Taylor, Jerry Niskanen
anomaly? stealth? i wasn't sure for a while, but 7/20 ok
WIKI 3 26
Following people who have changed their position
Some climate change skeptics have changed their positions regarding global warming. Ronald Bailey, author of Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths (published in 2002), stated in 2005, "Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up."[331] By 2007, he wrote "Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now.... as the new IPCC Summary makes clear, climate change Pollyannaism is no longer looking very tenable."[332]
Jerry Taylor promoted climate denialism for 20 years as former staff director for the energy and environment task force at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and former vice president of the Cato Institute. Taylor began to change his mind after climate scientist James Hansen challenged him to reread some Senate testimony. He became President of the Niskanen Center in 2014, where he is involved in turning climate skeptics into climate activists, and making the business case for climate action.[333][334][335]
Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, reached a tipping point in 2006 as a result of his increasing familiarity with scientific evidence, and decided there was "overwhelming evidence for anthropogenic global warming". Journalist Gregg Easterbrook, an early skeptic of climate change who authored the influential book A Moment on the Earth, also changed his mind in 2006, and wrote an essay titled "Case Closed: The Debate About Global Warming is Over".[336] In 2006, he stated, "based on the data I'm now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert."[337]
In 2009, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev expressed his opinion that climate change was "some kind of tricky campaign made up by some commercial structures to promote their business projects". After the devastating 2010 Russian wildfires damaged agriculture and left Moscow choking in smoke, Medvedev commented, "Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change."[336]
Bob Inglis, a former US representative for South Carolina, changed his mind in around 2010 after appeals from his son on his environmental positions, and after spending time with climate scientist Scott Heron studying coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef.[338]
Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, funded by Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, had been a prominent critic of prevailing climate science. In 2011, he stated that "following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."[339]
"I used to be a climate-change skeptic", conservative columnist Max Boot admitted in 2018, one who believed that "the science was inconclusive" and that worry was "overblown". Now, he says, referencing the Fourth National Climate Assessment, "the scientific consensus is so clear and convincing."[340]
AHA democracy is slow, fascism is fast; biden quickly moved to fix supply chain in covid, re-booted chips mfgr, kamala did deal to slow central am immigration = systemic, but voters blamed biden for inflation tho best in world, thot unemployment was record HIGH?!; trump prevented no carrier AC factory from moving, and his foxcomm plant never built; infra week literally a joke, vs biden infro act bipartisan rebuilt bridge hit by ship in record time; gop mitch showed up to cut ribbons on bills they voted against; only notice pothole, not roads;
AN 12 24
During the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump relentlessly attacked President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the economy — blaming both of them for post-pandemic inflation in the United States. And the message resonated with enough voters for Trump to pull off a narrow victory over Harris.
According to the Cook Political Report, Trump defeated Harris by roughly 1.5 or 1.6 percent in the popular vote and picked up 312 electoral votes compared to 226 for the vice president.
A victory of 1.5 or 1.6 percent is hardly a "landslide," as Trump's allies have been claiming. But it's a victory nonetheless, and Trump will be sworn in for a nonconsecutive second term on January 20, 2025.
READ MORE:**Trump’s tariffs on Mexico could devastate border region: TX economists**
Some of Biden's supporters have argued that history will be kind to the outgoing president — not unlike the kind words for the late President George H.W. Bush after he lost the 1992 election to President Bill Clinton. And history, they argue, will remember Biden's job-creation record and the low unemployment of his presidency.
In October, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), U.S. unemployment was 4.1 percent.
In a December 2 post on X, formerly Twitter, Alex Armlovich — a senior housing analyst for the Niskanen Center — praised Biden's record on creating manufacturing jobs. And he made his point by tweeting a chart from Joey Politano, who publishes a financial newsletter.
Armlovich tweeted, "This rise in US manufacturing construction spend via @JosephPolitano is absolutely mindblowing. So many CHIPS & IRA-fueled factories are about to start opening in January you're not gonna believe it."
READ MORE:[Bombshell report details 'dangerous' new allegations against Trump Cabinet nominee
In a separate tweet, Armlovich laments that Trump, in 2025, will get the credit for Biden's economic achievements.
Armlovich predicts, "Trump's name will be on every IIJA, CHIPS, & IRA ribbon cut b/c key Dem factions thought NEPA red tape was more important than permitting reform to finish projects in <4 yrs FDR didn't respond to the 1930s by saying 'Mussolini is too fast we need NEPA.' He just started building."
===
1ST BIG WIN --> KOCH PLAYBOOK?
frontline 5 22 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-power-of-big-oil/transcript/
late 80's (after hansen?) FF deniers pretty sure gov't action on AGW, rallied to ~, doubted they cd win but "ran the table"; dems knew W-M beat ended action for a decade?!
1992
Chapter iii. The Environmental Presidency
GOV. BILL CLINTON, Arkansas, 1983-1992:
The man standing beside me today has what it takes to lead this nation from the day we take office. Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee.
MARC CHUPKA, White House economist, 1993-94:
When Bill Clinton announced that his running mate was going to be Al Gore, that was very exciting.
There was an anticipation of a much greater effort to tackle climate change.
BILL CLINTON:
We will finally give the United States a real environmental presidency.
AL GORE:
Then President-elect Clinton understood clearly that that's why I was on the ticket. That's why I agreed to run as vice president.
MALE NEWSREADER:
He has won this presidential race, along with Sen. Al Gore, now the vice president-elect.
JANE McMULLEN:
Now you’re in the White House—
AL GORE:
Yeah.
JANE McMULLEN:
—to tackle it. Did you feel a sense of responsibility?
AL GORE:
Oh, absolutely. That was the principal task that I set for myself entering the White House. And I went to work right away to try to get a carbon tax in our first budget plan.
MARC CHUPKA:
Sen. Gore asked me to produce some quantitative results of how much various energy taxes would reduce emissions.
Feb. 17, 1993
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON:
Our plan does include a broad-based tax on energy, and it is environmentally responsible. It will help us in the future as well as in the present with the deficit.
MARC CHUPKA:
I was excited that a fairly bold step had been proposed.
MALE NEWSREADER:
It’s called a "BTU tax."
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The tax is likely to be levied at the producer or distributor level, though consumers would feel it as energy companies passed it along in their prices.
MARC CHUPKA:
It’s a tax policy. You don’t expect everyone to love it. But the opposition to this particular proposal was very strong, very strident, very aggressive.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Koch Industries has been called the biggest company you never heard of. The sprawling giant includes pipelines, petrochemicals, asphalt plants, trading floors. Based in Wichita, Kansas, it sells everything from gasoline to beef.
JEFF NESBIT, Comms. Dir., Citizens for a Sound Economy, 1993:
I would say that virtually no one in the early 1990s had ever heard of Koch Industries.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Koch's core business is distribution. It owns 37,000 miles of international pipeline.
JEFF NESBIT:
They can take the heaviest oil, the dirtiest oil, the hardest to turn into a useful product and refine it. And they became the best in the world at doing that. I think it's still probably the second-largest privately held company in the world.
The two brothers who ran Koch Industries were Charles and David Koch. They had their sights set on how they were going to deal with issues that were existential to their industry. It's the heart of what they do, so they're going to fight and hang on to that till the bitter end.
JERRY TAYLOR, Cato Institute, 1991-2014:
The Cato Institute was a public policy think tank. It was founded by Charles Koch. And Charles was heavily invested in energy policy discussions back in that time, particularly the emergence of climate change.
The Cato Institute position was that climate change is real, but the climate change that we're seeing today is far, far more modest than what the computer models say we should have seen by now. We need to know a lot more before we should be spending trillions of dollars to address it.
JEFF NESBIT:
So the Kochs had funding directed at the Cato Institute as a libertarian think tank; they also had funding that went toCitizens for a Sound Economy, which was built for a slightly different purpose, which was to be a quote, grassroots mobilizer.
JERRY TAYLOR:
Coming out of the gate, we then get served up with a proposed BTU tax. It was obvious to us at the Cato Institute that once that tax is in place, it's going to be very hard to get rid of.
JEFF NESBIT:
We walked over from Citizens for a Sound Economy over to the American Petroleum Institute, and we met with the entire leadership of API. And the meeting was all about, let's just knock out the BTU tax in its infancy.
JERRY TAYLOR:
We would be meeting in various locales in Washington with over 100 people in the room. It was a real war room situation.
JERRY JASINOWSKI, President of the National Association of Manufacturers :
[Archive] This coalition is one of the fastest growing and strongest that I've seen. We will stop the BTU tax and I believe substitute spending cuts in its place. Thank you very much for coming.
Oklahoma
RON HOWELL, Former consultant, Koch Industries:
We were known, and I think we made ourselves known that way, as the oil capital of the world. Almost everywhere you'd look had behind it oil industry dollars.
I thought that the tax was a bad idea for America, but predominantly a bad idea for Oklahoma. Oklahoma was not in a good spot at that time at all. Oil wells were being shut. That meant a lot of lost jobs, a lot of lost companies. And this was putting the heel of the boot down hard.
I got a call from Koch Industries telling me the industry is very concerned about this, but we're worried that this word isn't getting out. Our particular goal was to focus on Sen. Boren.
JEFF NESBIT:
David Boren was a moderate Democrat who chaired the relevant committee that would deal with the Clinton budget.
RON HOWELL:
We were hearing that he wanted to be left to do his own revising of it behind closed doors.
JEFF NESBIT:
They basically said if we can get David Boren to flip, we win. So they said, we're going to do whatever it takes.
RON HOWELL:
We set about what I would call a grasstops and a grassroots campaign. The grassroots were encouraged to call Sen. Boren and let him know that you do not want a tax, after seeing an ad that showed "take shower, pay a tax; start your car, pay a tax."
JEFF NESBIT:
Everybody was given their marching orders out of this playbook. People would stand up behind politicians with signs about no BTU tax. There were rallies.
ENERGY INDUSTRY SPOKESMAN:
—cost to the average household in Oklahoma is going to be roughly about $500 a year.
RON HOWELL:
My main role was what I would call the grasstops. You may be a civic leader, you may be a CEO. Often it would be Mr. Koch would call them, or myself, and talk them through "Did you know it does this, this, this and this?" Encourage strongly Sen. Boren kill it.
JEFF NESBIT:
What they told the public and what the policymakers were led to believe was that there was an army of folks who were ready to march in the streets. Maybe there were a handful of folks who thought, "Oh, gosh, I should call my senator and register my complaint,"but they had no such grassroots army. It was funded and fueled by the corporate interests.
