Author: Kate

From The City That Brought You Nancy Pelosi

In 2007, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) held a seminar for the nonprofits vying for a piece of $78 million in funding. Grant seekers were told that in the next funding cycle, they would be required — for the first time — to provide quantifiable proof their programs were accomplishing something.
The room exploded with outrage. This wasn’t fair. “What if we can bring in a family we’ve helped?” one nonprofit asked. Another offered: “We can tell you stories about the good work we do!” Not every organization is capable of demonstrating results, a nonprofit CEO complained. He suggested the city’s funding process should actually penalize nonprofits able to measure results, so as to put everyone on an even footing. Heads nodded: This was a popular idea.

Read on. 6.6 billion just doesn’t get you what it used to.

Y2Kyoto: The Great Train Robbery

When we last checked in on our favourite Railroad Climate Engineer, he was narrowing down the list of Climategate suspects to “fossil fuel lobby” and “corporate interests”.

Today, we find the most excellent Dr.Rajendra Pachauri in a “corporate interest” feature by the Telegraph. For starters;

Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.
Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.
Even odder is the role of TERI’s Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to “sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries’ concerns about energy and the environment”.
TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world’s largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives much of its own funding from the EU) and two world leaders in the international ‘carbon market’, between them managing more than $1 trillion (£620 billion) worth of assets.
All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.

Perhaps he’s just investigating undercover.

Reader Tips

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our 2009 SDA Late Nite Radio Christmas Extravaganza. Tonight, for your delectation, here are:

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Y2Kyoto: Climate Instability Just Around The Corner

I picked up on something said during a television interview at Copenhagen last week, and both my gut and my search engine tell me the language of the UN’s great socialist money-sucking scheme is evolving once again.
Just as “global warming” was pushed into an inconveniently cold and bitter night, “climate change” may be readying its last will and testament.
“Climate change” was always a weak substitute for “global warming”, because it was always so easy to rebut. As even the experts were forced to concede, the climate is always changing and has since long before man discovered spark plugs.
This new terminology is more clever, for it neatly avoids the shortcomings of its clumsy forebears. It requires neither warming, nor change. Just television.
When blizzards descend on scientists and world leaders from Copenhagen to East Anglia to Washington, they warmists can now claim ownership.
When hurricane forecasts fall short of the mark, the propagandists can cite their very failure to support their scheme.
Warm winters, cold winters, more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, growing ice caps, melting ice caps – directions won’t matter. Every “new” temperature record, every seasonal flood, every California hot spell, every dusting of snow in the south of France – in other words, local weather, reported globally, will return full force as evidence of anthropogenic climate crime, as it did in a simpler time when the ice conditions of a canal in Ottawa led to nationwide panic.
So, get ready to welcome the new talking point on the block: “climate instability“.
I’m not offering a game plan. I’m just warning you to prepare for it.
(Related!)

And Worth Every Penny!

Winnipeg Free Press;

Each member of the Peguis First Nation band council made more money last year than Winnipeg’s mayor, Manitoba’s premier and nearly every one of the province’s MPs.
According to brown-envelope documents delivered to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation recently, Peguis Chief Glenn Hudson made $174,230 in the fiscal year ending in March.
That includes a base salary of $124,000 plus $48,200 in unspecified “other remuneration.” It doesn’t include $32,000 in travel per diems and expenses.
But Hudson made far less than his four councillors, most of whom earned well over $200,000, tax free.

“Then he packed his bags and flew home.”

