Montana Climate Change Commission, Part II
April 3rd, 2008 | by Craig |This is part 2 of an ongoing series, you can find part 1 here.
Part II — Show Me The Money
We left off part 1 with the selection of the climate change committee. The response thus far has not been about the issues, but rather about personalities, namely mine. And, in some cases, missing the point entirely, which is what I’d expect (not to mention that my hunch is it’s intentional. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”).
I brought up the selection of the committee and their inclinations not to say that a conspiracy is afoot. Far from it. It’s the Governor’s commission, and he can appoint who the hell ever he wants. “To the victor goes the spoils.”
The upthrust, for those of you who missed it (intentionally and otherwise), is that the media ignored these affiliations. The fact that the commission may have been predisposed to a certain conclusion doesn’t really bother me all that much, but shouldn’t the public be informed of these things? After all, gang, it’s your tax dollars that are being spent on funding the commission, and it’s your tax dollars that are going to be spent if these recommendations become law. And don’t you want to know if some of the sectors who are heavily represented stand to profit?
Attending meetings can be a huge pain in the backside for most of the electorate. We’re spread out geographically, and for the most part, we have other things we need to take care of family, home, business and so forth. That’s why we need to have a media that examines things with a critical eye, rather than reprinting press releases. Since they aren’t providing that service anymore, is it any wonder they are bleeding subscribers and advertisers. To be clear, this is not — and should not be — a partisan issue. Left, right, center, up and down all should be demanding that our news sources be more diligent in their work.
Out of all the Technical Work Group Meetings, of which there were at least 8, and as many as 12, for 5 work groups, do you want to take a stab at how many members of the public were present? Anyone? Bueller?
Hint: Rhymes with zero.
I saw a comment on another site where someone complained that Bill Clinton didn’t time his speech here in Helena so that working folks could attend. Anyone care to guess when the Working Group meetings were held? Anyone? Bueller?
Hint: Not between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Last question: What is going to have a greater effect on your life? A stump speech from Monica’s ex-boyfriend, or legislation that is going to raise the cost of things you need to buy for your family?
I’ll give you this one. It’s not Bill.
Understand, I don’t expect that any of us can take time from work to attend these meetings, and even if we could, most of the terminology, abbreviations and argot is highly specialized, and would probably go right past us. Which is why we should be scolding the press for not doing their job.
To be fair, I think that the media are sometimes faced with a chicken and egg problem. They need more resources to cover these events, while subscriptions are slipping. Among other things, subscriptions are slipping because they don’t cover these events.
But, let’s get back to our main focus, the Climate Change Advisory Commission. There is a ton of information on their web site. Check out the layout and color scheme. Compare and contrast with the official state sites. Pretty danged close, aren’t they? At least until you look to the bottom and see who holds the copyright. It’s almost like they designed the site to give the impression that these suggestions are already policy.
That would be Center for Climate Strategies, and its parent group, the Enterprising Environmental Solutions, Inc.. Wait a minute, with all the talk about CCS, where does EESI fit in?
CCS bills itself as a neutral party, but it was created in 2004 as a policy center for EESI, which, in turn, was founded by an (you guessed it) advocacy group, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council.
So, where do all these organizations get their money?
I mentioned earlier that the left tends to get bent out of shape when Exxon gets involved, but when a group calls itself a “non-profit” organization, suddenly no one cares where the money is coming from. The motives from the money machines on the left are nothing but sunshine and utopia, and are not to be questioned.
So where does that money come from?
- The Turner Foundation
The main components of the Turner Foundation’s programs are:
Energy & Transportation: To protect the atmosphere and other natural resources by promoting energy efficiency, renewable energy and improved transportation policies and practices.
Habitat: To defend biodiversity by protecting habitats.
Water & Toxics: To protect rivers, lakes, wetlands, aquifers, oceans and other water systems from contamination, degradation and other abuses.
Population: Worldwide development of policies and practices which will reduce population growth by addressing the relationships between population growth, global resources, the status of women and girls, and access to family planning and reproductive health services.
- The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation
Human activity is causing the depletion of essential resources, global warming, rapid loss of biodiversity, and accelerating degradation of Earth’s life support systems. These developments threaten the livelihoods, health, and security of people in all nations and cultures as well as the well-being of the greater community of life. The RBF’s sustainable development grantmaking endeavors to address these challenges by supporting environmental stewardship that is ecologically based, economically sound, socially just, culturally appropriate, and consistent with intergenerational equity.
- Merck Family Fund
A radical transformation in the way energy and materials are produced and used, transportation is designed, and communities are built will be the legacy of our time. Every consumer and lifestyle choice that is made, from choosing office supplies to supporting public transportation, helps to slow the rate of global warming.
The Merck Family Fund is serious about its own practices and wants to support grantees and applicants in their efforts.
- The Surdna Foundation
The Surdna Foundation’s Environment Program is national in scope and supports a healthy natural environment, the foundation upon which human communities flourish. We believe that the social and economic concerns of communities are inextricably, and crucially, linked to the natural world. Today, the environment is at great risk due to the interrelated threats of global climate change, biodiversity loss and unsustainable levels of resource consumption. Our goals are to:
I. Build support for programs to stabilize climate change at the local, state and national level.
II. Improve transportation systems and patterns of land use across metropolitan areas, working landscapes, and intact ecosystems.
