When
Tony Abbott became Australia's prime minister in September 2013, the chain of
events that would prematurely end his tenure may already have been in motion:
just a few months later China would order its out of control shadow banking
system to put on hold its debt issuance machinery, which as we reported a year
ago, ground to a complete stop around November 2014 (which also was the
explanation for the dramatic slowdown in the US economy over the winter as the
collapse in China's Total Social Financing growth sent a deflationary ripple
effect around the globe), which - as we warned at the time - would have dire consequences
on all of China's "feeder" economies, namely Brazil and Australia.
But while we have been
tracking the implosion of Brazil's economy since December, long before the rest of the world noticed
the calamitous collapse of what was once Latin America's most vibrant economy,
it was a very recent event in Australia - not the country's parallel economic slowdown also due to China's hard
landing:
that was painfully clear long in advance - that took many by surprise. Namely,
the resignation of Tony Abbott almost exactly two years after becoming Prime
Minister.
And while it is easy to
blame his admission of failure on external factors, namely the Chinese
slowdown, a very surprising finding has emerged over the past few days, one
which reveals Abbott's "ouster" in a totally different light.
According to Freedom of
Information documents obtained by Australia's ABC, now-former prime minister
Tony Abbott's own department discussed setting
up an investigation into the Bureau of Meteorology amid media claims it was
exaggerating estimates of global warming.
Yes, it appears that the
prime minister himself had dared to question to prevailing status quo on
"global warming."
ABC reports that in August and September 2014, The Australian newspaper published reports
questioning the Bureau of Meteorology's (BoM) methodology for analyzing
temperatures, reporting claims BoM was "wilfully ignoring evidence that
contradicts its own propaganda."
Naturally, the BoM strongly
rejected assertions it was altering climate records to exaggerate estimates of
global warming. Nevertheless, as the following document obtained by the ABC
shows, just weeks after the articles were published, Mr Abbott's own department
canvassed using a taskforce to carry out "due diligence" on the BoM's
climate records.
As it turns out, late in
2014 the Australia government set up a taskforce to provide advice on post 2020
emissions reduction targets ahead of the United Nations Paris climate change
conference in December 2015. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet
originally wanted the taskforce to also conduct "due diligence to ensure
Australia's climate and emissions data are the best possible, including the
Bureau of Meteorology's Australian temperature dataset".
An accompanying brief seen
by Mr Abbott noted that "in recent articles in The Australian, the BoM was
accused of altering its temperature data records to exaggerate estimates of
global warming". To wit from the ABC:
"The way the Bureau
manages its climate records is recognised internationally as among the best in
the world," the brief said.
"Nevertheless,
the public need confidence information on Australia and the world's climate is
reliable and based on the best available science."
Inexplicably, instead of
letting it go as most "status quo" governments always do, the cabinet
kept pushing with demands for audits: audits which, if taken too far, may
reveals some truly very "inconvenient truths" if not so much about
global warming, as about the propaganda behind it and the firms that stood to
profit from such propaganda.
The pressure intensified when
Mr Abbott's business advisory council chair Maurice Newman wrote an opinion
piece in the paper, demanding a Government-funded audit and review of the
Bureau.
The
concerns centred on the Bureau's temperature homogenisation process — the
method in which it adjusts temperatures for weather sites based on factors like
trees casting shade or influencing wind or if the station is moved.
It was then that the
pushback started in earnest: enter Greg Hunt, Australia's Environment Minister
who would do everything in his power to halt Abbott's crusade to
"audit" the BoM. In a letter to Abbott in November 2014, Hunt
called for the removal of the due diligence clause, pointing out that he and
his parliamentary secretary, Simon Birmingham, had already “established a
strengthened governance oversight of the bureau’s ongoing work in this
area." In other words, "trust us" - we are the government... we
work for you.
Both
the Department of Environment and Environment Minister Greg Hunt argued against
having the taskforce investigate the Bureau.
One Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet bureaucrat described a Department
of Environment official as being "on a campaign" to get the
references to BoM removed from the taskforce's responsibilities.
Further documents appear to
show Mr Hunt convinced senior cabinet
members to remove any references of "due diligence" or "quality
assurance".
In a letter to Mr Abbott
written on November 18 last year, Mr Hunt highlighted the fact the "draft
terms of reference refers to the taskforce doing due diligence on the Bureau of
Meteorology's Australian temperature data set".
"In doing this, it is important to note that
public trust in the Bureau's data and forecasts, particularly as they relate to
bushfires and cyclones, is paramount," it
said. "Given the recent publicity
about the Bureau's temperature data sets, Senator Birmingham and I established
a strengthened governance oversight of the Bureau's ongoing work in this area."
Said otherwise, don't you
dare question global warming or else the public may lost faith in the Bureau of
Meteorology's forecasts about "bushfires
and cyclones." One couldn't possibly make this up if one tried.
As for the assurance Greg
Hunt gave to Abbott to drop his audit, it basically was a promise to
"self-regulate" better through a, drumroll, technical advisory forum:
The strengthened governance of
the Bureau that Mr Hunt referred to is the setting up a Technical Advisory Forum to review and provide advice on the Bureau's
temperature data — a recommendation from an earlier review of the
Bureau's processes.
"It
is important to emphasise that this is
primarily a matter of meteorology, statistics and data assurance,"
Mr Hunt wrote in his letter to Mr Abbott.