MALE NEWSREADER:
CSE says its work isn’t done yet. It’s joined forces with other lobbying groups, stoking the flames of the prairie fire, hoping they’ll spread and burn the BTU tax for good.
RON HOWELL:
I remember a very late night or early morning phone call, and it was actually Sen. Boren's communications guy. "We want those ads to stop. And we want the CEOs to quit calling us, and in return, Sen. Boren’s going to announce his intentions to vote against it."
SEN. DAVID BOREN, D-Oklahoma, 1979-94 :
Our proposal is fairer than that put forward by the administration—that is the BTU tax, which is the tax which is a part of the administration's plan that does hit lower- and middle-income Americans.
JEFF NESBIT:
He folded right away. It’s like wow, this can really work. We can pick our targets strategically and win, even when we’re not in political power.
NARRATOR:
At the time, David Boren disputed he was influenced by the oil industry. He said he was responding to concerns from the American public, and he opposed the tax because it would hurt consumers and businesspeople.
MALE NEWSREADER:
President Clinton has pulled the plug on his proposed BTU energy tax.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Critics said it would cost jobs and devastate the economy, and there weren't enough votes in the Senate to pass it. Besides, who the heck knew what it was?
MALE NEWSREADER:
This is after all a nation addicted to its cars and to the idea of driving down the open road.
AL GORE:
It was extremely disappointing to not get the votes. It was just the raw power of all the money that they threw into this. But we just decided to regroup and try to skin the cat a different way.
MARC CHUPKA:
They never proposed another energy tax. It was just considered radioactive.
JEFF NESBIT:
I think some of the leadership of the Koch network were really quite excited that it worked so well. So that's how that playbook first began. It was developed right then. What I didn’t know at the time was that it would become the beginning of something much bigger. And that playbook is still in use today.
I don't feel embarrassed or regretful. In hindsight, I shouldn't have done that. There's no question I shouldn't have done that. But they were my client. I was a contractor. I was paid, I'm going to do my job. And my job was to do that.
NARRATOR:
Charles Koch did not respond to questions about the campaign against the BTU tax. In 1994, a top Koch executive said, "Our belief is that the tax, over time, may have destroyed our business."...
==
https://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/article/Inside-Exxon-Mobil-s-fight-to-stop-climate-12994450.php
BUSINESS
Inside Exxon Mobil’s fight to stop climate change litigation in its tracks
James Osborne
Staff Writer
June 15, 2018
[FILE - In this May 31, 2006 file photo, an ice sculpture fashioned by protesters, to demonstrate their view of how the company's policies are affecting the environment, slowly melts outside the Exxon Mobil shareholders meeting in Dallas. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Friday, April 13, 2018, that Exxon Mobil must hand over documents for Attorney General Maura Healey's probe into whether the company misled investors and consumers about what it knew about the link between fossil fuels and climate change. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)]
WASHINGTON — Imagine this storyline: One of the largest oil companies in the world becomes the victim of a left-wing conspiracy, funded by wealthy liberals who convince Democratic attorneys general across the nation to sue the company to stop it from offering different views about climate change.
What sounds like the stuff of a bad Hollywood thriller is, in fact, the narrative Exxon Mobil’s attorneys are telling as they seek to defend the company from mryiad lawsuits and investigations into what oil companies knew about climate change and when they knew it. With a surprising procedural victory in a Texas court recently, Exxon is attempting to gain greater latitude in what it and other oil companies can say — or not say — about climate change and the impact on their businesses, seeking to build on legal rulings that have expanded corporations’ rights of free speech in recent years, legal scholars say.
The U.S. government has long limited First Amendment protections for corporations, prohibiting them from making false statements to further business interests — a staple of U.S. consumer protection laws going back to the days of snake-oil salesmen peddling so-called magic elixirs. But Exxon’s case could test how far the courts are willing to go to uphold governments’ ability to regulate commercial speech.
Exxon is arguing that the state and local governments suing the company have gone too far, trying to impose an Orwellian code of conduct to drown out those who call attention to uncertainties about how climate change will play out over the long term and affect the global economy.
“Exxon is framing (climate change) as a legitimate political debate in which they are a participant, rather than a for-profit company trying to make a buck,” said Tamara Piety, a law professor at University of Tulsa. “There has been a growing movement (among corporations) to raise the First Amendment. If something can be proven to be unconstitutional it’s completely off the table”
Over the past two decades, companies have successfully used the free speech strategy to challenge government regulations on everything from the placement of workplace signs explaining employee rights to the distribution of patients’ medical data. A key win for corporate America came in 2010 Citizens United case, when the Supreme Court ruled that limits on corporate spending in political campaigns violated companies’ free speech rights.
Now Exxon is seeking to expand corporate rights one step further, arguing that the government legal action, based on the company’s past statements, is little more than leverage to get oil companies to agree to a wide-arching climate change deal that would restrict what they can say about the issue — in violation of “of Exxon Mobil’s constitutional rights.” That includes investigations launched by the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general into whether Exxon lied to shareholders and consumers about the risks of climate change to the environment and its business, and lawsuits filed by cities and counties in California and Colorado, which are seeking damages from Exxon and other oil companies for the costs of rising sea levels and increased wildfires.
Exxon in January asked a state court in Fort Worth to order more than a dozen city and county officials from California to sit for depositions by Exxon’s attorneys to determine whether they are conspiring with plaintiffs’ attorneys and environmentalist activists to force Exxon into accepting a deal. A New York federal judge in March dismissed a similar request by Exxon to depose the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general, ruling it was based on “extremely thin allegations and speculative inference,” but the Texas judge, R.H. Wallace Jr., decided to give the company more room to prove its claim, ruling in April that Exxon could begin making requests to depose specific officials.
Exxon declined to comment. But James Coleman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and a contributor to the conservative Federalist Society, said Exxon, which has come out in support of the Paris climate accords and a national carbon tax, is simply protecting its First Amendment rightsto communicate about climate change and the effects on its finances as it sees fit.
“It’s an unusual claim (by Exxon) but it doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” he said. “The government can make you give accurate information, but the government can’t force you to say things you disagree with. For instance, the government couldn’t make Exxon say climate change is the defining challenge of our time, even if they consider it a fact.”
San Francisco and other California communities are challenging Wallace’s ruling in the Texas 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, potentially setting the case on a path to the Texas Supreme Court. And considering the political makeup of the state’s high court, Exxon stands a good chance of winning its argument, said Tom McGarity, a law professor at the University of Texas, who sits on an advisory board to the California plaintiffs.
“It presents a very sympathetic venue,” he said. “It’s a pro-business Supreme Court.”
Conspiracy
The case in Texas comes three years into a legal campaign against Exxon and other oil companies. In Exxon’s telling, it all stems from meeting of environmental activists in the beach town ofLa Jolla, California, in 2012.
Activists and attorneys discussed a strategy for addressing climate change based on the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s, which successfully argued tobacco companies were liable for smokers’ deaths because executives knew the risks but still claimed publicly they did not, according to an account of the meeting published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group that helped organize the event
If Exxon and other oil companies could be shown to have known the risks to health and safety of climate change but did nothing to warn the public and investors, then perhaps activists could create a groundswell of public outrage to change the political and economic landscape for oil companies, much as they had for tobacco companies.
“We wrote up a report so other lawyers and policymakers could pick up on those lessons (from tobacco) and use them, like you would any science you would hope is actionable,” said Peter Frumhoff, head of policy and science at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The first tenet of good science is being transparent.”
But the activists also gave Exxon a potential weapon to counterattack.
The company’s lawyers have focused on one line in the Union of Concerned Scientists account, in which activists describe how they could could use litigation for “maintaining pressure on the industry that could eventually lead to its support for legislative and regulatory responses to global warming.” That game plan, Exxon lawyers said, was then adopted by government prosecutors, including former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who recently resigned amid allegations of sexual abuse.
Wallace, the Texas judge, agreed with the company lawyers, writing that environmentalists who attended the La Jollameeting “aimed to chill and suppress Exxon Mobil’s speech.”
California and Colorado officials dismiss Exxon’s legal maneuvers as little more than intimidation tactics aimed at frightening and bogging them down in paperwork. A spokesman for the New York Attorney General’s Office called Exxon’s strategy an attempt to “distract and deflect from the facts at hand.”
Public opinion
Within conservative circles, Exxon’s conspiracy message seems to be gaining traction.
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Earlier this year, David Bookbinder, an attorney with the libertarian Niskanen Center, filed suit against Exxon and the Canadian oil company Suncor, claiming they were responsible for the costs sustained by Colorado local governments in fighting wildfires and other effects of climate change.
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A few weeks later, he began seeing his name pop up on conservative websites, including theDaily Caller and one owned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Articles suggested Bookbinder and his colleagues were part of a conspiracy funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a New York charity with more than $800 million in assets that is overseen by the descendants of the late oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil was the precursor to Exxon Mobil.
The claim was based on a $200,000 grant the Niskanen Center received shortly before the Colorado lawsuit was filed. Bookbinder said the grant had nothing to do with the lawsuit and scoffed at the idea his plaintiffs were part of a conspiracy to damage Exxon.
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“My clients don’t want Exxon out of business,” he said. “Then they don’t get paid.”
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund said in a statement that it does consider a willingness to take oil companies to court in awarding grants to climate activists. “Litigation is one tool that can help to level the playing field by leaning into legal standards that are meant to serve the common good,” the statement said.
In its legal filings, Exxon maintains that the Rockefellers and the hedge fund billionaireTom Steyer, who is funding a campaign to impeach President Donald Trump, are behind the wave of litigation. Exxon lawyers cited a $30,000 campaign donation Steyer made to a former mayor of San Francisco shortly before that city filed suit, as well as a Columbia Journalism School investigation into how Exxon’s past statements questioning climate science conflicted with what its scientists were saying internally.
The Rockefeller Family Fund, another charity controlled by Rockefeller descendants, funded the Columbia investigation.
There’s nothing illegal about using money to try to influence a company’s behavior. But that’s besides the point for Exxon. Just as climate activists succeeded in convincing more Americans that climate change is a large and growing threat, Exxon wants to promote the idea of a liberal conspiracy to undermine a fossil fuel industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people and literally fuels the U.S. and global economies.
