Making Money Through

Bill Koch: The Dirty Money Behind Cape Wind Opposition

Our report, “Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine,” exposed Charles and David Koch, the billionaire oilmen who control Koch Industries, as a chief source of funding for the climate denial machine. As it turns out, doing everything possible to delay the clean energy revolution is something of a family business. We’ve released a dossier on Bill Koch, David’s twin brother and the principal funder of opposition to Cape Wind, the project to build the nation’s largest wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts.

Bill Koch made his fortune through his privately-held, carbon-intensive company, Oxbow. (Koch founded Oxbow with the fortune he received from suing his brothers in 1983 after they ousted him from the family business.) Oxbow Corporation, with $3.7 billion in yearly sales and over 1200 employees, sells 10 million metric tons of petroleum coke and 8 million metric tons of steam coal annually.

After making a killing peddling dirty energy, Bill Koch turns around and uses his immense personal wealth to fund the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the primary group that finds every possible way to delay Cape Wind from moving forward. Even worse, he pays lobbyists through his Oxbow corporation to try and quietly kill the wind farm project altogether.

We compiled the full story behind Bill Koch into a brief dossier which you can read below or download by right-clicking here: Bill Koch: The Dirty Money Behind Cape Wind Opposition.

See also “New Yorker exposes Koch brothers along with their greenwashing and whitewashing Smithsonian exhibit” and “From promoting acid rain to climate denial — over 20 years of David Koch’s polluter front groups“).

Glacier melt in Peru becomes more than a climate issue

HUARAZ, Peru – Glacier melt hasn’t caused a national crisis in Peru, yet. But high in the Andes, rising temperatures and changes in water supply over the last 40 years have decimated crops, killed fish stocks and forced villages to question how they will survive for another generation.

Without international help to build reservoirs and dams and improve irrigation, the South American nation could become a case study in how climate change can destabilize a strategically important region, according to Peruvian, U.S. and other officials.

“Think what it would be like if the Andes glaciers were gone and we had millions and millions of hungry and thirsty Southern neighbors,” said former CIA Director R. James Woolsey.

Peru is home to 70 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers, which are also found in Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile. Peru’s 18 mountain glaciers, including the world’s largest tropical ice mass, are critical to the region’s water sources for drinking, irrigation and electricity.

Glaciers in the South American Andes are melting faster than many scientists predicted; some climate change experts estimate entire glaciers across the Andes will disappear in 10 years due to rising global temperatures, creating instability across the globe as they melt.

See also “Another one bites the dust, literally: Bolivia’s 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya glacier is gone.”

If Peru and its allies don’t fund and create projects to conserve water, improve decrepit water infrastructure and regulate runoff from glaciers within five years, the disappearance of Andean glaciers could lead to social and economic disaster, said Alberto Hart, climate change adviser at Peru’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“This will become a problem for the United States,” he said. “When you have a dysfunctional country, you have a problem for the entire region.”

The United States spent $30 million on climate change assistance in Peru in fiscal year 2010, according to documents provided by the State Department. The funding, allocated as part of the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, went mostly to preserving the Amazon rainforest in Peru.

Peruvian officials would hardly turn away money to preserve the Amazon. But the immediate problem is adaptation to rapid glacier melt, Hart said….

The Peruvian government is asking Washington and other allies for at least $350 million every year through 2030 to build reservoirs and dams, and improve irrigation, said Hart.

Japan, Australia and Switzerland also have offered assistance for climate change, Hart said. The World Bank is also working in Peru to monitor water supplies and implement drought-resistant agriculture, part of a larger climate change project that includes several Andean nations, according to Walter Vergara, a World Bank engineer who started the project in 2004.

But Peruvian officials say the United States has a majority share of the responsibility to help Peru, because of the close trade alliance between the two nations, and because the United States is the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases….

Bolivia and Ecuador are also threatened by glacier melt and Colombia’s costal and riverside cities are being wiped out by floods and landslides – disasters that are only expected to get worse, according to a study by the Pew Center on Climate Change.

Climate change is “a significant threat” to the region, and the United States must “really come to terms” with the security challenges it poses, Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Arturo Valenzuela said recently….

“It used to take you two or three hours walking to reach the ice. But now you have to walk five, six hours to reach ice,” said Maximo Juan Malpaso Carranza, a farmer in Utupampa, a small community high in the Cordillera Blanca.

“We all get water from there,” he said, pointing to Huascarán. “But if the ice disappears, there won’t be any more water.”

More than 2 million people, stretching from the Andes to the coastal cities, get their drinking water and irrigation from rivers fed by glacier runoff from Cordillera Blanca. But research by Cesar Portocarrero, the Peruvian government’s lead glacier scientist, shows the Cordillera Blanca has lost 30 percent of its glaciers since 1970.

Most of Peru’s agriculture is fed by water from the Andes. Glacier-fed rivers also support the nation’s largest hydroelectric plants. Lima, the world’s second-largest desert city, is almost totally dependent on Andean rivers from the Cordillera Central, where some mountains have lost more than 60 percent of their glaciers in the last 40 years.

Water conflicts have been frequent in southern Peru over the last few years, and glacier melt will create even more across the country, and, in extreme cases, spreading to neighboring countries, said retired Maj. Gen. Luis Palomino Rodriguez, head of Peru’s National Civil Defense Institute, in an interview.

