XM MLB Chat: Ken Lay's Useful Idiots-Rioters, Al Gore, Bud Selig

Rioters in Copenhagen throw rocks and fireworks at police. bbc photo. View of rear of Al Gore's houseboat showing jet ski and sliding board (from AAEA). MLB Commissioner Bud Selig believes baseball should help out socially conscious movements like global warming.

Solomon, National Post: "The climate-change industry — the scientists, lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and, most importantly, the multinationals that work behind the scenes to cash in on the riches at stake —

has emerged as the world’s largest industry.

Virtually every resident in the developed world feels the bite of this industry, often unknowingly, through the hidden surcharges on their food bills, their gas and electricity rates, their gasoline purchases, their automobiles, their garbage collection, their insurance, their computers purchases, their hotels, their purchases of just about every good and service, in fact, and finally, their taxes to governments at all levels.

These extractions do not happen by accident. Every penny that leaves the hands of consumers does so by design, the final step in elaborate and often brilliant orchestrations of public policy, all the more brilliant because
the public, for the most part, does not know
who is profiteering on climate change, or
who is aiding and abetting the profiteers....

Enron, a pioneer in the climate-change industry: Almost two decades before President Barack Obama made “cap-and-trade” for carbon dioxide emissions a household term, an obscure company called Enron — a natural-gas pipeline company that had become a big-time trader in energy commodities — had figured out

how to make millions in a
cap-and-trade program for sulphur dioxide emissions,

thanks to changes in the U.S. government’s Clean Air Act. To the delight of shareholders, Enron’s stock price rose rapidly as it became the

major trader in the U.S. government’s $20-billion a year emissions commodity market.

Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, keen to engineer an encore, saw his opportunity when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were inaugurated as president and vice-president in 1993.

To capitalize on Al Gore’s interest in global warming, Enron immediately embarked on a massive lobbying effort

to develop a trading system for carbon dioxide, working both the Clinton administration and Congress. Political contributions and Enron-funded analyses flowed freely,

all geared to demonstrating a looming global catastrophe if carbon dioxide emissions weren’t curbed.

An Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that calamity could come of global warming, meanwhile,

was quietly buried.

To magnify the leverage of their political lobbying, Enron also worked the environmental groups.

Between 1994 and 1996, the Enron Foundation donated $1-million to the Nature Conservancy and its Climate Change Project, a leading force for global warming reform, while Lay and other individuals associated with Enron donated $1.5-million to
environmental groups seeking international controls
on carbon dioxide.

The intense lobbying paid off. Lay became a member of president Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, as well as his friend and advisor. In the summer of 1997, prior to global warming meetings in Kyoto, Japan, Clinton sought Lay’s advice in White House discussions.