Exxon is now considering an appeal of a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that found the state’s attorney general’s office had not violated the company’s constitutional rights when it demanded the company turn over documents. Such an appeal would go to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Exxon’s success in convincing the public of its liberal conspiracy narrative could make the difference between winning and losing.
“I don’t think the Supreme Court is completely oblivious to public opinion,” said Piety, the Tulsa law professor, “and the more Exxon can marshal public opinion, the better chance they have of convincing the courts.”
Dempsey, a Managing Director at FTI, manages Energy in Depth and lists himself as an editorial editor WesternWire, another front group run for Western Energy Alliance, another oil trade association like IPAA. Dempsey and a colleague were recently recorded by a lawyer for EarthRights International who called them out for being agents of Exxon, and pretending to be journalists. Exxon is a defendant in the Boulder Colorado lawsuit that EID and WesternWire have tried hard to malign. Dempsey used to work for Senator James Inhofe
ref
https://earthrights.org/media/exxon-sends-undisclosed-agents-to-question-opposing-counsel-about-colorado-climate-litigation/
[audio]
:{
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:{Valentina Stackl
valentina@earthrights.org
}:(202) 466 5188 x100
January 15, 2019. Washington, D.C. — Exxon-sponsored consultants posing as journalists attempted to question EarthRights International (ERI) General Counsel Marco Simons, who represents three Colorado communities in climate change litigation against the oil giant, over email and in a recorded phone call yesterday.
[transcript]
“Western Wire” describes itself as “the go-to source for news, commentary and analysis on pro-growth, pro-development policies across the West,” but is staffed by a public relations firm under a contract to the Western Energy Alliance (WEA), a secretive oil and gas association. They were established in 2017 and publish stories that portray the climate lawsuits as a “conspiracy.” WEA does not disclose its members – but its board includes an Exxon executive, Greg Pulliam.
Boulder County, San Miguel County, and the City of Boulder sued Exxon and Suncor last year for their role in contributing to climate change harms, and ERI represents the communities in court. Because legal ethics rules prohibit attorneys from talking with agents of opposing parties without their attorneys present, Simons refused to talk with the Western Wire staff “if you’re representatives of Exxon in any way.” While the Western Wire staff said they did not know the members of WEA – the organization that sponsors them – they did not dispute that they were representatives of Exxon.
The Western Wire staff involved are Michael Sandoval and Matt Dempsey, listed as Western Wire’s “Managing Editor” and “Opinion Editor,” respectively. Neither, however, is a journalist. Dempsey is listed on the website of FTI Consulting as a Managing Director of Strategic Communications. Sandoval’s name is not listed on FTI’s website, but his LinkedIn page lists him as a Director of Strategic Communications at FTI, and he was reached through FTI’s general phone number. In fact, Sandoval confirmed that Western Wire was staffed by employees of FTI Consulting under a contract to WEA.
The call was recorded with the consent of both sides; here is a full transcript and a recording.
Western Wire is not the only fossil fuel company front group. ERI has produced a fact sheet on several industry initiatives to present misleading information.
The Colorado climate litigation is still in the early stages. Suncor and Exxon moved the case to federal court, and the plaintiffs are now seeking to return the case to Colorado state court, where it was initially filed. Several other cities, counties and states across the country have filed similar climate accountability lawsuits in the past year and a half. ERI is joined in representing the plaintiffs by David Bookbinder, Chief Legal Counsel of the Niskanen Center, and Kevin Hannon of the Hannon Law Firm LLC.
For more information about the Colorado climate accountability lawsuit and these communities’ efforts to fight climate change, please see:
From San Miguel County: :{https://www.sanmiguelcountyco.gov/514/Climate-Accountability:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;border:0px;font-weight:400"):}:
From the City of Boulder: :{https://bouldercolorado.gov/climate:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;border:0px;font-weight:400"):}:
==
==
2/19
House Committee on Science, Space and Technology devoted its first hearing of the 116th Congress to exploring the wide-ranging effects of climate change and explaining the science fueling them, a discussion that revealed a subtle shift among key Republicans toward accepting the prevailing research that points to human-driven global warming.
In her opening comments, committee Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) said that the hearing is one of multiple sessions on climate change the new Congress plans to hold in order to develop policies to address it. The committee's move to highlight mainstream climate science is a marked break from the last six years when it was led by Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, an ardent climate denier from Texas who retired.
The committee's new top Republican, Rep. Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, staked out a more pragmatic and less provocative position than Smith and many other conservatives in Congress had.
"Droughts and heat waves come and go naturally, but the changing climate has intensified their impacts," Lucas said in his opening remarks. "We know the climate is changing and that global industrial activity has played a role in this phenomenon. But our communities, like the farmers and ranchers in my district, need to know more about the extent to which a changing climate affects short- and long-term weather patterns."
under Lucas, the committee's minority side invited as its expert Joseph Majkut, who holds a doctorate in atmospheric science and is director of climate policy at the bipartisan Niskanen Center. Majkut adheres to broadly accepted climate science, unlike some GOP-invited speakers in the past. During the question-and-answer period, Majkut quashed fringe theories that a few members floated about climate change as handily as the scientists invited by the Democrats did.
Democrats on the committee welcomed the change in approach by the ranking GOP member.
"For years, too often we found ourselves wasting time with non-technical witnesses about whether it's a matter of scientific debate whether or not it would be a good thing if the Greenland Ice Sheet melted," said Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), a physicist. "I was really thrilled to see some of the changes appearing in this committee. I'd also like to thank Ranking Member Lucas and my Republican colleagues for selecting Dr. Majkut as their witness for this hearing. He's someone with a Ph.D. in a relevant science and someone with views which are inside the scientific mainstream and that's refreshing."
Old (and Odd) Arguments Batted Down
Not every minority member on the committee followed Lucas's lead. Some of the older members, such as Rep. MoBrooks (R-Ala.), relied on the old climate denying argument that, because other factors besides human activity caused warming 21,000 years ago, those are the factors driving changes now. (They're not.)Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas)brought up a period of warming in Greenland that was followed by a harsh freeze about 1,000 years ago, in an effort to prompt the expert panel to say that global warming might be a good thing.
Majkut, the GOP-invited expert, demurred. "What we do know is we built our society around the temperatures that we've encountered over the last 200, 300 years," he said, "We're fixing to change those temperatures quite a bit, and that rapid transition is the cause for concern."
In her written testimony, Kristie Ebi, an expert witness and director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at University of Washington, highlighted the vulnerabilitysome populations have to heat by mentioning that more than 700 children died from 1990 to 2014 because they were left in hot cars. Rep. Jim Baird (R-Ind.) suggested they may have perished because vehicles now are built "tighter" than before, allowing less air in.
Baird also speculated that species might adapt swiftly enough to climate change to avoid mass extinctions, despite vast scientific evidence to the contrary.
"The climate now is changing faster than it has been in 10,000 years, so it has to be a challenge for many of our plants and other species to try to evolve fast enough in the face of this rapid rate of change," Ebi responded.
Republicans Attacked the Green New Deal
Younger GOP members on the panel, such as Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, opened their questioning by saying they accepted climate change and, unlike their older colleagues, did not offer alternative theories.
But nearly all the GOP members used the hearing as an opportunity to bash the Green New Deal, a job creation and climate plan whose outlines were unveiled last week by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
Ocasio-Cortez's office bungled the rollout of the project when it posted a meandering draft document with "Frequently Asked Questions" that said, among other things, that its goal was net-zero emissions rather than absolutely zero because "we aren't sure that we'll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast."
The GOP members of the Science Committee seized on elements of the FAQ to allege that the Democrats' solution to climate change was a socialist takeover of industries. Republican members also alleged that gasoline and electricity prices would skyrocket. The GOP has used such doomsday scenarios to great effect in the past, including to derail Senate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in 2010, the last two times Congress was tasked with reining in greenhouse gases.
Democratic members did not address the apocalyptic predictions of their GOP colleagues. But Majkut, who described the Green New Deal as a broad progressive agenda with some climate policies attached to it, rebuffed the idea that broad-based efforts to cut emissions would throttle the economy.
"I think the intent is not to overly punish any particular class of people or any particular technology. It's to put in place a system we're all going to benefit from in the long term," Majkut said. "Frankly, I don't know if it will be too costly.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/about-75-of-trumps-proposed-coronavirus-capital-gains-tax-cut-would-go-to-the-top-1-of-earners/
salon igor
Roughly three-quarters of the benefits from the capital gains tax cut floated by President Donald Trump as part of the administration’s coronavirus relief plan would go to the top 1% of earners, according to the Tax Policy Center.
Trump has repeatedly floated a cut to capital gains taxes, which are taxes paid by investors on profits made when an asset, like stock orreal estate, is sold. The capital gains tax rate is already 35% lower than the top income tax rate, and only about 6% of households in the bottom 80% of earners claim any capital gains, meaning the overwhelming majority of benefits would flow to the wealthy.
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett argued over Memorial Day weekend that the administration opposed extending enhanced unemployment benefits despite a quarter of the labor force losing their jobs since the pandemic hit the United States. Hassett told CNNthe administration would “consider” another round of $1,200 direct payments to Americans but is more focused on stimulating the economy through tax cuts.
“Right now, it looks like the economy’s picking up at a very rapid rate, in which case we could potentially move on to other things that the president has mentioned, like the payroll tax cut and potentially even a capital gains holiday,” he said.
the idea of a capital gains tax holiday was met with skepticism by economists.
“Capital gains tax cuts are poorly targeted benefits,” writes the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which noted that 75% of tax filers who reported capital gains last year were in the top 1% of earners.
“About 6 percent of households in the bottom 80 percent reported any capital gains income at all, compared with 83 percent of those in the top 0.1 percent,” said Tax Policy Center co-founder Leonard Burman, who previously served at the Treasury Department and the Congressional Budget Office. “That elite group (incomes over $3.8 million) accounted for more than half of all long-term capital gains, reporting an average gain of $5.5 million.”
The analysis suggests the tax cut would do little to ease the pain of the economic shock caused by coronavirus-related lockdowns to the vast majority of Americans. But Burman notes that it would also “do little to boost the economy since rich people spend only a fraction of any additional income” and because “capital gains income may be hard to come by in the next few years given asset price declines.”
In other words, even the benefits to the wealthy would not fully kick in until well after the economic crisis has eased.
The cut would also do little to boost the stock market, which has been the president’s primary concern. Less than a third of corporate stock is subject to capital gains taxes, according to a Tax Policy Center report, and even stock in taxable accounts is often untaxed becausemany assets are held until death or donated to charity.And new investors would defer the taxes for as long as they want since they don’t kick in until the investment is sold.