The Pentagon is starting to address the impacts of climate change. It gave the Southern Command, in charge of Latin America, $600,000 to develop a mapping tool that will allow Latin America and the United States to share information about climate change risks. It is also spending $1.4 million to study the climate change effects on foreign military bases….

Peru has taken steps, but lacks resources. It created a national strategy on climate change in 2003 and has set up a Ministry of Environment with oversight of climate change programs. Officials are working with USAID and non-profit organizations to build reservoirs in Andean communities and monitor water flow from the glaciers.

“We may think that current wait-and-see policies are adequate to the task,” said Chad Briggs, Minerva Chair for Energy and Environmental Security with the U.S. Air Force. “Peru may be a looming example of how that is not the case.”

Related Post:

• Must-see video: Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss

Two years into the Obama presidency and the economic data is still looking grim. Don't be fooled by the gyrations of the stock market, where optimism is mostly a reflection of the ability of financial corporations -- thanks to massive government largesse -- to survive the mess they created. The basics are dismal: unemployment is unacceptably high, the December consumer confidence index is down, and housing prices have fallen for four months in a row. The number of Americans living in poverty has never been higher, and a majority in a Washington Post poll said they were worried about making their next mortgage or rent payment.

In a parallel universe lives Peter Orszag, President Barack Obama's former budget director and key adviser, who even faster than his mentor, Robert Rubin, has passed through that revolving platinum door linking the White House with Wall Street. The goal is to use your government position to advance the interests of your future employer, and Orszag and Rubin's actions in the government and then at Citigroup provide stunning examples of the synergy between big government and high finance.

As Bill Clinton's treasury secretary, Rubin presided over the dismantling of Glass-Steagall, the New Deal legislation that would have prohibited the creation of the too-big-to-fail Citigroup. He was rewarded with a $15-million-a-year job at Citigroup, where he became a leader in the bank's aggressive move into high-risk ventures. An SEC report in September claimed that Rubin as Citigroup chairman was aware that the bank failed to disclose $40 billion it held in subprime mortgages before the collapse.

During those years at Citigroup, Rubin financed the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, an economic policy program, and named Orszag, a Clinton economic adviser, as its director. The Hamilton Project continued to celebrate Rubin's deregulation philosophy up to the point of utter embarrassment. Clearly, Orszag is not easily embarrassed, for upon taking his new job recently he boasted "I am pleased to be joining Citi, with its unmatched global platform and dedication to providing clients with service and advice."

The most damning comment on this corrupt syndrome was offered by former Citigroup co-chief executive John Reed, who had worked with Rubin to get Glass-Steagall reversed and now is a sharp critic of the result. "We continue to listen to the same people whose errors in judgment were central to the problem," Reed told Bloomberg News. "I'm astounded because we basically dropped the world's biggest economy because of an error in bank management." Reed estimated that the financial deregulation proposals contained in the Dodd-Frank bill and other reforms of the Obama administration represent only 25 percent of the change needed.

The failure to provide serious regulation of the financial industry to avoid future downturns is documented in devastating detail in that Dec. 28 Bloomberg report, written by Christine Harper:

"The U.S. government, promising to make the system safer, buckled under many of the financial industry's protests. Lawmakers spurned changes that would wall off deposit-taking banks from riskier trading. They declined to limit the size of lenders or ban any form of derivatives."

The reason for that failure is obvious from the president's choice of advisers featuring Rubin acolytes from the Clinton years. Harper writes: "While Obama vowed to change the system, he filled his economic team with people who helped create it," referring to, among others, Timothy F. Geithner, who had gone from the Clinton Treasury Department to head the New York Fed, where he presided over the salvaging of Citigroup and AIG. As Obama's treasury secretary he was quick to appoint a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as his chief of staff. Geithner's subservience to Wall Street was reinforced by White House top economic adviser Lawrence Summers, Rubin's deputy and then replacement in the Clinton administration who pushed through the repeal of Glass Steagall and fought against the regulation of derivatives.

And with the decisive assistance from both a Republican and Democratic president, all has worked out just as planned for the banks. Harper reports: "The last two years have been the best ever for combined investment-banking and trading revenue at Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley, according to data compiled by Bloomberg."

It's all wonderfully bipartisan. Recently it was announced that Carlos Gutierrez, commerce secretary under George W. Bush, had been named to a high position at Citigroup. For President Obama, there's no cause for worry about the loss of indispensable talent from his administration. Orszag's replacement as head of the Office of Management and Budget, Jacob J. Lew, was both a member of Rubin's Hamilton Project and a former Citigroup executive -- thus insuring that government of the banks, by the banks, for the banks shall not perish from the earth.

Source:http://removeripoffreports.net/

Brad Friedman and Desi Doyen: Green <b>News</b> Report: January 18, 2011 <b>...</b>

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Scientists warn of a future "superstorm" in CA; Obama to discuss clean energy with Chinese premier's visit?; "Managed retreat" for California coastal town; ABC Reports On Fossil-Fueled Climate ...

Modernizr <b>News</b>

We're kicking it off with some pretty exciting news right away. First, we've expanded our team to include Alex Sexton. Due to this addition we've also formalized our individual roles in the Modernizr Team, as such: ...

Schneier on Security: More Stuxnet <b>News</b>

January 17, 2011. More Stuxnet News. This long New York Times article includes some interesting revelations. The article claims that Stuxnet was a joint Israeli-American project, and that its effectiveness was tested on live equipment: ...