This, of course, is a page
right out of the Keynesian/monetarist playbook: one can't sow seeds of doubt in
the mind of the public that the most sacrosanct assumptions about the world are
wrong by open government probes be it by auditing the Fed, or Hillary's email
server... or Australia's meteorological data, so instead let's just take their
word that all the data will be scrubbed and double checked.
A 2011 review found the
Bureau's data and analysis methods met world's best practice but recommended a
group be set up to review progress on the development and operation of the
temperature data.
The 2015 panel included
eminent statisticians and members have told the ABC they were in no doubt that
it was set up in response to the newspaper articles. A draft letter from Mr
Abbott addressed to Mr Hunt showed that Mr Abbott wanted personal updates on
the panel's review.
"The credibility of Government agencies is
important and must be ensured," the letter read.
And while the review
naturally cleared the BoM of any data "goal-seeking" when it was
released in June, perhaps the threat of future such audits was simply too much
- three months later Abbott was gone.
This is not Abbott's first
concern about either met data, or global warming. As the Guardian notes, Abbott previously questioned the
reliability of climate science, but when he was prime minister he repeatedly
said he accepted the climate was changing and humans made “a contribution”. In
other public statements, Abbott said coal was “good for humanity” and wind
turbines were “visually awful”.
Perhaps the recent probe
into the "statistics and data" behind the Australian Bureau of
Meteorology were the straw that broke the camel's back: clearly Abbott was not
going to be appeased and would continue his probes and audits into the
"conventional wisdom" behind global warming, a persistence which
threatened one firm more than any other.
Goldman
Sachs.
While we hardly have to
remind readers that it is Goldman that conceived of the carbon-credit market,
and was behind cap and trade, here is an (in)convenient summary of who the true
puppetmaster is behind the worldwide infatuation with stopping "global
warming", and who stands to benefit the most as the world is manipulated
into doing everything to kill global warming dead in its tracks, courtesy of Matt Taibbi:
…Fast-forward to today. it’s
early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose
leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs –
its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign – sits in the White House.
Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman
is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new
government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key
government jobs.Gone are HankPaulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are
Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former
Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm’s co-head of finance.) And instead of credit
derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits – a
booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the
Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to
push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an
“environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade.
The new carbon-credit market
is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to
Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as
expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even
have to rig the game. It will be rigged
in advance.
Here’s how it works: If the
bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas
distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions
(a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over
their allotment, they will be able to buy “allocations” or credits from other companies
that have managed to produce fewer emissions: President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of
carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his
top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three
times that amount.
The feature of this plan that
has special appeal to speculators is that the “cap” on carbon will be
continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will
become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a
brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is
guaranteed to rise in price over time. The
volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for
comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all’ electricity suppliers
in the U.S. total $320 billion.
Goldman
wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of
paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they’re the profit-making
slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman
started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up
last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of
their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief
ofstaff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally
helped author the bank’s environmental policy, a document that contains some
surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently
opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson’s report argued that
“voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate-change problem.” A few years
later, the bank’s carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone
won’t be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public
investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that
Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called
Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called
Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar),
exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy
producers to use cleaner energy. As
Paulson said at the time, “We’re not making those investments to lose money.”
The bank owns a 10 percent
stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded.
Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm
that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill
passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the
planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment
Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David
Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Hanis. Their business? Investing in carbon
offsets, There’s also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite
to invest in green-tech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make
it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy-futures
market?
“Oh, it’ll dwarf it,” says a former staffer on the House energy committee.
Well, you might say, who
cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won’t we all be saved from the catastrophe of
global warming? Maybe – but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really
just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues.
Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and
forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade
will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet
another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse
than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it’s even
collected.
Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it
doesn’t, something like it will. The moral is the
same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to
2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for
years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and
accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with
mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees – while the actual
victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.
In short: trillions are at
stake for Goldman as long as the "fight" against global warming
continues. And as noted above, cap-and-trade is going to happen or
"something like it will" - Goldman's future revenues depend on it.
In fact, the only thing
that can crush this finely orchestrated plan to generate billions in private
profits from the mass euphoria to "save the planet" funded,
naturally, entirely by the taxpayer, is a critical piece of evidence that the
data and statistics behind "global warming" has been
fabricated, something which very well may have occurred had Abbott's plan
for an audit gone too far.
And so Abbott suddenly
became a major liability, if not so much for Australia, then certainly for
Goldman Sachs.
In retrospect, while Abbott
completely unexpected exit on September 14 was a shock, his Prime Ministerial
replacement should come as no surprise at all: Malcolm Turnbull, as we noted,
just happened to be Chairman of Goldman Sachs Australia from 1997-2001. The same Turnbull who was deposed as opposition leader in 2009 over
his support for a carbon tax and an emissions trading scheme, a "scheme"
that, when fully implemented, would lead to huge monetary windfalls for none
other than Turnbull's former employer: Goldman Sachs.
So was Goldman the
responsible party behind Abbott's ouster? One can only speculate, however one
thing is certain: any concerns and fears of "probes" or
"audits" into Australia's global warming "data and
statistics" are now history.
* * *
ABC's
full FOIA revealing Abbott's probe of BoM "data" below:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-26/did-goldman-sachs-sacrifice-australias-prime-minister-his-doubts-about-global-warmin
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