The economic conditions do not warrant such a tax cut, argued Karl Smith, the vice president for federal policy at the business-friendly Tax Foundation.
“There is no [investor] shortage to be eliminated. Even modern supply-side models of the economy suggest that a capital gains tax cut would have a tiny effect on long-term GDP,” he wrote at Bloomberg, joking that “Republicans’ preferred solution to any problem, whether a recession or an alien invasion, is to cut the capital gains tax.”
Steve Wamhoff, the director of federal tax policy at the liberal-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), argued that “proponents of capital gains tax breaks have always offered a weak argument that they encourage investment” but Trump’s proposal is more dubious given that it is only a temporary cut.
A temporary cut “is supported by no argument at all,” Wamhoff said, since “it would only reward investments made in the past while doing nothing to encourage new investment.”
In other words, a capital gains tax holiday would allow investors to sell off decades of past investments without paying any tax while doing nothing to boost new investment.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., slammed the administration’s proposal for ignoring the needs of average Americans.
“If you want to compare the need for us to change the capital gains tax, which, once again, once again, ignores the fact that there are people in our country that are hungry, and that there is some equivalence to that, I respectfully disagree,” she told Bloomberg. “There are certain things that are urgent.”
The capital gains tax holiday is just one of several tax cuts the administration is considering as part of its coronavirus relief effort. While House Democrats proposed a $3 trillion bill that would provide aid to states and local governments, extend unemployment benefits, and issue a new round of $1,200 payments, Senate Republicans have said the proposal is “dead on arrival” as they focus on more pro-corporate policies, like protecting companies from liability from coronavirus-related lawsuits.
The Trump administration is pushing to include a payroll tax cut, which Trump has called for repeatedly in lieu of direct payments to no avail for months, in the upcoming legislation.
Like the capital gains tax cut, a payroll tax cut would overwhelmingly benefit the richest Americans while doing little to boost the economy in the short-term.
A study by ITEP estimated that two-thirds of the benefits from the tax cut would go to the richest 20% of taxpayers. The payroll tax cut would also do nothing to help the 40-plus million Americans who have lost their jobs.
By comparison, the poorest 20% of Americans would receive just 2% of the benefits and the next poorest 20% of Americans would receive just 6% of the benefits.
“A payroll tax cut would help those lucky enough to keep their job and would provide a bigger break to those with more earnings,” the ITEP analysis said. “Sending checks to every household would be a far more effective economic stimulus because it would immediately put money in the hands of everyone who would likely spend it right away, pumping it back into the economy.”
The payroll tax is also used to fund Social Security and Medicare, which would inevitably see cuts if the revenues are slashed.
“Make no mistake: by pushing to cut off the program’s funding stream, President Trump is taking the first step toward dismantling Social Security,” warned Max Richtman, the head of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. “The president’s campaign to eliminate payroll taxes is a violation of his patently false promises to seniors ‘not to touch’ Social Security… Choking off Social Security’s funding stream is an existential threat to seniors’ earned benefits.”
Larry Kudlow, the director of the White House National Economic Council, also floated lowering the corporate tax rate for companies that “onshore” their supply chains from 21% to “about 10.5%”
Economists rejected the idea that such a corporate tax cut would help amid the pandemic.
The proposal is “like trying to graft supply-side Reaganism onto conservative populism,” Samuel Hammond, a policy expert at the conservative Niskanen Center,told The Washington Post. “A lower corporate tax rate probably won’t suffice to build an entirely new factory within U.S. borders.”
“It’s ridiculous. Companies moving their supply chains back from China is not the crisis to address when 30 million people are unemployed,” added Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at the freelancing marketplace Upwork. “This is a distraction at best and could be destructive at worst.”
House Democrats likewise rejected the plan.
“The current health crisis produced by multiple Administration failures, said Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Tex., who sits on the Ways and Means Committee, “hardly justifies another windfall for those at the top.”
The proposed tax cuts drew eye rolls from experts, who criticized Republicans for pushing tax cuts as a universal panacea.
“At this point it’s almost a pathology. Whatever the crisis, whatever the state of the economy, Republicans crave another tax cut for the rich,” wrote Washington Post economic columnist Catherine Rampell. “One possible explanation is self-interest: Some important Republican constituents live off their wealth rather than the sweat of their brows.”
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180?! 3/20
https://boingboing.net/2020/01/27/galt-underwater.html
Leading libertarian intellectuals are now disavowing the label (Tyler Cowan says he's now a "State Capacity Libertarian") thanks to the total failure of libertarianism to cope with climate change.
John Quiggin (previously) explores how, at the start of the climate debate, libertarians advocated for "market based" solutions, like tradeable emissions credits, something dubbed "free-market environmentalism." The model had been used successfully to fight acid rain, and it was appealing to libertarians as it "would supply incentives to find the most cost-effective path toward reducing emissions."
Climate activists weren't fond of the idea, favoring instead a limit on pollution itself (this traces a similar arc to the debate on smoking, which started with "sin taxes" on tobacco but really only made progress when these were augmented with absolute prohibitions on smoking in most places and strict curbs on the sale and marketing of tobacco products).
But once emissions credits became a reality, libertarians almost unanimously rejected them, and switched from "free market environmentalism" to straight-up climate denial. As Quiggin says, the problem with tradeable emissions is that it rebuts the core tenet of libertarianism: John Locke's idea that property rights arise spontaneously from nature, rather than being created by governments hoping to achieve specific policy goals.
But more deeply, "Affluent white men who don’t like being told what to do are by far the most important constituency for libertarianism. Such men would consider it a dreadful imposition to have to pay, whether directly or indirectly, for the right to drive a car or use air conditioning."
This created a steady-state in which the climate steadily worsened and libertarians steadily denied that their cities were underwater, on fire, or gripped by pandemics, repeating expensive talking points about solar cycles or crooked scientists who were hoping to dismantle capitalism (IOW: "Reality has a well-known leftist bias").
But Trump disrupted the steady state. When he took office, the libertarian frontrunners abandoned any pretense of commitment to anything except more power and money for people who were monied and powerful, leaving the few standards-bearers for the movement with no way forward. Even as the Cato Institute abandoned its climate denial stance, it still argued that the climate crisis couldn't be averted by state intervention, despite the fact that markets had totally failed to come to grips with it.
Quiggin reckons with the incoherence of markets-only thinking in his masterful 2019 book Economics in Two Lessons, which explores the power, limitations and dangers of using markets to solve our problems in a thoughtful and clear way.
Having abandoned intellectual credibility in the fight to stop climate action, libertarianism has no future as a movement. Trumpism will soon swallow up what’s left of its organizational structure. Individuals have a number of choices available, fromNiskanen-style “liberaltarianism” to the fantasy of “going Galt.” But the libertarian moment is well and truly over.
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Global warming is the ultimate refutation of Lockean propertarianism. No one can pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while leaving “enough and as good” for everyone else. It has taken thirty years, but this undeniable fact has finally killed the propertarian movement in the United States.
Libertarians Can’t Save the Planet [John Quiggin/Jacobin]
CAP-AND-TRADE / CATO INSTITUTE / CLIMATE / CLIMATE CRISIS / DENIALISM VS NIHILISM / FREE MARKET ENVIRONMENTALISM / LIBERATARIANISM / PEAK INDIFFERENCE / REALITY HAS A WELL-KNOWN LEFTIST BIAS / STATE CAPACITY LIBERTARIANS
The decline of libertarianism — also known as propertarianism — has inspired a lot of discussion in the past couple of years. The economist Tyler Cowen recently disavowed the label, affirming his commitment to a modified version of the philosophy that he calls “State Capacity Libertarianism.”
Cowen’s defection continues the exodus of intellectually serious figures from the libertarian milieu, most notably to the so-called liberaltarian Niskanen Center. Both Cowen and the Niskanen cohort have stressed the failure of mainstream libertarianism to formulate an honest response to the climate crisis.
Free-Market Environmentalism: Theory and Practice
When the issue of climate change first received serious attention in the 1990s, for a time it looked set to establish common ground between environmentalists and libertarians. There was much interest in the concept of “free-market environmentalism” or FME, drawing upon the work of British economist Ronald Coase, who had suggested that environmental problems could be resolved through the proper allocation of property rights. Terry Anderson of Montana State University exercised a strong influence in these debates.
FME’s key proposal for addressing climate change was the creation of tradable emissions permits, a model that had been successfully deployed in the case of sulfur dioxide emissions. According to this view, a market in permits would supply incentives to find the most cost-effective path toward reducing emissions, as long as there were appropriate limits on the volume of permits.
Most environmental activists greeted the idea of “rights to pollute” with suspicion: they argued for more direct controls, as part of a broader shift away from mass consumerism. But many were won over by the prospect of forming an effective coalition to press for decarbonization. By the time of the Kyoto conference in 1997, support for carbon prices as the most cost-effective long-term solution, to be implemented through internationally tradable permits, had become the dominant view. Twenty years later, this vision is finally being realized in the European Union, where high permit prices are driving coal-fired power out of existence.
Trading Places
But a funny thing happened on the way to Kyoto. Propertarians, who had often been keen on tradable permits as long as environmentalists opposed them, now rejected the idea with near unanimity, along with the rest of the political right. Since then, we have faced a paradoxical situation where they consider any kind of market-based solution to climate change unacceptable. Why did this happen?
The problem was to some extent philosophical. Propertarian thought relies heavily upon the Lockean fiction that property rights arise naturally, before the emergence of a state (defined broadly to include any kind of authority within a group, tribe, or nation). Obviously, no such rights could have existed when it came to the atmosphere, so emissions permits would have to be the creation of national governments working through global agreements. Admitting that states define and enforce property rights was too big a pill for many propertarians to swallow.
But the cultural barriers standing in the way of free-market environmentalism were even greater. Affluent white men who don’t like being told what to do are by far the most important constituency for libertarianism. Such men would consider it a dreadful imposition to have to pay, whether directly or indirectly, for the right to drive a car or use air conditioning. Environmentalists who insist that untrammeled individualism of all kinds has malign consequences lie at the opposite cultural pole.
However, this created a dilemma for propertarians. Having rejected both state- and market-led solutions to climate change, their only remaining option was to deny that the problem existed at all. This required tremendous intellectual dishonesty, supplied in large measure by hired guns who had won their spurs in earlier fights over passive smoking and the ozone layer. This didn’t trouble the libertarian ground troops, who clung tenaciously to their baseless self-image as the smartest guys in the room. Lacking any scientific, economic, or statistical knowledge to back up their opinions, they seized upon the innumerable talking points that the denial industry churned out.