III. Safeguard the biological diversity and productivity of U.S. domestic oceans.
And the list goes on. This is how CCS can work so cheaply for the states, as they are so heavily subsidized by leftist money.
No agenda?
Further, they can do it on the cheap, since most of the policy documents are already written from a standard template. If you go through the documents on their web site, and randomly Google a few phrases, the same documents will come up from almost every other state they have worked in. Their claim is that they will build consensus about policy, but in essence, it looks to an outsider like they are seeking consensus on how many of CCS’s pre-developed policy plans will be recommended.
Stay tuned for Part III, “Here Comes the Science.”
16 Responses to “Montana Climate Change Commission, Part II”
By Mark T on Apr 4, 2008 | Reply
Craig - only you could print what you just printed about Turner and Rockefeller et al and see a “leftist” agenda.
Something different about this site …. sooooomthing …. you apparently have decided to take a leading role in advocacy journalism - that is, a political agenda masked as public interest. The very idea that you are scared of what the foundations above advocate speaks volumes … that’s the right wing agenda, paranoid, seeing the whole of creation as an anti-capitalist plot, meanwhile oblivious to real problems.
By the way, newspapers are more profitable than ever. Their problem is greedy owners who are squeezing their resources to feed the investors. The system at work. Talk to someone at the Gazette sometime about how everything - everything plays second fiddle to “making book.”
By W. Mark Felt on Apr 4, 2008 | Reply
And once again, Mark, you fail to contradict anything Craig’s said - just throw up your ‘Right Wing Noise Machine’ conspiracy smokescreen and continue to make yourself part of the problem rather than the solution.
You’ve mentioned many times the lack of journalism in this state, the apparent inability for one to research the documents rather than regurgitating a press release. Now here’s someone who’s doing exactly that and because it doesn’t fit into your mold of activism, it must be Bad(TM)
Disagree all you want, but c’mon - address the issue, not the person.
By Mark T on Apr 4, 2008 | Reply
I read his post and found nothing of substance - the quotes he gave us from the various foundations were innocuous. So at baseline was paranoia, and I pointed that out. I’ve done my job, Mr. Felt.
By dad on Apr 4, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for the good reporting on this topic — reporting that should be done by the MSM. Mark T’s comments put me in mind of a school kid who gets an F on a report while his friend gets an A, and he has a hissy fit to draw attention away from the fact there are no facts in his report. Just rants.
By contrast, Craig does a good job of calmly laying out how these national advocacy groups have hijacked this whole process, and he provides links so that we can check out the proof.
By the way, the claim that newspapers are more profitable than ever is another howler. The industry just reported a record 9 percent quarterly drop in advertising. You can check reports on newspaper profits online at editor & publisher if you don’t believe me.
By Mark T on Apr 5, 2008 | Reply
Take away Craig’s paranoia, and you have an outline of what certain people are doing to advocate for their beliefs, which are neither far-fetched nor unsupportable by science. Nothing bad going on here, nothing sinister, and this is highlighted by his reporting on the overall goals and visions of the groups he lists. But once filtered through his paranoia, it becomes a vast conspiracy - probably of people who want to destroy capitalism and make women into lesbians. It’s right wing circle jerk fodder.
Newspapers are very profitable, enjoying operating margins in the 20% range, more profitable even than pharmaceuticals. To cite on little statistic, as Dad did, and impute a large trend, is faulty logic.
By the way, I pulled my share of A’s on reports, though most of what I had to write about was nonsense. In my journeys through blogoland, I encounter many C students, usually conservative. They are oddly enough the ones who like to talk as if they were pulling down the A’s. Never was.
By Cammy on Apr 5, 2008 | Reply
Mark, Mark, Mark,..if it’s not an issue, why are you making such a big deal over this? Enough to even attack Craig and others on your own site?
Maybe you’re the one that’s paranoid, not Craig.
Settle down, relax, and breathe.
By dad on Apr 6, 2008 | Reply
I’m not sure why you would accuse Craig of paranoia. He calmly laid out a number of facts–with links–to back his arguments. By contrast, your response is really nothing more than an ad hominem attack and hyperbole, I think Cammy had things pegged pretty well in that regard.
As for the one fact you cite — that newspapers are “very profitable,” with operating margins in the 20 percent range — that may have been been true in the past, but the newspaper industry has changed dramatically in the past year or so, especially for large urban dailies. Craigslist has siphoned off a lot of their classified ads, and the recession and housing slump have hammered their advertising revenues. A lot of newspapers are too busy trying to stay out of the red to worry about 20 percent margins. Here’s a few items E&P has run in just that past week or so that confirm this trend:
April 05: The Journal Register Company, a publicly traded newspaper company that owns 22 dailies and 300 non-dailies, now faces a massive debt problem and the possibility of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, and may consider filing for bankruptcy, according to an article in today’s New York Times.
April 04: Already on notice that its stock price is too low to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Sun-Times Media Group (STMG) disclosed after markets closed Friday it has been warned its market capitalization is below listing standards.
