from developed countries to developing ones in the name of climate change. From BusinessWeek: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, said the organization is helping to set up a “green fund” that would raise $100 billion a year by 2020 to mitigate the effects of climate change in developing countries. Strauss-Kahn indicated the fund may use its quotas, which reflect …
Data show 2009 was a record year for lobbying on energy issues. 1747 clients (firms and groups) hired lobbyists to work in the area of energy and nuclear power. This is a stunning 93 percent increase from 2006. This increase may be stunning, but it isn’t surprising. With literally trillions of dollars put into play by various cap-and-trade bills over the last three years, it would have been surprising if lobbying hadn’t grown by leaps and bounds. Though initially offered as legislation to fight global-warming, the justifications for cap and …
Two weeks ago, CBS News filed a story on the over 100 people (including Senators, Representatives, their spouses, and staff) that flew to the failed United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen on the taxpayers dime. At the time, Congress had not yet filed their expense report. CBS has now followed up on the story. Watch CBS News Videos Online From CBS’ report:
The 2010 United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen ended as another colossal failure for the Obama administration, but the loss did not come cheap to American taxpayers. As CBS News reported last night, over 101 people (including Senators, Representatives, their spouses, and staff) took three military planes and racked up 321 hotel nights and ate tens of thousands of dollars in meals … all on the taxpayers dime. Watch CBS News Videos Online
To fully appreciate what a step backwards the final Copenhagen accord is, one has to recall the buildup to it. For the last two years, global warming activists and UN officials had circled December 2009 on their calendars as the watershed moment for creating a new carbon-constrained global economy for decades to come. And in the nick of time, they would argue, as the existing targets in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol are scheduled to expire in 2012. Furthermore, with the Bush administration gone in 2009, many in the international community …
In his speech at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, President Obama told leaders from around the world that “the time for talk is over.” Obama pushed for all major economies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but admitted some doubt as to whether a collective agreement would be reached. He could offer no concrete plans and nothing more than confidence that cap and trade legislation would be signed into law next year in the United States. While the focus of his speech was primarily on what actions the United States government …
The Heritage Foundation’s Steven Groves and Ben Lieberman are live at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference reporting from a conservative perspective. Follow their reports on The Foundry and at the Copenhagen Consequences Web site. Rather than the much anticipated (by environmental activists) or much feared (by those concerned about the economy and American sovereignty) binding new greenhouse gas emission reduction targets to replace the expiring provisions in the existing Kyoto Protocol, the final Copenhagen agreement is shaping up to be much less than that. Though this modest outcome had been …
Back in September, Heritage fellow James Roberts wrote of the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh: In the past 10 months, the leaders of the G-8 and G-20 nations have met three times at elaborate and expensive summits to address the world’s financial woes. … Originally a Group of Six–France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States–with Canada added in 1977, the G-7 process attempted to deal with the OPEC oil shock-induced economic crises of the 1970s as well as the need to re-design the post-World War II Bretton …
This morning while President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations Climate Change Conference, his allies were busy trying to shield him of the political fallout from the conference’s apparent failure to produce anything substantial. Throughout the conference, one of the biggest obstacles to an agreement was the insistence of developing nations that rich countries sign a binding treaty that included a large transfer of wealth to the developing world. If there were any doubts that wealth distribution was at the heart of climate cap-and-trade agreements, President of the Bolivarian Republic …
The Heritage Foundation’s Steven Groves and Ben Lieberman are live at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference reporting from a conservative perspective. Follow their reports on The Foundry and at the Copenhagen Consequences Web site. Though Barack Obama garnered much attention for his Nobel Peace Prize win, the United States has won three lesser-known, tongue-in-cheek awards at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference from a liberal environmentalist organization that has been critical of America’s refusal to wholeheartedly embrace their radical agenda. And what “ignoble actions” earned the United States these noble prizes? …