All-In for Trump
Then Trump came along. He grasped — indeed, embodied — the reality that abstract notions of personal liberty were not what really appealed to the conservative base. Rather, it was the conviction that well-off white men should be free to think, speak, and act as they pleased, while the state clamps down on everyone else when they step out of line.
At the same time, two decades of climate change denialism fostered a nihilistic and crudely partisan attitude toward basic questions of truth or falsehood among conservatives. Trump substituted barefaced lies for the ponderous apologetics of the intellectual right, starting with the claim that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s.
After Trump’s election, the “libertarian moment” so widely touted just a few years ago gave way to a sudden collapse, with most of the movement’s intellectual leadership shifting in the opposite direction. Republican politicians seen as potential leaders of the future, such as Rand Paul and Mike Lee, went all-in for Trump, along with advocacy groups like FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth. The only exception was Michigan’s Justin Amash, who quit the Republican Party in 2019 and now faces almost certain defeat, sharing the fate of a handful of state-level Republicans who departed to join the Libertarian Party.
The remnants, clustered around the much-diminished Cato Institute, have no obvious way forward. The institute finally abandoned climate denialism last year, but it still has no answer for the climate crisis. The last remaining cheerleader for the “libertarian moment,” Nick Gillespie, offered a rather slippery response to Tyler Cowen’s criticism:
Whatever your beliefs and preferences might be on a given issue, the scale (and cost) of addressing, say, climate change is massive compared to delivering basic education, and with the latter at least, there’s no reason to believe that more state control or dollars will create positive outcomes.
On close inspection, Gillespie is just restating the standard libertarian view on education, while saying nothing at all about climate change, other than to acknowledge that it is a massive problem. He neither denies that “more state control or dollars” are needed, nor offers any alternative.
Having abandoned intellectual credibility in the fight to stop climate action, libertarianism has no future as a movement. Trumpism will soon swallow up what’s left of its organizational structure. Individuals have a number of choices available, from Niskanen-style “liberaltarianism” to the fantasy of “going Galt.” But the libertarian moment is well and truly over.
Global warming is the ultimate refutation of Lockean propertarianism. No one can pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while leaving “enough and as good” for everyone else. It has taken thirty years, but this undeniable fact has finally killed the propertarian movement in the United States.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Quiggin, an Australian economist at the University of Queensland, blogs at Crooked Timber.
no lnx
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A Texas judge has decided California officials suing the energy industry over climate change are talking out of both sides of their mouths, and the former top lawyer of the Golden State is disappointed in their actions.
It might be embarrassing, but California officials need to address their inconsistent claims, says Dan Lungren, California’s attorney general from 1991-1999 who recently penned an opinion piece on the subject in the *Sacramento Bee*.
Sued over the alleged future effects of climate change, Exxon’s argument (which has been signed off on by a Texas judge) is that the cities and counties alleging these impending disasters have failed to disclose them in their bond offerings.
“If this was happening in the private sector, I think I’d have a lawsuit for fraud,” said Lungren, who has also spent 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“I don’t think public entities should be held to such low standards that all we do is make sure they’re not found liable for intentional fraud. I would expect those acting in the name of the people to be held to a higher standard.”
The California officials might soon be forced to explain themselves. Exxon’s Texas strategy seeks to depose them and an attorney at Hagens Berman, which represents some of the California governments on a contingency fee.
On April 24, Tarrant County District Judge R.H. Wallace, Jr. signed proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, changing little from what Exxon is claiming.
“While the California municipalities alleged in their complaints against the energy companies that the impacts of climate change were knowable, quantifiable and certain, they told their investors the exact opposite,” the document says.
“These contradictions raise the question of whether the California municipalities brought these lawsuits for an improper purpose.”
The California counties of Marin, Santa Cruz and San Mateo and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Richmond and Imperial Beach have filed suit against several energy companies - including Exxon, Chevron and BP - over climate change. The company is also being targeted by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York.
Similar lawsuits have been filed by New York City and Boulder, CO.
San Mateo County’s complaint says it is “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” and that there is a 93% chance the county experiences a “devastating” flood before 2050. However, bond offerings in 2014 and 2016 noted that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur."
“I find it difficult to understand how, on one hand you can make a statement to the court with 92% certainty that these things are going to happen, and going to the people and saying it is unknown,” Lungren said.
As AG, Lungren was tasked with making sure state bond offerings were accurate – “Had we come across anything contrary to pleadings we were making with the courts, we would have corrected that.”
No matter how embarrassing it is, lawyers for the California plaintiffs should tell the judges presiding over their cases that they need to withdraw or amend their claims, Lungren said.
“If I were to find we inadvertently made statements in documents before the court that were contradicted by other documents – particularly those that the public is relying on the good faith offerings of the state - I would immediately take action to reconcile that,” Lungren said.
At a recent American Enterprise Institute event, an attorney representing Boulder noted that the bond offerings came with a statement regarding a final paper from the California Climate Change Center that said property in San Francisco Bay is vulnerable to impacts associated with sea-level rise.
But the cities did not present an opinion on the accuracy of those claims, which was noted by Competitive Enterprise Institute attorney who attended the event.
“You presume when you file, whether filing as an officer of the court or under oath, you’re saying what is contained in your document is truthful and factually correct,” Lungren said.
“So if you have two different documents contemporaneously - one before the court with respect to the lawsuit and the other under the various rules that say you have to have honest statements to potential investors, otherwise it’s subject to fraud – it’s at least hypocritical and a failure of legal responsibility in those instances.”
ref
https://legalnewsline.com/stories/511398628-in-suing-exxon-over-climate-change-boulder-is-hoping-company-s-deep-pockets-will-pay-for-its-left-wing-agenda-group-says
BOULDER, Colo. (Legal Newsline) – It remains to be seen if Exxon will fight the latest climate change lawsuit against it in the same way it is attacking the first round, by scrubbing municipal documents for evidence of hypocrisy by the public officials filing them.
According to a conservative group following the case, mounting such a defense might be overkill. The lawsuit filed by Boulder, Colo., and two Colorado counties is so frivolous, Exxon could end up seeking reimbursement for the costs of defending itself, according to Mountain States Legal Foundation.
William Perry Pendley, president of MSLF, says he isn't surprised that politicians in Boulder are going through Exxon's deep pockets "to pay for their costly, radical, left-wing boondoggles."
"But taxpayers who think at least they will not have to pay for this pricey misadventure and might even get some tax relief if it is successful, should think again," Pendley said.
"This lawsuit could not be more frivolous and if the judges do what other judges have done, legal sanctions and hefty fines will be imposed."
To defend itself from the California lawsuit, Exxon is seeking to depose government officials and a private lawyer in Texas court over whether their allegations of impending climate change-caused doom are contradicted by bond offerings that make no mention of it.
Asked if Boulder ever disclosed climate change-related threats to its property in any bond offerings, the City declined to comment.
It's unclear whether the bond argument is a possible defense for Exxon in Colorado, and the company did not return a request for comment.
As for Boulder, which filed its lawsuit with Boulder and San Miguel counties, its most recentofficial statement does not include references to climate change.
The official statement on acquisitions of land does not contain the terms “climate change,” “weather” or “global warming.”
Pendley said there is no science to support the lawsuit. Judges in the California lawsuits have yet to rule on motions to dismiss filed by the energy industry.
"Causation between the alleged inactions of the companies and the imagined harms is missing in its entirety and the demand that whimsical injuries be redressed (‘Help us pay to paint our streets white,’ one imagines) is laughable," Pendley said.
Addressing the bond topic last week was David Bookbinder of the Niskanen Center, which is one of two nonprofits representing Boulder on a pro bono basis. A third firm is taking as much as a 20% contingency fee, according to Boulder County's website.
Bookbinder was a speaker at an American Enterprise Institute discussion of California climate litigation the same day his lawsuit was being filed in a Colorado state court. He used an expletive to describe Exxon’s strategy and said that he was “ashamed” of the law firm representing the company.
“If we needed more evidence that no one thinks this was improper or fraudulent or disingenuous, my former adversaries in the plaintiffs securities bar – those people are extremely aggressive. The time lapse between bad news coming out and lawsuits filed by what were called the ‘strike bar’could be measured in, you know, one day, 48 hours, 72 hours, maybe four days – 96 hours,” Bookbinder said.
“There have been no lawsuits filed against any of these cities for their bond disclosures. That should tell you something as well.”
In 2017, the counties of Marin, Santa Cruz and San Mateo and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz and Imperial Beach filed suit against dozens of energy companies, including Exxon and 17 other Texas-based businesses, over climate change. The company has previously been targeted by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York.
“It is reasonable to infer that the municipalities brought these lawsuits not because of a bona fide belief in any tortious conduct by the defendants or actual damage to their jurisdictions, but instead to coerce ExxonMobil and others operating in the Texas energy sector to adopt policies aligned with those favored by local politicians in California,” attorneys for the company wrote.
In doing so, they must have lied to potential investors in their respective bond offerings, the company claims.
Statements made to potential investors contradict allegations made by the municipalities when they sued the energy industry, the filing says.
For example, San Mateo County’s complaint says it is “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” and that there is a 93% chance the county experiences a “devastating” flood before 2050. However, bond offerings in 2014 and 2016 noted that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur."
Bookbinder noted that the offerings came with a statement regarding a final paper from the California Climate Change Center that said property in San Francisco Bay is vulnerable to impacts associated with sea-level rise.
But the cities did not present an opinion on the accuracy of those claims, which was noted by Devin Watkins, an attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who attended the event.
The CEI has called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate the matter.
Panel member Andrew Grossman, a partner at BakerHostetler, said he isn’t sure whether there is evidence of securities fraud or violations of other regulations.
“It seems like it’s enough, at the very least, that it would be warranted, and that it is warranted, for there to be an investigation, for there to be somebody, you know, for the regulators who look at these things to take a look at them and determine, you know, did the cities live up to their obligations,” he said.
“If there was something that was inconsistent in the lawsuits versus the disclosures, honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me because, probably, nobody thought about it. And if they are consistent, well good for them. I guess they got it right.”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/us-think-tank-shuts-down-prominent-center-challenged-climate-science
:{:{E&E News:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:
The Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., quietly shut down a program that for years sought to raise uncertainty about climate science, leaving the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch without an office dedicated to global warming.
