Extremely wealthy radical left-wingers like George Soros are busy at the Paris enviro-summit right now plotting to fatten their already bulging wallets by keeping billions of people worldwide powerless, sick, and poor.
Soros and his fellow investors on the "clean energy" bandwagon want to cut carbon dioxide emissions down to zero, a move that will necessarily condemn hundreds of millions of people in developing countries to prolonged misery and death. They want a draconian, government-led crackdown on carbon dioxide emissions which some scientists theorize will have an impact on global temperatures. They want massive taxpayer subsidies for marginal energy sources such as solar and wind power, which cannot compete in the marketplace. They claim they want to bring electricity to the world's poor but only without generating extra carbon emissions, which of course, is impossible. Carbon and economic progress go hand in hand. Life itself is impossible without carbon.
Soros and other members of the climate-industrial complex enjoy condescending to Third World inhabitants, explaining to them why they can't have cars, air conditioning, and the agricultural technology those in wealthy countries possess because it would generate carbon, the harmless gas we all expel from our lungs. They can't have these things we take for granted because all that carbon isn't good for the planet, they allege.
There are about 7 billion people on the planet and more than a billion of them lack access to electricity. Around "3 billion people cook and heat their homes using open fires and simple stoves burning biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) and coal," according to the World Health Organization. "Most are poor, and live in low- and middle-income countries."
The report continues:
Such inefficient cooking fuels and technologies produce high levels of household air pollution with a range of health-damaging pollutants, including small soot particles that penetrate deep into the lungs. In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke can be 100 times higher than acceptable levels for small particles. Exposure is particularly high among women and young children, who spend the most time near the domestic hearth.
Cooking with solid fuels pollutes household air and kills 4.3 million people annually. Those deaths are attributed to: stroke (34 percent); ischaemic heart disease (26 percent); chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (22 percent); pneumonia (12 percent); and lung cancer (6 percent).
Cooking with electricity would end household air pollution but carbon would have to be emitted to bring electricity to the world's poor. And that can't be allowed because it violates the tenets of the Left's manmade global warming faith -- so the poor will have to continue getting by without electricity.
Which is fine by Soros and his fellow investors in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, an assortment of crony capitalists, billionaire left-wingers, open-borders advocates, and Obama lackeys and bundlers, put together by Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Gates is at the United Nations-sponsored COP21 conference, which stands for the 21st annual meeting of the Conference of Parties. COP21's official goal is to pursue "a new international agreement on climate change, applicable to all, to keep global warming below" 2 degrees Celsius. The summit started Nov. 30 in France's capital and runs through Dec. 11. Also reportedly in attendance are leaders of 150 nations and 40,000 delegates from 195 countries, but they are largely taking orders from the leftist billionaires.
The summit got underway after the reported death at age 86 of Canadian-born energy tycoon and climate alarmist Maurice Strong. Strong is considered by some to be the father of the global warming movement. Curiously, news reports do not indicate a cause or place of death nor does the press release from the Nairobi-based U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) he founded that first announced his passing. Strong, who described himself as "a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology," fled to Communist China years ago after he was implicated in the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food scandal and likely died there.
Meanwhile, Gates has been clothing himself in moral garments, posing as a savior of humanity. He committed $2 billion to so-called renewable energy to "bend the curve" on climate change. “What we’re asking ourselves to do here is change energy, and that includes all of transport, all of electricity, all of household usage and all of industrial usage,” he said.
“People like myself," Gates said, "who can afford to take big risks with start-up companies, should — because of climate change — be willing to put some number of billions into the spin-offs that will come out of that government-funded activity.”
In other words, it's all about the government subsidies. As author Chris Horner has observed, "green economy" is a euphemism for "central planning."
The Obama White House praised the Breakthrough Energy Coalition which will grow fat on government funding from the United States, Communist China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. Relying on technology, “the new model will be a public-private partnership between governments, research institutions and investors,” the White House said.
Of course, the public-private partnerships envisioned by the global warming hoaxers are an example of what Benito Mussolini termed "corporatism." And speaking of Mussolini, Organizing for Action, Obama's storm troopers are now trying to blacklist scientists and politicians who aren't toeing the party line on global warming.
The involvement of sleazy Obama supplicant Tom Steyer in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition is a gigantic red flag. Steyer is a hedge fund manager and huge donor to Democrats who waged war against the Keystone XL Pipeline only because doing so boosted his investment in the pipeline's competitors.
Among the other investors are: Al Gore's business partner John Doerr of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman; tech magnate Vinod Khosla; Jack Ma of China's Alibaba Group; Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard Enterprise; and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. With their political and business pull, these people have the resources of the U.S. government, academia, think tanks, and the lapdog media at their disposal.
The summit in France comes as Congress gives an emphatic thumbs-down to President Obama’s move to implement harmful Environmental Protection Agency regulations that will drastically increase the price of energy for millions of Americans.
“The EPA carbon rule amounts to a massive tax increase on those who can least afford it," said Freedom Partners Senior Policy Advisor Andy Koenig.
"How can the Obama administration ask families to pay more for electricity and heat when even they admit these regulations will have virtually no impact on the climate?"
That's an excellent question.