April 03: Goldman Sachs waved investors away from the sector calling newspaper stocks “value traps,” in a note issued on Thursday. Goldman Sachs had a rather bleak forecast for Q1 advertising revenue as companies prepare for their earnings calls later this month. Analyst Peter Appert anticipates that ad revenue will decline about 10%.
April 02: In a new round of aggressive cost-cutting at the family owned Daily Herald in suburban Chicago, employees were told late Wednesday that they must take an unpaid day off every month until the newspaper’s revenues rebound. Corporate managers at the Paddock Publishing Co.-owned paper will also forgo the raises they were scheduled to get in April, and take a 5% pay cut, President and CEO Doug Ray said in a memo to employees.
April 02: In a new round of aggressive cost-cutting at the family owned Daily Herald in suburban Chicago, employees were told late Wednesday that they must take an unpaid day off every month until the newspaper’s revenues rebound. Corporate managers at the Paddock Publishing Co.-owned paper will also forgo the raises they were scheduled to get in April, and take a 5% pay cut.
March 31: Newspaper publisher Triple Crown Media Inc., which owns daily and weekly newspapers in Georgia, has announced a 5% companywide work force reduction because of the nation’s economic downturn and increased paper and fuel costs….Although the company took other steps to streamline operations, it determined that a work force reduction would also be needed, Gebhart said.
By Mark T on Apr 6, 2008 | Reply
You Google good, Dad, But the newspapers you cite are small and insignificant, and will be gobbled up by their larger competitors. Your evidence is nothing more than anecdotal. What’s happening is not new - it’s been going on for decades. Big newspapers are eating up small ones. They key to their survival, which they are now implementing through an acquiescent FCC, is cross-ownership, wherein a town’s newspaper, its radio and TV stations will be owned by one entity, and will all serve the same bottom line, and the same entrenched financial interests. That is the trend that should concern you.
Irrefutable: Newspapers are profitable, They merely need to adapt and figure out how to convert on-line readership into profit. It’s tricky, but they’ll do it.
Regarding Craig’s post, the subject of this thread, very reasonable people are working on the climate change problem, and have openly laid out their goals. Craig lays out their very reasonable statements of beliefs and objectives as proof of malfeasance. Looking through Craig’s eyes, these are evil people on a nefarious mission. It’s both laughable and paranoid. And it is being linked all over in the Right Wing blogs of Montana. This probalby indicates that conservatives have more of a pack mentality than liberals, but is nonetheless an interesting phenomenon.
By W. Mark Felt on Apr 6, 2008 | Reply
The Chicago Sun-Times is ’small and insignificant’?
By Mark T on Apr 6, 2008 | Reply
I speak of climate, you talk of local weather.
By Dave Budge on Apr 6, 2008 | Reply
Mark,
You’re talking out of your rear end. NYT has a net profit margin of 6.53%, WPO - 6.9%, PFE - 16.82, MRK - 13.54%
Operating Margins:
NYT - 10.15%
WPO - 11.4%
PFE - 30.53%
MRK - 25.83%
And both margins and revenue are down for both NYT and WPO. Are those papers big enough?
By dad on Apr 6, 2008 | Reply
The news items I cited came from looking back at a few days worth of business stories at Editor & Publisher, not from googling. Googling came up with a couple more related to larger chains:
* Tribune Co. just reported a $78 million fourth-quarter loss (Properties include the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and Baltimore Sun.) Reuters reports the company is at risk at defaulting on its debt unless it dumps more properties.
* McClatchy, the nation’s third largest newspaper chain, has seen its stock price plummet from $50 to $10 in the last two years. It reported a $1.43 billion fourth-quarter goodwill writedown last month and a $1.3 billion third-quarter goodwill charge in November.
I’m sure none of these facts will convince you, but maybe an article by fellow lefty Eric Alterman in the March 31 New Yorker will have some influence. In it, he says: “Newspapers are dying.”
He notes that newspapers have lost 42 per cent of their market value in the past three years, and that few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way newspapers have. McClatchy has lost 80 percent of its value since buying Knight Ridder, he notes, and Lee is down 75 percent since buying the Pulitzer chain. New York Times Co. stock has dropped more than 50 percent since late 2004.
He adds: “Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad. Newspapers have created Web sites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums are not nearly enough to replace the loss in revenue from circulation and print ads.”
I’ve discovered one thing in this conversation. I think I’ll probably pass on any investment advice you might offer here or any other web sites.
By the way, I don’t think Craig ever said anything about “evil” people. His point seems to be that the deck has been stacked so this group comes up with a particular outcome.
Now, what if we asked Barack Obama for advice on how to handle something like this. Wouldn’t he say that you should try to unite rather than divide? Wouldn’t he say that you should try to include people with differing viewpoints so that everyone feels they have their say, so that we get a better product by considering all points of view?
Or is Barack Obama wrong about the need to unite rather than divide?
By Mark T on Apr 6, 2008 | Reply
Some days I have to eat my hat.
By Steve T. on Apr 6, 2008 | Reply
I know the feeling. And although tin foil doesn’t taste too bad, the texture is…. off.