The move came after Pat Michaels, a climate scientist who rejects mainstream researchers’ concerns about rising temperatures, left Cato earlier this year amid disagreements with officials in the organization.
“They informed me thatthey didn’t think their vision of a think tank was in the science business, and so I said, ‘OK, bye,’” Michaels said in an interview yesterday. “There had been some controversy going around the building for some time, so things got to a situation where they didn’t work out.”
A spokeswoman said Cato’s shuttering of the Center for the Study of Science does not represent a shift in the institute’s position on human-caused climate change. But the think tank moved decisively to close down the science wing that was overseen by Michaels. Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and former adjunct scholar, also left the center.
“While it is true that, with the departure of Pat Michaels, we have deactivated our Center for the Study of Science, we continue to work on science policy issues,” Khristine Brookes, the spokeswomen, wrote in an email. She didn’t mention climate change.
Michaels is among a small number of academics with legitimate climate science credentials who downplay the human contribution to rising temperatures. He is a frequent guest on Fox News and other conservative outlets, and he has spent years attacking efforts to address climate change. He was influential in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and he helped turn the GOP away from climate policy at a time when conservatives were embracing it (*Climatewire*, Dec. 5, 2018). That shift has endured.
Cato also is no longer affiliated with Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has long been critical of established climate science. Lindzen was a distinguished fellow at the think tank. It’s unclear when he left Cato, and Brookes declined to comment on personnel issues.
Maue, who worked with Michaels, said other think tanks cultivated closer relationships with the Trump White House.
“In terms of climate change and regulation, Cato was not a big player at all in the Trump administration,” he said.
Michaels was not asked to take part in the White House plan for an “adversarial” review of climate science related to the National Climate Assessment. Michaels has been critical of government climate reports for decades and has published research in major scientific journals. Both of those are seen as attributes by recruiters in charge of finding experts for the White House panel.
Michaels has spent years attacking climate modeling, which he claims ran hot, despite evidence from NASA that contradicted his claims and demonstrated that models were largely accurate. He has also portrayed academic researchers in climate-related fields as beholden to funding that incentivizes them to produce alarming research. The Cato Institute has received millions of dollars from the Koch network, the Mercer Family Foundation, Exxon Mobil Corp. and other foundations that oppose regulations.
Maue said theNiskanen Center,which was founded by Cato alumnus Jerry Taylor, has attracted conservative followers with its middle-of-the-road climate policy. That’s appealing to businesses that help fund think tanks and to those that might support policy positions on climate in the post-Trump era, he said.
“That’s attractive to business and politicians who don’t really want to see the climate flame wars continuing on,” Maue said in an interview. “I think many businesses have taken an approach to what’s going to happen and, assuming Trump isn’t around in 2021, what’s coming down the pike.”
Still, Maue said that one of Michaels’ lasting contributions in the climate policy debate was to create a position where one can accept that humans are affecting the climate but not as much as the vast majority of scientists claim. It’s now a de facto position for many Republican lawmakers who acknowledge that humans are contributing to climate change but don’t want to restrict fossil fuel use.
“Where Pat’s influence is is in the term ‘lukewarming,’” Maue said. “Lukewarming is not climate denial; it’s just that he’s taking, and most of us on this side of the issue believe in lower climate sensitivity. We don’t believe there’s going to be 5 degrees of warming; we figure it’s at the lower end of 1.5 degrees.”
The vast majority of climate scientists believe that the world could warm 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels within the next two decades and accelerate through the end of the century, with some estimates placing warming above 5°C.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. Copyright 2019. E&E provides essential news for energy and environment professionals at :{:{www.eenews.net:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:
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forbes bs
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/legalnewsline/2018/04/27/judge-ca-cities-alleging-doom-in-climate-change-lawsuits-sold-investors-a-different-story/#54681cea10e1
California officials who are suing large energy companies are telling two contradictory stories while taking part in a targeted effort featuring state attorneys general, private lawyers and Rockefeller money, a Texas judge has found.
On April 24, Tarrant County District Judge R.H. Wallace, Jr. signed off on proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, changing little from what Exxon is claiming – that lawsuits from California cities and counties are the product of an alleged conspiracy and assert that near-certain, climate change-caused doom is coming, even though previous bond offerings made to potential investors say such catastrophes can’t be predicted.
The judge’s filingwas obtained by Energy In Depth, a research program of the Independent Petroleum Association of America.
“While the California municipalities alleged in their complaints against the energy companies that the impacts of climate change were knowable, quantifiable and certain, they told their investors the exact opposite,” Wallace's filing says.
“These contradictions raise the question of whether the California municipalities brought these lawsuits for an improper purpose.”
The California counties of Marin, Santa Cruz and San Mateo and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Richmond and Imperial Beach have filed suit against several energy companies - including Exxon, Chevron and BP - over climate change. The company is also being targeted by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York.
Exxon took the fight to Texas in January by asking that it be allowed to depose the officials who filed these cases, as well as Hagens Berman lawyer Matt Pawa. The firm is representing some of the plaintiffs on a contingency fee.
The depositions could lead to a lawsuit alleging the California cases were brought in bad faith.
Statements made to potential investors contradict allegations made by the municipalities when they sued the energy industry, Exxon argued. For example:
San Mateo County’s complaint says it is “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” and that there is a 93% chance the county experiences a “devastating” flood before 2050. However, bond offerings in 2014 and 2016 noted that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur."
At a recent American Enterprise Institute event, an attorney representing Colorado governments in climate change cases noted that the bond offerings came with a statement regarding a final paper from the California Climate Change Center that said property in San Francisco Bay is vulnerable to impacts associated with sea-level rise.
But the cities did not present an opinion on the accuracy of those claims, which was noted by Competitive Enterprise Institute attorney who attended the event.
The California cases came five years after a “playbook” was discussed at a 2012 conference in La Jolla, CA. It is being carried out by Pawa, the AGs of New York and Massachusetts and the California local governments, Exxon said.
The judge’s findings of fact agree.
“During the conference, participants discussed strategies to ‘[w]in [a]cess to [i]nternal [d]ocuments’ of energy companies, like ExxonMobil, that could be used to obtain leverage over these companies,” the filing says.
“The conference participants concluded that using law enforcement powers and civil litigation to ‘maintain[] pressure on the industry that could eventually lead to its support for legislative and regulatory responses to global warming.’ One commentator observed, ‘Even if your ultimate goal might be to shut down a company, you still might be wise to start out by asking for compensation for injured parties.’"
In 2016, Pawa met with members of the philanthropic Rockefeller Family Fund. The draft agenda said the goals of his campaign included convincing the public that Exxon is a corrupt institution that “has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm,” as well as forcing public officials to distance themselves from the company by refusing campaign donations and rejecting requests for meetings.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund recently awarded a $200,000 grant to the Niskanen Center, which is representing the City of Boulder in its lawsuit against Exxon and another company.
“The draft agenda notes that participants planned to use ‘AGs’ and ‘Tort()’ suits to ‘get() discovery’ and ‘creat(e) scandal,’” the judge’s filing says.
Those AGs attempted to hide their coordination with Pawa, the judge says.
"At the press conference, Attorney General Schneiderman discussed the need to regulate the energy industry's speech on climate change, just as Potential Defendant Pawa had urged at La Jolla and at the Rockefeller meeting," the filing says.
The judge also found that this effort was done to chill Texas-based free speech (Exxon’s statements public statements about climate change), so jurisdiction is proper in his court.
==
According to conservative columnist Matt Lewis, conservatives are setting the stage to primary Donald Trump and take back the Republican Party.
In a piece for the Daily Beast entitled, “Here’s How the GOP Resistance Takes Down Trump in 2020,” Lewis notes that longtime conservative activists are already working behind the scenes to push at least one challenger into a race against Trump in the hopes that others will join in and bring some Republican voters back.
“Once considered a preposterous idea (“It’s Trump’s party!” “The takeover is complete!!”), it looks like Donald Trump will face a primary challenge,” Lewis writes. “If you read conservative sites as I do, you’ll know that a loosely formed Greek chorus of conservative Trump critics has been predicting this for some time now.”
According to the conservative columnist, quoting Jerry Taylor, head of the Niskanen Center which hosted a conservative anti-Trump get-together, activists are not looking for “a candidate representing ‘Reaganite conservatism in the Bill Buckley tradition’ who wouldn’t have a shot against Trump, since—as Taylor notes—Fox News now defines what constitutes ‘conservative.’
Instead, they will first look at Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who was described as “a more experienced, competent, ethical populist than Trump,” with Taylor saying, “…a weakened Trump ends up fighting a weird two-front primary war with Hogan on his populist left and Ann Coulter for president on his populist right.”
“Indeed, Hogan, a cancer survivor who has been elected twice in the blue state of Maryland, but is largely unknown outside his state, would pose a very different challenge from the kind of adversaries (think Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz) that Trump dispatched in 2016,” Lewis writes. “
“Back to the plan,” Lewis continues. “It goes like this. Hogan starts softening up Trump. And then, step two is this: Something magical happens. Maybe it comes from Robert Mueller, maybe it’s an economic downturn, maybe it’s Trump using emergency powers, or maybe it’s some external event nobody sees coming. But something big happens.”
“Maybe even—and this is arguably the best scenario for the anti-Trump forces—a weakened Trump ends up fighting a weird two-front primary war with Hogan on his populist left and Ann Coulter for president on his populist right,” he added. “Now comes the coup de grace: In an effort to save the party from imploding, Nikki Haley is reluctantly drafted into the race. She rides in on a white horse and instantly becomes consensus choice of what is left of the Republican Party.”
Admitting that it is a fantasy plan, Lewis suggested sometimes you have to “shoot for the moon.”
“Just as Ronald Reagan staked out the future by running (and losing) in 1976, presenting an alternate vision to Trump for young Republicans is a worthwhile endeavor,” he concluded.
You can read the whole piece here — subscription required.
AN
==
https://www.desmogblog.com/topics/niskanen-center
2017 mar
There are lots of attributes that seem to work as reliable predictors that a person or group will reject the science of human-caused climate change and the risks that come from it.
In recent years, for example, being a Republican or a Tea Party member has gone hand in hand with branding the science of climate change as a giant scam.
If you’re one of those conspiracy theorists like Britain’s David Icke or Infowars founder (and apparent President Trump influencer) Alex Jones, then you’ll also be placing climate change into the file marked “illuminati hoax.”
