Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Climate industry has 3 requirements of Americans: constrain your industry, send your money abroad, and accept stronger UN. Per Kyoto negotiator and Clinton and Bush official Nigel Purvis-Euractiv, Jan. 13, 2012

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Jan. 13, 2012, “US Republicans stir transatlantic tensions over climate change,” Euractiv, Arthur Neslan

“Concerns are growing in Brussels that persistent denial of human-caused global warming among Republican presidential hopefuls could damage EU-US relations and even spark a trade conflict.

All the leading challengers for the White House have staked out positions on global warming that defy the international scientific consensus, causing what Thomas Legge, a climate officer for the German Marshall Fund, called “exasperation” in Brussels….

Six candidates are vying for the Republican party’s nomination to challenge Democrat incumbent Barack Obama in the November [2012] general election.

Ironically, the ‘cap and trade’ idea that underwrites the global carbon market was originally the brainchild of US Republicans. [Aug. 2009, “The Political History of Cap and Trade,” Smithsonian Magazine, “In the ’80s, the challenge was to limit acid rain from power plants; now, it’s to cut carbon emissions.“] But this changed because of what one senior US climate negotiator at Kyoto described as a collection of “toxic” ingredients.

There are three issues–
 
constraining industry,
sending money abroad, and
strengthening the UN–

that are inflammatory on their own right,” Nigel Purvis, a State Department official under the Clinton and Bush administrations, said on the phone from Washington.

More than that, the climate change issue had become a symbol of ‘big government’ for Republicans, Purvis argued….

“When you put all these factors together, they are a Molotov cocktail,” Purvis said. “It is unfortunate and quite dangerous.”…

Legge [of German Marshall Fund]…also suggested that “the candidates are taking positions of necessity to win primaries and they will then tack back to the centre.”

Nigel Purvis, now the president of the Climate Advisers consultancy in Washington, agreed that there was long-term cause for optimism….

But uncertainties remain surrounding the extent of future temperature rises and the effects they will have on the Earth’s complex ecosystem.”…



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