Al Gore, former VP, famous shill for "climate-change" hoax, has made a mint since he ran against W in 2000, worth 330 million now

[Apollonian]

How Al Gore has made $330m with climate alarmism: Former VP made a fortune after losing to George W when he set up a green investment firm now worth $36BN that pays him $2m a month... as he warns about 'rain bombs' and 'boiling oceans'​

Lihttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11653723/How-Al-Gore-300m-climate-alarmism-Former-VP-fortune-losing-George-W.html

[see vid at site link, above]

• Al Gore has made hundreds of millions through his climate awareness
• The former VP is at the forefront of green technology investment
• Gore's company Generation Investment Management pays him $2m per month
• The company has billions in investments worldwide
• Gore's wealth of around $300m is supplemented with speaking fees, shares and real estate

By PAUL FARRELL FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 12:49 EST, 19 January 2023 | UPDATED: 13:47 EST, 19 January 2023

Warning the world that it is on the brink of disaster has been lucrative for Al Gore.
His wild prediction at Davos that Earth faces 'rain bombs' and 'boiling oceans' is just his latest in decades of climate alarmism.
At the same time, the former VP has been at the forefront of green technology investment that has seen his wealth balloon to an estimated $330 million.
Four years after losing to George W Bush in 2000, Gore set up Generation Investment Management with former Goldman Sachs Managing Director and close friend David W. Blood.
The mission statement of the investment firm, where Gore collects $2 million in a monthly salary, is to back companies that are making strides towards going green. The firm is worth around $36 billion.
He proudly said of his role at the fund, when it launched, was that of a figurehead saying: 'I'm not a stock picker.'

Warning the world that it is on the brink of disaster has been lucrative for Al Gore
Between 2008 and 2011, the firm generated roughly $218 million in profits to be split among its 26 partners. As a founder, Gore likely had a large stake in the profits.
The firm owns millions of shares in companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google's parent Alphabet, finance giant Charles Schwab and tractor king John Deere.
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The group has also invested in lesser known companies such as Motivate, the company behind New York's Citi Bike, and Taiwanese electric-scooter make Gogoro.
Gore told Wired in 2017 that among the first companies that Generation invested in was BP. Although he said that the fund pulled back prior to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2013.
In 2004, when the firm launched, Gore was lecturing about the perils of climate change, including once at the premiere of the heavily criticized climate disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow.

Al Gore, left, and Davis Guggenheim pose with the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2007

Al Gore talks about global climate change in his Oscar-winning documentary
Those lectures would lead to him being given a starring role in the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
The film has generated controversy over the years, with outrage that it was shown to school students in the US and UK.
Gore's Democratic Party ties were also criticized for politicizing climate issues.
All the while, the Tennessee-native was making millions while lecturing the world on how humanity was losing the war against climate change.
He told the World Economic Forum in 2020: 'This is Thermopylae. This is Agincourt. This is Dunkirk. This is the Battle of the Bulge. This is 9/11. We have to rise to the occasion.'
In November 2021 at the UN Summit on Climate Change, he compared the world's complacency on climate change to the way it failed to take seriously the threat of fascism during the 1930s.
Invoking Winston Churchill's famous warning that 'the era of procrastination (…) is coming to its close,' Gore told the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow that the impacts of global warming would soon spur momentum for action.
'We are now experiencing the consequences of the climate crisis in every part of our world,' he said , echoing Churchill. 'The scientists warned us that these consequences were coming.'

Gore owns a condo in the St. Regis building in San Francisco, close to Silicon Valley, where many of his investments lie

The energy used at Gore's home in Nashville was more than 20 times the national average

Gore bought his home in Montecido, California, in 2009, along a coastline that he believes his eroding due to climate change
Gore's family has owned farming land in his native Tennessee for generations, while his mansion in Nashville is valued at $7.5 million, his waterfront villa in Montecito, where he counts Oprah as a neighbor, is worth $13 million, his Virginia home is worth around $3 million as is his apartment in the St. Regis building in San Francisco.
On top of his Green Investment Management money, Gore has around $80 million worth of stock in heavy hitters such as Apple and Google, he also draws a a salary from Apple as a compensation committee member.
Gore also nets at least $200,000 per public speaking engagement. Gore's advice on 'going green' is also sought by the biggest businesses in the world for undisclosed sums.
It wasn't always like this for Gore.
At the time that he ran for the presidency, after serving as Bill Clinton's loyal sub-ordinate for eight years, his net worth was a paltry $1.7 million, mainly through his family's land holdings in Tennessee.

