XM MLB Chat: Special interests to reap global warming cash

"The “climate change” environmental agenda was in-play years ago, but this agenda was not nearly as aggressive as it is now. Along with the other act-fast agenda items pushed through the White House, the Cap and Trade legislation is under current review....

Al Gore...keeps bobbing up to the surface...The same Al Gore who wrote this NYT Op/Ed “The Selling of an Energy Policy” (4/21/02).

In that Op/Ed, Al Gore chastised the Bush administration saying:

"Instead of leading, it has attempted to mislead. Instead of sharing a vision with the people, the administration has
given access to special interests."...

Interesting that Al Gore should mention an administration misleading people. VERY interesting that Al Gore would declare

that an administration would give access to special interests.

Under the Obama administration, there are so many connected special interest groups and businesses that I need a spreadsheet to keep track of the connections with one another. One thing that’s easy to track is the connection to Obama....

Between Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, the Pew Center’s Business Environmental Leadership Council, and the U.S. Climate Action Partnership which testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, you might wonder

why the same names keep surfacing, setting energy policy.

Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board

Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO, GE (wind turbines)
John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers*
Jim Owens, Chairman and CEO, Caterpillar Inc.
William H. Donaldson, Chairman, SEC
Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., President & CEO, TIAA-CREF
Richard L. Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer, AFL-CIO
Robert Wolf, Chairman & CEO, UBS Group Americas
David F. Swensen, CIO, Yale University
Mark T. Gallogly, Founder & Managing Partner, Centerbridge Partners L.P.
Penny Pritzker, Chairman & Founder, Pritzker Realty Group
Monica C. Lozano, Publisher & Chief Executive Officer, La Opinion
Charles E. Phillips, Jr., President, Oracle Corporation
Anna Burger, Secretary-Treasurer, SEIU
Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Dean, Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley
Martin Feldstein, George F. Baker Professor of Economics, Harvard University

Pew Center’s Business Environmental Leadership Council:

ABB
Air Products
Alcoa Inc.
American Electric Power
Bank of America
BASF
Baxter International Inc.
The Boeing Company
BP
California Portland Cement
CH2M HILL
Citi
Cummins Inc.
Deere & Company
Deutsche Telekom
The Dow Chemical Company
DTE Energy
Duke Energy**
DuPont
Entergy
Exelon
GE (purchased the former Enron wind turbine assets)
Hewlett-Packard Company
Holcim (US) Inc.
IBM
Intel
Interface Inc.
Johnson Controls, Inc.
Lockheed Martin
Marsh, Inc
Novartis
Ontario Power Generation
PG&E Corporation
PNM Resources
Rio Tinto
Rohm and Haas
Royal Dutch/Shell
SC Johnson
Toyota
TransAlta
United Technologies
Weyerhauser
Whirlpool Corporation
Wisconsin Energy Corporation

U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) is a group of businesses and leading environmental organizations that have come together to call on the federal government to quickly enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. Members include:

Alcoa, Boston Scientific, BP America, Caterpillar,

Chrysler, ConocoPhillips,John Deere, Dow, Duke Energy,**

DuPont, Environmental Defense Fund, Exelon, Ford, FPL Group,

GE, GM, Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, Natural Resources Defense Council,***

The Nature Conservancy, NRG Energy, PepsiCo

Pew Center On Global Climate Change, PG&E, PNM Resources

Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens, World Resources Institute, Xerox

Noting the numerous connections,

special interests, business conflicts of interests, and SEC violations,

it is important to note

what Al Gore said: “the administration has given access to special interests.”

Is it really about windmills and not about windfalls?" via RedState, 4/30/09

*Al Gore is a partner in Kleiner, Perkins
**One or more MLB teams have partnered with Duke Energy
***MLB has allowed Natural Resources Defense Council enormous access to the game to further its political agenda.

Washington Times, 5/4/09: DUKE ENERGY GETS SPECIAL TREATMENT FROM OBAMA GROUP

"Democratic lawmakers who spent much of the Bush administration blasting officials for letting energy lobbyists write national policy have turned to a coalition of business and environmental groups to help draft their own sweeping climate bill.

And one little-noticed provision of the draft bill would give one of the coalition's co-founders a lucrative exemption on a coal-fired project it is building.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, both of California, were among the Democrats -- then in the minority -- who slammed Vice President Dick Cheney for holding closed-door meetings to draft energy policy early in the Bush administration....

But the sweeping climate bill Mr. Waxman and Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the panel's key environmental subcommittee, introduced at the end of March includes a provision that benefits

Duke Energy Corp., a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), whose climate plan released in January the lawmakers have frequently called a

"blueprint" for their climate legislation.

The exemption would save Duke Energy -- along with other firms now building new coal power plants --

from having to spend millions of dollars outfitting its Cliffside, N.C., power plant currently under construction with "clean coal" technology.

"The USCAP companies must be delirious over the freebies that they've received after writing the blueprint for [the House draft bill]," said Larry Neal, deputy Republican staff director for the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

At the kickoff to hearings last week on the massive climate bill, Myron Ebell, climate and energy policy director for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told lawmakers, "The authors of the draft bill have invited the beneficiaries of what