The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental communication accounts, which a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA requests. This “cloud” serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Although this is seedy and unlawful at any time, it also goes in the “bad timing” file, especially for the Obama Administration and the UN.

Just as a brand new book further exposes the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (whose scams I dissected here, and in more disturbing detail here), and on the heels of the weekend surprise of a 2005 memo showing President Obama’s cooling/warming/population zealot of a “science czar” John Holdren is the kind of guy Mitt Romney turns to for developing his “environmental”’ policies, we’ve exposed the Obama administration and IPCC have cooperated to subvert U.S. transparency laws, operating domestically out of Holdren’s White House office.

With this morning’s Freedom of Information Act request, the explaining they have to do must begin by providing the taxpayer certain records regarding — including but not limited to — user names and passwords for a backchannel ‘cloud’ established to hide IPCC deliberations from FOIA, thereby also seeking to undermine the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978. (more…)

Just forget about that whole global warming scare that was still in vogue up until just over a year ago before the “climategate” scandal erupted, to say nothing of updated research that interlinks natural forces with warming and cooling trends as opposed to human activity. In fact, over 1,000 scientists from the across the globe have gone on record to question earlier claims advanced through the United Nations that have been used to justify “cap and trade” schemes modeled after the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.

Small wonder then that opinion polls now show that alarmist climate projections evoke greater cynicism. However, the regulatory agenda that aims to extend government control over the private sector remains very much in motion, even as the rationale has changed.

This pivot away from global warming alarmism as a sales pitch can be traced back to President Obama’s first State of the Union Address.

“I know there have been questions about whether we can afford such changes in a tough economy,” he said.  “I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.  But here’s the thing — even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future — because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy.  And America must be that nation.”

Get that?

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As some may recall, the filibuster-proof Senate did not move on cap-and-trade. In the past four years of Senate control, they did not try to ratify the US-signed, never unsigned Kyoto Protocol. Even after the filibuster-proof majority was lost by just a vote, the Senate failed to lift a finger to consider cap-n-trade. There just weren’t enough Democrats willing to buy in, or risk their jobs on this folly.

As my colleague Myron Ebell put it in Politico:

“The American people figured out that cap-and-trade was code for higher energy prices and reacted with righteous fury when House Members [passed the bill before going] home after the vote for the Fourth of July recess. After hearing the outcry, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to postpone Senate debate on cap-and-trade and instead take up health care reform, which enjoyed much more public support.”

Funny ’cause it’s true.

So, naturally, over the weekend the Washington Post op-ed pages spilled forth the ritual line: It’s those mean Republicans wot done it. And boy are they blowing it.

So goes today’s argle bargle from Team Soros, acting out in response to the election and seeing their incremental progress toward energy rationing about to be swept aside. Now, after failing in a Left-wing cram-down, they wag their fingers and lecture us that the global warming agenda really should be a conservative priority but, hey, if we’re willing to cede the ground to them they’re more than happy to take credit! Don’t know what you’re missing! Although this will continue for two years, it is already tiresome.

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Certainly the philosophy of the Triple Bottom Line (“3BL” or “TBL”) is unconventional when compared with accepted business practices which are based upon the typical single bottom line of profit. We know that profit is essential to business survival, but we should ask how this expanded 3BL business model gained traction. For an answer, we need to look at the history of 3BL, and that history shows us that environmental and social idealism have been closely linked since the modern global environmental movement began in 1972.

In 1972, Maurice Strong, a patriarch of the global environmental movement who now sits on the board of directors for the Chicago Climate Exchange, led the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which met in Stockholm and released a declaration linking the human exerience to nature. It acknowledged that “man is both creature and moulder of his environment” and has advanced to the point where he has the power to significantly affect nature and, by extension, his own intellectual, moral, social and spiritual growth. The global social ramifications of man’s environmental stewardship are thus clearly stated in the Stockholm declaration:

The protection and improvement of the human environment is a major issue which affects the wellbeing of peoples and economic development throughout the world; it is the urgent desire of the peoples of the whole world and the duty of all Governments.

The UN felt the environment and social well being were so linked that the declaration’s first Principle focused on it:

Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being, and he bears a solemn responsibility to protect and improve the environment for present and future generations. In this respect, policies promoting or perpetuating apartheid, racial segregation, discrimination, colonial and other forms of oppression and foreign domination stand condemned and must be eliminated.

Without question, the UN has made a particular commitment to social and environmental ideology since the very beginning of the green movement, and in the Stockholm declaration we can see much of the framework for global socio-environmental ideology already in place.

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Imagine if a Bush administration official had said this:

“For most of the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, people were blissfully ignorant of the fact that emissions caused a greenhouse effect. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon.”

That was the Obama administration’s “special envoy for climate change”, Todd Stern. Now, the Industrial Revolution is generally accepted as having begun in or about 1850. And of course Svante Arrhenius famously posited the greenhouse effect hypothesis in 1896 (and as a very beneficial thing, incidentally). So, it’s fair to say that this claim is somewhat off.

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The notion of remaining silent is not one readily associated with Al Gore. But, by his steadfast, years-long refusal to do anything other than pontificate about his views, such as defend them in an exchange with anyone who might know what they’re talking about, he does seem to be adopting some form of the adage “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt”.

So, today the Competitive Enterprise Institute has launched its Gore Debate Challenge. As CEI’s press release notes:

“For years, Al Gore has steadfastly refused to debate the global warming issue.  Most recently, he ignored a put-up-or-shut-up challenge on the Glenn Beck Show from climate policy expert Lord Christopher Monckton, a former British government adviser.  Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute hopes to change all that with the release of a new video campaign.  In it, CEI offers Mr. Gore a $500 check, together with the proceeds of a world-wide email pledge-a-dollar drive, all aimed at persuading Mr. Gore to accept Lord Monckton’s challenge.

“To our knowledge, Mr. Gore hasn’t been in a debate since he ran for president,” said Sam Kazman, CEI General Counsel.  “But given that he and his allies are seeking the biggest tax increase in history in the form of new energy taxes and rationing, he ought to at least have to courage to engage in a face-to-face defense of his position,” Kazman stated.

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The New York Times reports this weekend that:

“SINGAPORE — President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.”

Read down the article and note the several claims by participants offering the greatest exhibits imaginable at the running absurdity — now in its 18th year! — that is this movable feast of conferences in Rio, Barcelona, Bangkok, Bali, Buenos Aires, Bonn, and next month Copenhagen: We had to declare it a failure in advance in order to ensure its success. Mmm. Yes.

But here’s the far larger point, and Team Tea Party and simpatico coalescences should take note and begin organizing accordingly:

This also makes the Kyoto II, the proposed twenty five-year extension of a five-year plan that was the Kyoto treaty, an inescapable issue for the 2010 U.S. mid-term elections.

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Today, in 1998, Vice-President Al Gore signed the Kyoto Protocol (yeah, we don’t know where the constitutional authority is for that either):

Especially, since, by a vote of 95-0, the Senate had already rejected the Kyoto Protocols. Still, Al Gore has been able to parlay his work on the issue into a financial windfall.