Climate change scam massive payday for lawyers and 2300+ lobbyists--follow the money

• The livelihoods of thousands of lawyers and lobbyists are invested in advancement of the global warming scam. Hence the daily flood of hysterical articles from complicit media.

NY Times: "Climate lobbyists are flooding Capitol Hill...

• Offset opportunities gain a growing following

Supporters of carbon offsets, or projects that remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere through things such as

• methane digesters at dairy farms," (for animal emissions)

(NY Times): "are watching action in the House Agriculture Committee closely, according to one lobbyist. Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) announced this month that he was soliciting the opinions of more than 400 agricultural, environmental, scientific and educational groups on "the different options being considered in Congress to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

• The carbon capture sector also has a growing set of actors looking outside big energy bills for a little help. Clean Energy Systems, a seller of power-plant turbine systems, is pressing for grants for small companies after the stimulus bill emphasized large projects.

Funding tends to go for big demonstration projects that aim to grab a half-million tons of C02, squeezing out promising players that might hold a breakthrough if they could get support for small tests, said

• Jason Larrabbee, a company lobbyist....

Even for those focused on cap-and-trade legislation, the types of advocates get more diverse by the day. A recent report from the Center for Public Integrity found that the number of

• climate lobbyists tripled in the past five years to at least
• 2,340 individuals.

Waiting for the 'litigation stage'

Big corporations like Shell Oil Co. have mentioned global warming on Senate documents in the past few months, but much of the surge came from

• new players like investment banks, retailers and agribusiness.

There also has been a jump in lobbying from companies touting products with a claimed climate benefit.

• ImageTree, for example, doled out several thousand dollars in 2008 to promote its software that helps measure the amount of carbon in forests.

Then there are the immigrants from the other side of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Australian National University, for example, lists

• climate change as a major focus in 2009 official lobbying documents.

BlueNext, a French company active in the European carbon market, just hired Washington, D.C.-based

• Natsource to lobby on climate change in "domestic and international agreements."

With Congress revving up to consider a mandate for utilities to produce renewable electricity, there's going to be a fight about how much companies

• can count "renewable energy certificates" from outside projects to meet the requirement,

• said one tax expert.

Similarly, many are predicting a jockeying match over the role of offsets in a cap-and-trade system, with

• everyone from the turfgrass industry to farm operations wanting their clean-energy projects
• to count towards emission reductions.

The real lobbying squabble on global warming may come after any cap-and-trade bill gets passed, though, according to Kyle Simpson, a policy director at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

• "Once we're actually trading carbon, everything moves into the litigation stage," he said.

• "That's going to be a madhouse. Everyone will be arguing over whether a ton of carbon is really a ton.""

"Climate Lobbyists Look Beyond Cap and Trade," by Christa Marshall, NY Times, 3/24/09 via Free Republic

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