But perhaps the largest, most active, and influential group pushing climate science denial is America’s collective of so-called free-market conservative “think tanks” that want to cut the size of government and claim to be defending your freedom and liberty — examples include the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
President Donald Trump has been drawing heavily from this collective as he fills his administration.
So when one Washington, D.C.–based libertarian think tank released a briefing paper on climate science earlier this month, casual observers might have expected the same messages of doubt, denial, and conspiracy. But they would have been wrong.
Degenerate Narratives
“We find a lot of degenerate narratives about climate science amongst libertarians and conservatives in D.C.,” saidJoseph Majkut, director of climate science at the Niskanen Center.
Majkut, a Princeton graduate in atmospheric and ocean sciences, has written a dispassionate paper explaining the common myths held as true by many conservatives.
“The climate science debate that you see occurring at fairly high levels of government in the United States is decades behind real climate science,” Majkut told DeSmog.
He says with his briefing paper, he wanted to subject some of the common arguments to a “durability test.”
“How might a policy maker think about climate science,” he asked. “How might you view the sort of conclusions that you can take from the climate science community — are they durable, what are the common objectives that you cede to them from experts that might lie outside the consensus and might challenge it and how do those objections hold up?”
The paper notes the world is warming, global temperature records are reliable, and there has been no compelling evidence offered that the cause of warming is anything other than human activity. While none of this is news to climate scientists, it will be news to many conservatives.
In summary, Majkut’s paper concludes that “even at the lowest reasonable values,” the risks of human-caused climate change are “so large” that they easily explain the concerns of the so-often disparaged “climate advocates.”
“If you are committed to the politics of liberty, then that should have very little to do with what you think the conclusions of climate science are,” said Majkut.
The paper does not offer suggestions on policy, but Niskanen thinks there should be a revenue-neutral tax on fossil fuel energy “at the point of production” — a policy proposal not a million miles away from the kind backed by former NASAclimate scientist James Hansen and a growing (but still tiny) group of Republican members of Congress.
Climate Change as a Libertarian Cause
Niskanen, Majkut said, focuses its efforts on members of Congress and people working in the government administration, “and the people who influence how they think about these issues … the staff and policy analysts.”
He said: “Part of our effort is to say that, as a libertarian organization, we are not in the business of growing the government and we are not in the business of picking winners and losers in energy policy, but we actually think this is a legitimate issue and a lot of the narratives that you rely on are wrong.”
Niskanen was founded in 2014 by Jerry Taylor — a once-staunch opponent of action on climate change who spent more than 20 years at the Cato Institute.
Taylor, whose younger brother is the Heartland Institute’s James Taylor, has explained how his views on climate change went through a slow but fundamental change.
As the evidence for human-caused climate change got stronger, Taylor said it became “harder and harder” for him to dismiss it, particularly as a risk management issue.
Majkut said what convinced his boss was “simple messages coming from trusted messengers and him then realizing that the scientific narratives that he had embraced were wrong and faulty and weak.”
He says now, the issue of climate change should be seen as “a massive exercise in risk management.”
“In no other context — national security or whatever — would [Jerry] think it acceptable to just entirely ignore a large scale planetary non-diversifiable risk.”
Majkut argues that when it comes to the protection of property rights and people’s freedoms — basic tenets of libertarian and conservative ideology — too many get their analysis back to front.
“Our world view is sympathetic to the goals of restraining government and letting markets work themselves out,” he said. “But part of letting markets work themselves out is not stomping on the property rights, the freedom and lives of people across our borders and people in the future. We think climate change is informative, we think it’s real, and we should do more about it and climate change puts at risk those things.”
Majkut admits the Niskanen Center is in a unique position. In many other areas, Niskanen’s staff would share some common ground with advocates for liberty and small government.
“On climate we are distinct, but what we are saying is that accepting climate science as informative should not really affect your political identity.”
This week, the Heartland Institute will be in D.C. to host one of its regular conferences promoting climate science denialism. Will Majkut be going along?
“No,” he said before placing his tongue firmly in his cheek to add: “I’m on a fake news diet.”
==
otm 5/7/17
http://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the-media-2017-05-05
==
http://www.globalpossibilities.org/climate-politics-and-the-disruption-of-conservative-orthodoxy/
HUFFINGTON POST, BY CARL POPE, SIERRA CLUB
The Republican reaction to Pope Francis’s climate encyclical, juxtaposed to the Democratic congressional rebellion against President Obama on trade, suggest that climate and energy are powerfully disrupting the grid-locked orthodoxy which has dominated American politics for the last decade.
The Tea Party-Koch Brothers wing of conservatism, (and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party), are clearly on the defensive.
The most significant “tell” is the flailingresponses of reactionaries to the looming threat posed to climate denial by Francis’s Laudato Si.
Jeb Bush’s latest flip-flop — first asserting in New Hampshire that he wouldn’t take his economics from his church, and then backpedaling in Iowa — was merely the most recent spasm of right-wing discomfort.
Earlier Rick Santorum’s sputteringly strove to explain — on Fox news — why he was scolding the Pope, a non-scientist, to remain silent on climate, while Santorum himself, as a politician, had both right and duty to his own climate pulpit.
The assault began when the Heartland Institute tried to bully the Pope — unsuccessfully — into withholding or water down the encyclical by arguing that some of the voices urging climate action — UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs — opposed the Catholic Church on abortion. Indeed the overriding, major chord of the conservative assault on the encyclical is that Christian values only govern sex and family — economics, geopolitics, and climate should be left to secular, capitalist ideology.
Francis’s allies within the Church understand what this means better than outsiders. Archbishop Pedro Barreto Jimeno of Huancayo, Peruwarned that Francis“will have many critics, because they want to continue setting rules of the game in which money takes first place. We have to be prepared for those kinds of attacks.”
The Pope took his critics into account —making it clear within the textof Laudato Si that his approach to the environment is firmly rooted in traditional Catholic views of the uniqueness of human life and the need for a non-market based common good — drawing a line clarifying that he is not preaching a “new age” form of Catholicism.
(Reactionaries’ bewilderment that the Catholic Church’s option for the poor includes protecting them from greenhouse enhanced droughts, heat waves and rising oceans echoes their glib assumption that a presumed “social conservatism” would fence in American Hispanic voters, overriding their communitarian economic and environmental attitudes, and allowing Republicans to retain Hispanic voter loyalty while still promising to “self-deport” 11 million of their relatives.)
It is more a gale than a fresh breeze when the most ground-breaking Pope since John XXIII links poverty and climate, in a way which leaves the far-right sputtering — (just as it was a powerful symbol when a daughter of the Church, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, broke with President Obama on tradeciting climate concerns.)
Indeed, something fundamental is shifting this summer in political and cultural attitudes around climate.
Compare this year to the summer that preceded Copenhagen, the dominant 2009 news on climate was the grinding failure of the US Senate and the Obama Administration on climate and energy legislation. And the rest of the news was equally dispiriting — no progress, little ambition, cynicism about the prospects.
Six months out from Paris, a new dynamism is palpable. Hawaii justcommitted itself to 100 percent clean energy by 2045.The California Senatepledged the world’s seventh largest economy to a 50 percent emission cut by 2030 – including petroleum. The first quarter witnessed a stunning 76 percent growth in US residential solar installations over the previous year. Georgia joined the growing list of states that permit homeowners to generate their own rooftop solar electrons, while giant (and historically conservative) Georgia Power proclaims that it will promote and grow clean power just as aggressively as it previously dominated coal and nuclear.
Globally renewable energy was more than half of added capacity. Chinese emissions declined in the first quarterby an amount equal to the total carbon pollution of Great Britain, Mexico became the first major emerging market to pledge solid emission reductions, and Ethiopia offered to reduce its projected 2030 carbon pollution by 64 percent — if climate finance is made available. Alberta tossed out its pro-tar sands Conservative Premier and elected the first left-leaning government in its history.
Led by “Climate Chancellor” Angela Merkel, :{the world’s major industrial nations called for a binding climate treaty at the “upper end” of the ambition levels:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{ required by climate science,:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}: and agreed that the era of fossil fuels must end this century. The Saudi Oil Minister signaled that his kingdom fears the era of oil by end by mid-century. And 199 nations meeting in Germany reached a breakthrough agreement on how to curb deforestationand lay the groundwork for an eventual reduction – through forest and grassland sequestration – in atmospheric carbon concentrations.
The price of oil remained mired below $70; OPEC agreed again to keep pumping and fighting for market share; and the share value of coal companies, already down by three-quarters, just kept slumping. (Purchasers two months ago of Peabody junk bonds have already lost 18 percent of their money.)
Sensing a change in the landscape, Europe’s six biggest oil and gas companies abandoned their fossil fuel common front with coal, and threw the black rock and its shareholders under the bus. Re-branding themselves as “almost gas” companies (shades of John Brown and BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” phase) Shell, BP, Total, Eni and British gas called on the international community to levy a global carbon taxthat would drive electricity generators from coal to gas.
This is exciting news for climate. But there are signs that this climate and energy revolution is also breaking apart the frozen tectonic plates which have locked American conservatism into an orthodoxy of inaction not just on global warming, but on almost every problem challenging our society.
No longer do all conservatives join Koch, Heartland, and Republican Presidential candidates in dismissing conservative engagement with climate solutions. Not only are both libertarians (the new NiskanenCenter)and business conservatives (American Enterprise Institute)alike debating the need for conservative solutions like carbon taxes, but the first conservative climate progress mega-donor, Jay Faison has surfaced, pledging to spend $175 million on encouraging his movement to come to grips with atmospheric reality.
Over the past decade — ever since the nascent Tea Party partly seized control of Republican politics, shutting down George W. Bush’s forgotten campaign promise to clean up carbon pollution, rebuffing his immigration reforms, and eventually thrusting his “compassionate conservatism” into the fiery abyss of conservative heresy — a new Republican orthodoxy locked down the primary fault zone in American politics, where new realities and social change forces collide with conservative political, cultural, and economic habits.
The Supreme Court’s “money is speech and corporations are people” jurisprudence weakened the ability of business elites to buffer Tea Party pressures on elected Republicans. Even such routine public business as the reauthorization of infrastructure spending or the Export-Import Banks ground to a halt. Nothing, it seemed, was possible.