WELT ONLINE; (Google translate)

The US president BO had hardly arrived when he let it be known, “the time for talk is over.” From now on, he would take over the leadership of the negotiations.
Together with German Chancellor Merkel, the heads of Russia, Brazil, Japan, the EU and other prominent countries, Obama went to work. But things didn’t go like the Nobel prize winner had imagined. Only German Environment minister Norber Roettgen remained optimistic. Despite the tough negotiation, he opined, there could be a resulting compromise. “Today we throw the dice.”
Instead, it turned into a fiasco. […]
According to rumors from the Bella Center, President BO is said to have asked for a conversation with Wen jibao to bring up the matters. But O had to wait. Wen, according to the rumors, almost never left his hotel room and could not be found. Finally the US Delegation succeeded in finding the chinese premier in a conference room. An obviously angry Obama is said to have stormed into the room. “Are you ready yet to talk with me Mr Premier?” he is said to have shouted. “Are you ready now? Mr Prmier, are you ready to talk with me?” What a stage entrance for a US President.
However, Wen was not alone in the room, as Obama literally burst in, according to members of the congress. The Chinese (premier) was in the middle of talks with India’s head of state Mammohan Singh and the South African president Jacob Zuma. Suddenly the group found itself forced into a conversation with the US president.

(updated translation courtesy Tom Paine)
Welt.de (original)
h/t Joe B.
Update: A translation of full text in the extended entry.

Continue reading

Reader Tips

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our 2009 SDA Late Nite Radio Christmas Extravaganza. For the next ten days, each night we will feature one or more Christmas songs, carols, and other works, including a variety of both secular and sacred pieces. Tonight, for your delectation, we begin with a few secular classics reminding us that, indeed, it is, again, Christmas time.

I would also like to note that a selection of Christmas Carols, formatted for printing, is available from the Sagacious Iconoclast main page and from the SDA Late Nite Radio archives page linked here every night, in case you should find them useful.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Hopenchangen!

With time for an agreement running short, His Eloquency brings all his prodigious diplomatic skills to bear…

UK diplomatic sources confirmed there had been a major setback after China took huge offence at remarks by President Obama over the need to independently monitor every country carbon emissions.
In his speech President Obama said: “Without any accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page” – remarks the Chinese interpreted as an attempt to humiliate them, prompting Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to return to his hotel.

It looks like they’ve finally settled on who best to blame

“We’ve done what we can here,” a senior White House official in Copenhagen, Denmark, tells ABC News. “The Chinese are dug in on transparency and are refusing to let people know they’re living up to their end of the agreement.”

Andy Revkin is there on the ground and finally placing the word “Copenhagen” in its proper context;

Copenhagen insanity: Floods of reporters sprinting in opposite directions chasing rumors of Obama or UNFCCC press conference.

Whoops, maybe no presser after all…

1935 First bit of excitement here for a few hours. A rumour swept through the media centre that Mr Obama was going to give a press conference and almost immediately hundreds of journalists rushed through the Bella Centre into the main auditorium used for such events. Some 400 reporters and TV crews packed into the room but after about ten minutes two harassed Danish officals managed to get into the room to explain that no Obama press conference had been scheduled. Dozens of journalists left the room. Most stayed, just in case.

Oh dear.
Meanwhile, when you’ve lost Castro…. (link fixed)
(Follow Daniel Foster for continuing updates)
UPDATE: Turns out the threat of a no-show was just a tease. Obama leave Hopenchangen without a press conference? Surely, you jest!
UPDATE 2; Looks like someone’s gittin outa Dodge …Obama leaving before final vote but feels “confident that we are moving in the direction of a significant accord.” Besides, he has to hussle back to DC before the blizzard hits.
And the money quote: “U.S. will not be legally bound by anything that occurred here today.”
Afterthought – As the One jets home to Washington, it’s ironic that Europe’s best hope for a weakened America turned out too weak to get the job done.

CBC Opens Up Saskatchewan’s Tar Sands

Check out this masterpiece of editorial drive-by;

Note that our taxpayer funded broadcaster chose (at the 1:38 mark) to grace the interview with Saskatchewan Environment Minister Nancy Heppner with split screen film of oil sands mining and melting arctic ice, neither of which are located in Saskatchewan.
If they’re going to editorialize, would not lines of unemployed potash and oil field workers, stalled projects, and capped wells be more relevant to the interview?
Where are the real estate signs in communities hit by a regulatory induced downturn in the western Canadian economy? The farms forced into bankruptcy by skyrocketing fuel and fertilizer costs?
You can address your complaints to Vince Carlin here: ombudsman@cbc.ca
h/t Derek

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