"Green Industrial Complex." That's an evocative phrase from Brendan O'Neill, writing in The Australian,describing the well-funded effort to convert America and the world to a carbon-free economy--and make billions, even trillions in the process. Here O'Neill zeroes in on the efforts of Al Gore, who sits at the center of this "GIC":
For a snapshot of the government and business interests intertwined in the rise of green capitalism, consider Al Gore. He's getting rich from environmentalism, not just by being paid a whopping $US175,000 ($217,500) a speech but by using political pressure to force government policy in a direction that benefits his business interests.
Gore is chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection, an outfit that seeks to "persuade people of the importance, urgency and feasibility" of going green. It recently launched a $US300 million ad campaign to coax American people and politicians to embrace the carbon-lite lifestyle.
But Gore is also chairman of a greeninvestment firm called Generation Investment Management, which is a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, an international collaboration of businesses and science bodies, and which invests in firms that produce renewable energy and low-carbon technology. So Gore uses one of his multimillion-dollar organisations, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to put pressure on government to promote the low-carbon lifestyle that will furnish one of his other multimillion-dollar organisations, General Investment Management, with booming business.
Gore's activities provide only a glimpse into the new collusion between greens, businesses and government. So speedily has this network come together that according to one critic of the politics of environmentalism, Bjorn Lomborg, it is not going too far to liken the new green-industrial complex to the military-industrial complex that president Dwight Eisenhower warned of in the 1950s.
We have seen this before, of course, with Enron, which had the same idea: use political connections to rewire the regulatory system to its own advantage. Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and all those other crooks had a moneymaking vision, but they were simply ahead of their time.
So now, with better timing--and no doubt better lawyers--Jeff Immelt of General Electric picks up the green torch. That's "green" as in the environment, and "green" as in money. The same eco-fiscal scam, is happening today, only this time with the full faith and credit of the US government falling in behind Gore's and Immelt's rent-seeking efforts, thanks to Barack Obama.
Obama is a actually a sad case. Personally, he seems like a good enough guy, but he was always willing to be a tool for the powerful, be it Harvard Law School liberals, the Daley political machine, or the Chicago financiers who took up his presidential candidacy as their cause a few years ago. Between the TARP bailout and all the other bank bailouts, plus cap-and-trade, those billionaires are going to make more billions. But what they can't do, none of them, is create real jobs for Americans. And Obama and ordinary Democrats will get the blame in the upcoming elections.