Tectonic drift isn’t dangerous when the plates glide and rub against each other, releasing their energy gradually. But when they freeze up, the “thrust fault” that results accumulates energy until it cracks, relieving stored up stress in a few seconds, and creating new landscapes and mountain ranges. And when three moving “oceanic” plates (demography, globalization, and climate) converge on the stationary continental plate of American conservatism, the eventual outcome, while unpredictable, is certain to be spectacular.
The crack-up has begun — and surprisingly it seems that climate, not Hispanic voting blocks or global competition, may be the disruption that shatters conservative orthodoxy
==
pal of carl pope sierra 5/15
e energy and climate waters, it appears, are finally getting safer for thoughtful conservatives to test and navigate. The complete shut-down of conservative dialogue about climate solutions which followed John McCain’s 2008 defeat (reinforced by the 2010 defeat of South Carolina Republican Bob Inglis over his climate leadership) appears to be softening. Indeed, libertarian and conservative intellectuals who opposed policy action on climate even during the 2000-2008 period when many Republican politicians looked for appropriately conservative climate solutions are now calling for such actions.
One bellwether event is the launch of a new libertarian think-tank, the Niskanen Center, focusing heavily on climate and energy and led by Jerry Taylor, who served for many years as the Cato Institute’s energy maven until he decided to strike out on his own pathway.
Taylor (a friend and colleague) never denied or debated climate science. He did argue against action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. His view was that a) climate change, while real, didn’t warrant the kind of action environmentalists were demanding b) if it turned out global warming required big solutions, those solutions would be anathema to conservatives c) those solutions would also be so expensive that they would be easy for conservatives to beat in the political arena.
Taylor has now changed is views. He believes, and is disseminating on the right, a new paradigm a) evidence on the risks of extreme climate change warrants, in purely market terms, much higher prices on GHG emissions as a market measure b) Carbon taxes can be deployed as a solution with an acceptable risk that they become so bloated that they significantly increase the overall size and burden of government c) Public and elite sentiment for action has become so strong that if conservatives do not offer market based solutions, environmentalists will impose regulatory solutions because the politics has changed.
Taylor’s view—climate action is something conservatives should support—aligns him with an earlier libertarian who came around, Jonathan Adler of Case Western. (Adler, as late as 2000, was arguing that the only measures warranted to deal with climate were those which deregulated energy markets. But by 2008 he was searching for conservative solutions. Adler was preceded by Ronald Bailey, who in 2005 concluded that scientifically, the evidence strongly suggested greenhouse gas produced global warming.)
Niskanen Center has also posted a very intriguing poll done this spring of oil and gas industry insiders, showing that 75 percent of the industry believes that global warming is either very or somewhat serious, and 58 percent thought dealing with it should be a major government priority.
[img]
Taylor doesn’t cite it, but there is an additional major factor which may have caused a lot of people to shift their view on climate policy: in 1997 when Kyoto was passed, low carbon alternatives to fossil fuels were extraordinarily higher in cost. Now the cost difference between coal generated power and wind and solar is much smaller; in many markets renewables are cheaper. (And in the U.S. natural gas is also impacting the economics of coal.) Electric vehicles are, on a lifetime basis, less costly than many conventional gasoline drive trains. And technologies to greatly increase the energy productivity of our economy have advanced by leaps and bounds. Any reasonable guess on the cost of efficiently decarbonizing our economy has dropped dramatically (even as climate science has made clear that the level of carbon cuts needed is much bigger.)
It’s been clear for many years to practitioners on both sides—if not the media—that the conservative clam-up on climate was not about the problem, but the solutions. When Taylor debated me in 1995 at the University of Wisconsin, he was blunt, “If climate warrants significant solutions, they will be global, majoritarian, and governmental—all the things the right hates.” At a Trans-Partisan Forum in Gold Lake Colorado in 2005 a group of very prominent conservative leaders, exposed to an early version of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, summarized their tribal faith as “the planet is robust, economic freedom is weak” and one participant conceded to me, “we are terrified that climate change solutions will feed the big government beast, Leviathan.” But there were still conservative voices with the strength to call for action, just as an insurance policy. Even Mike Huckabee joked in 2008, “if the Lord sends a flood, it’s our job to stack up the sand bags.” When McCain lost, shut. Now it seems to be, cautiously, sliding open again.
Taylor is not alone. The American Enterprise Institute back in 2012 conducted a series of secret dialogues about a carbon tax. When the secret leaked out, the National Journal savaged AEI, mockingly asking, “What are they thinking about?”Now AEI has set up a public set of forums, featuring a Democratic Congressman who has introduced a carbon tax bill. Inglis who has been toiling in the academic vineyards at George Mason University, is getting much more public traction for his work on a carbon tax. Jeb Bush, historically self-categorized as a climate skeptic, recently tentatively suggestedthat he might be worried about climate change.
This is big stuff—and not just for climate policy. The shut-down of dialogue on energy and climate which occurred after 2008—in my view driven by Koch and fossil fuel money and wedge politics as opposed genuine conservative disbelief in climate science—was part of a larger disfunction in American politics. Instead of arguing about values, priorities and solutions, the right and left drifted into almost theological debates about reality. That’s not what our constitution was intended to accommodate, and our political system for the past five years has signally failed to operate effectively in this atmosphere. And as Taylor points out, neither conservatives nor liberals bring much intellectual heft to the question of precisely how atmospheric concentrations of different heat retaining gasses will influence the weather and climate—the rainfall over the next decade in California will not be influenced by my views—very different than Jerry’s—on the proper balance between community and individualism.
Let’s be clear. Taylor (or Inglis, or AEI) and I don’t agree on the right mix of energy and climate policy. And we probably never will—our values and political (not meteorological) assumptions vary too much. But perhaps we can now have public conversations out of which our differences might narrow—and some really bad ideas might at least be let go of by both sides. Galileo was not entirely right. But as long as the Inquisition intimidated believing Christians from entertaining and debating his ideas, the spots where he was wrong were never uncovered. That’s where we have been on climate. If I am reading the political weather correctly, and dialogue is about to resume, that is an altogether good thing, which will enable me to explain to Jerry Taylor why I think he is dead wrong on many topics—and vice versa.
And by the way—if I am right that one of the forces opening up dialogue is that, really, the cost of low carbon energy vs. fossil fuels is no longer a big deal—it does suggest that conservatives like Jerry were right in saying that as long as climate solutions meant significant sacrifices, democratic societies were unlikely to embrace them. The engineers and entrepreneurs changed that reality—not the atmospheric modellers.
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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Jerry_Taylor
:{
}:
Jerry Taylor is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank, and a climate change mitigation skeptic.
Views
Taylor said he opposes government action to mitigate climate change and believes "adaptation is a cheaper and more effective way to reduce the damages associated with anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Mitigation will likely do more harm to human well-being than good."[1]
Education
Taylor reportedly attended the University of Iowa, majoring in political science.
Career
A biographical note on Cato's website states that Taylor has "served on several congressional advisory bodies and has testified frequently on Capitol Hill regarding various energy and environmental policy matters. He is the author or coauthor of numerous Cato policy studies addressing energy taxes, the oil market, electricity regulation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainable development, and trade and the environment. He has also contributed to several anthologies, including The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2007), Energy & American Society – 13 Myths (2007), The Republican Revolution 10 Years Later (2005), Earth Report 2000 (2000), China as a Global Economic Power (1997), and Market Liberalism (1993)."[2]
Affiliations
Also, "Taylor is a member of the International Association for Energy Economics and has refereed articles for their publication, The Energy Journal. His is also an adjunct scholar at the Institute for Energy Research."[2]
Ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council
Jerry Taylor spoke at the 2001 ALEC Task Force Meeting in New York, NY on August 3, 2001.
| About ALEC |
|---|
|
is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills. Learn more at the Center for Media and Democracy's ALECexposed.org, and check out breaking news on our PRWatch.org site. |
Articles and resources
Related SourceWatch articles
References
- ↑ email to ahaynes, 2011-11-01
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Jerry Taylor - Cato Institute: Policy Scholars. Cato Institute. Retrieved on 2011-11-01.
External links
Exchange with Michael Tobis
- Michael Tobis (2007-12-10). The only way to a soft landing is down. Grist. Retrieved on 2011-11-01.
- Jerry Taylor (2007-12-12). Cato’s Jerry Taylor responds to Michael Tobis. Grist. Retrieved on 2011-11-01.
- Michael Tobis (2007-12-12). Cato Dude Replies. Only In It For The Gold. Retrieved on 2011-11-01.
Exchange re Cato ad; libertarians and climate change
- Jerry Taylor (2009-04-02). Libertarians & Climate Change. National Review Online. Retrieved on 2011-11-01.
- An excellent rejoinder: Julian Sanchez (2009-04-06). Climate Change and Argumentative Fallacies. Julian Sanchez. Retrieved on 2011-11-01.
"We’re accustomed to calling the “argument from authority” a fallacy, but in fact, that’s what the vast majority of us have to go on most of the time. Provided you ensure that authority’s authority actually applies to the field in question, it’s as good a strategy as any. ..."
| This article is a stub. You can help by expanding it. |
bs: Jerry Taylor is among the most widely cited and influential critics of federal energy and environmental policy in the nation. Taylor is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and National Review and appears regularly on CNBC, NPR, Bloomberg Radio, the BBC, and Fox News. His op-eds on public policy have appeared in the pages of The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and most other major dailies. His extended essays on energy policy have appeared in The Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, The Columbia Journal of International Affairs, Limes: The Italian Journal of Geopolitics, The Milken Institute Review, and Regulation magazine.
Taylor has served on several congressional advisory bodies and has testified frequently on Capitol Hill regarding various energy and environmental policy matters. He is the author or coauthor of numerous Cato policy studies addressing energy taxes, the oil market, electricity regulation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainable development, and trade and the environment. He has also contributed to several anthologies, including The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2007), Energy & American Society — 13 Myths (2007), The Republican Revolution 10 Years Later (2005), Earth Report 2000 (2000), China as a Global Economic Power (1997), and Market Liberalism (1993).
Taylor is a member of the International Association for Energy Economics and has refereed articles for their publication, The Energy Journal.
Niskanen Center - Improving Policy, Advancing Liberty
https://niskanencenter.org/
1.
About · Niskanen Notes · Niskanen Immigration Policy ... · Climate
Niskanen Center - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niskanen_Center
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**Revenue (2015)**: $1,954,786
Founder: Jerry Taylor
History · Goals and guidelines · Policy areas · People
==
Jerry Taylor - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Taylor
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www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-pope/let-the-dialogue-resume_b_7173440.html
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