Wednesday
Jan152014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The green nexus
Jan 15, 2014 Bureaucrats Greens Here's an interesting story from the other side of the pond:
Internal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emails show extensive collaboration between top agency officials and leading environmentalist groups, including overt efforts to coordinate messaging and pressure the fossil fuel industry.
The emails, obtained by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute (EELI) through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, could fuel an ongoing controversy over EPA policies that critics say are biased against traditional sources of energy.
I've little doubt that similar things go on in the UK.
Reader Comments (23)
Obviously all the noise about "massive secret well-funded denier network" was Freudian projection.
I'll get it in before anybody else does...
America sneezes.....
Conspiracy theory? What conspiracy theory?
Orwell would have appreciated this - a step closer to his 1984 dystopia.
The government controls the organisations supposedly protesting against it.
Nothing is what it seems.
They should call EPA the Ministry of Power - in charge of destroying the country's energy base until the lights go out.
Still, I suppose it's not much different to Millibrain employing Bryony Worthington to draft our Climate Bill.
Quite Don. One of the great things about mocking your opponent as a conspiracy theorist is that when evidence emerges of real conspiracy it never counts in their favour. It's just what goes on. It's passed into fact and the next day you're still mocking the same people, never saying "You had a point that time." A weakness in the way we talk about areas where corruption has really gained a stronghold.
From the previous thread, Bryony explains how she and her ex-colleagues at Friends of the Earth do it:
Shameless
It is more expensive than that. There is a revolving door between EPA and the greenmailers, according to documents released last year. This means that many of the lawsuits by Greenpeace, etc. against the EPA are actually pre-negotiated, including nice fat plaintiff legal fees, and are filed to get the Court's rubber stamp. This means they get to skip the regulatory process, as weak as it is, negotiate in private, commit money and policy changes, all with no real legal review or Congressional control.
In other words, the BBC corruption is in some ways small potatoes.
SimonW
I predict that, one day, that video will be the leading item on every news channel in the land - "How was a climate activist with an Eng Lit degree allowed to destroy our energy system?".
SimonW,
Hmm, nothing out of the ordinary there, in fact it was just as I expected to hear.
A clip showing a driven woman proselytizing
Worthington, a person who is obsessed with things of which she understands very little or more usually, not at all. Most unfortunately, she is certainly no friend of all of the people who desire to get on with life, to make money enough to keep loved ones safe, secure and save for a rainy day. In Britain, also in those western nations most which are considered to be first world economies Bryony types abound, and is why we are in the straits of no hope.
Ms Worthington, in government she held the ear of one of the most powerful men in the land and though she was ill equipped for the position of cleaner let alone as that of senior advisor - in the CCA 2008 Worthington abetted in drafting one of the most injurious and ill thought out pieces of backwards looking legislation Parliament has ever conceived and enacted.
Listening to her incessant twaddle and her hand waving, hand wringing lefty childlike justifications [par for all Socialists - ala Russell Brand] it makes me wonder how she charts her own life let alone making it up for the rest of us. That old axiom, 'written on the back of a fag packet' - would seem by comparison to and with Bryony's efforts - to be a painstaking and an inordinately intricate and well crafted blueprint.
Small wonder Britain goes to the dogs, for the curs now draw up the plans.
Closer to home, Richard Dixon is on the SEPA board.
Bryony Worthington who when speaking in 2011 can't remember Ed Miliband's name despite him making her a peer...
But, Is it legal ?
Hi LiT,
I thought that too but looking at wiki:
DavidM was Environment Secretary in 2006-2007: "His tenure in this post saw climate change consolidated as a priority for policymakers."
EdM: "Miliband was subsequently promoted to the new post of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, a position he held from 2008 to 2010."
So it looks like David started it and Ed finished it, although Bryony actually portrays Cameron as the driving force with Labour just following suit. (Cameron said about his wife “She supported Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth right back when we first started going out with each other.” )
I like the honesty about the decision making process (9 minutes in):
" So the Treasury and the Dept of Business thought it was a terrible idea, the UK acting alone would be detrimental to our competitiveness... introduce costs and force businesses to move overseas". Yep sounds about right.
"we thought it important as we've got to show leadership". How's that going then?
So there you have it, delusional ideas of "leadership" trumped the real world concepts of competitiveness and jobs.
And Bryony sees nothing wrong with that, in fact she seems quite proud of her role. Ye Gods.
And the moral of the tale is that when you are out saving the planet your intentions are pure and therefore you can do no wrong! History is full of wrong-headed idiots and psychopaths who - even when confronted with the facts - are totally and utterly convinced of their own rightousness.
Only revolution will save us but unfortunately few of us will give up everything we have worked for to go and do it. And that ladies and gentlemen is why there are so few capitalist 'activists' and why we resort to bleating about things on blogs like this.
Reading things like this makes me want a lobotomy so I don't know they are going on. Although you can get a breast enlargement on the NHS, I don't think they will do me a lobotomy.
Totally off-topic, but I notice that “Campaign against
the Sun RisingClimate Change” have disabled commenting on their “Mission Statement”, and removed the comments. Perhaps they did not like what was being said.Closer to topic: has anyone thought about linking Bryony
Worthless’s(curse my clumsy fingers) Worthington’s arms to a generator; I’m sure she could produce enough electricity to light up a bungalow.It doesn't take a conspiracy. It's just a mindless drift from "We must prevent drilling from damaging The Environment" to "We must prevent drilling" and forget The Environment.
Cameron said about his wife “She supported Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth right back when we first started going out with each other.”
Nothing to do with daddy earning a grand a day from the wind farm debacle?
The approach in the UK is for the government departments to fund (via grants) the activist groups with the 'right' answers to lobby them. Effectively the government pays to lobby itself to do the things it already wanted to do.
Changes of governing parties have little impact on this as the makeup of the departments themselves (and hence their ideology) do not change.
"Nothing to do with daddy"
Probably everything to do with daddy - that's the trouble.
As my old physics teacher used to opine: beauty x brains = a constant.
jamesp.
Your old physics teacher obviously never watched Countdown when Carol Vorderman was on it.
Jud,
Or at the other end of the spectrum, Jade Goody (not to speak ill of the dead, of course)
A fair cop for once-- the apologetic Nature leader on the lurching progress of warming comes hard on the heels of the explanatory video John Holdren's office released from the White House.
Blame Saatchi and Saatchi's K Street irregulars