'The accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth,' Gore said

'He's been wrong about everything. Every prediction wrong. He's a shill and doesn't offer anything worthy of consideration regarding our climate,' said one person who does not believe Gore's claims
In the aftermath of his run for the presidency, Gore received $15 million in taxpayer money for 'nomination expenses,' ABC News reported at the time.
The vice president's pension is based on how many years the person served in public office. After leaving the office of vice president in 2016, President Joe Biden began receiving $1 million per year for his 43 years of public service.
In total, Gore served for 24 years between the House of Representatives, the Senate and as Vice President.
A 2000 feature by CNN on his wealth stated that 'Gore doesn't own a single stock.' While Gore's health advisor Richard Boxer told the network that Gore was 'not at all interested in business.'
His most lucrative venture at the time of his presidential campaign was his 1992 book Earth in the Balance with landed him $1.1 million in royalties.
The CNN feature also notes that despite his advocating for the internet and technology, Gore was not an early investor in Silicon Valley. The piece said that most of his wealth had come from his father's business ties. Gore's father died in 1999.
After leaving politics, Gore founded the Current TV network in 2004, nine years later, he netted $70 million from the sale of the channel to Al Jazeera. While working as Current CEO, Gore was paid $1.2 million per year.

In 2000, Gore lost a controversial presidential election to Republican George W. Bush and accepted defeat following a brief court battle
Just two weeks after the Current TV sale, Gore decided to exercise a percentage of his stock options in Apple.
Around the same period, Gore was demanding nearly $200,000 for private speaking engagements. His rider stayed on brand with the Inconvenient Truth star demanding a hybrid sedan as transportation and not an SUV.
This contributed to giving Gore a comparable wealth portfolio to 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who became much maligned by the mainstream media over his personal worth of over $200 million.
Gore has been a member of Apple's board since 2003, and over that time, he has amassed more than 100,000 in shares and restricted stock in the company. In 2021, he was paid over $350,000 for his role on the company's compensation committee.
Earlier this week, CNBC reported that Gore and the two other members of the committee had voted to cut CEO Tim Cook's pay by 40 percent from around $98 million to $49 million.
During his tenure, the company's stock price has increased by a staggering 5,900 percent - meaning he would earn tens of millions of dollars in an instant if he decided to exercise his options.
Al Gore: Leaders 'criminally negligent' if they ignore climate change


In 2013, his holdings with Apple were estimated at $45.6 million. The same year, Gore inherited an undisclosed number of shares of Occidental Petroleum Corp., which are valued at between $500,000 and $1 million.
During his time as a senator, Occidental Petroleum, a fossil fuels company, was one of his biggest donors. The company had long standing ties with Gore's father, Al Gore Sr., also a former senator.
Gore Sr. retired from the Senate in 1970 and was given a $500,000 per year job as chairman of Occident Petroleum's coal arm, Island Coal Creek.
The Center of Public Integrity said in a 2000 study that Gore was receiving $20,000 per year from Occidental as a rental payment that the company had on land owned by the Gore family.
In July 1992, prior to the Clinton-Gore election, the New York Times wrote: 'Part of the criticism directed at Mr. Gore during his first race for Congress in 1976 concerned his father's involvement with energy interests.'
In 2009, Gore splashed out on a $9 million villa in Montecito, California, right on the seafront. A year later he announced his amicable divorce from his wife of 40 years, Tipper.
The separation is considered an example of a 'gray divorce,' a split that is not acrimonious just the product of two people growing apart. There is no indication that the divorce hit Gore's wallet too hard.
Gore has also served in various roles - most often an adviser or partner - to several companies including Google and Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Neither of the companies have disclosed how much they have paid Gore for his service.
At the time he signed on an advisor at Google in 2001, Gore was given stock options that were worth more than $30 million. At the time, Gore sported an ill-advised beard.
He told Fast Company in 2007 that on his first day at the tech giant that as a practical joke: 'Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] and the entire executive team had false beards on.'
The magazine's Ellen McGirt later wrote that Gore's wealth made it unlikely that he would ever run for the presidency again.
The former senator has multimillion dollar homes in Nashville, Virginia and a condo in San Francisco, where the Generation Investment Management is based.
CBS reported in 2007 that the energy consumption at Gore's Nashville home was 20 times the national average.
While in October 2021, Gore and Blood launched Just Climate that plans to invest in solutions that will help to limit global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Just Climate has been founded to do the hard yards of addressing the most difficult to decarbonize segments of the global economy that investors have ignored until now, Blood said.
In March 2017, Barron's ran a feature titled: 'Al Gore is winning at Investing.'
However the same year, Warren Buffett's top lieutenant Charlie Munger told a meeting that he felt as though Gore was 'not very smart' but that he had developed a simple investing strategy that was working for him.
His business gains were such that when Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with its $1.9 million prize money, he put all of his winnings into the Alliance for Climate Protection, an organization he founded.
The editor-in-chief of GreenTechMedia Stephen Lacey described Gore in an appearance The Energy Gang podcast in 2017: 'He is a flawed character. We’re in an era of backlash against elites, so Gore, a guy who bought a 6,500-square-foot seafront home in California for $8.8 million, and who hangs around with other celebrities who talk big on climate but who live lavish lifestyles, is the perfect target at this point in time.'
Read more:

• www.fastcompany....
• Gore Gets Record Amount of Taxpayer Funds - ABC News
• Al Gore explains how to make money from saving the planet | WIRED UK
• Apple CEO Tim Cook receives a 40% pay cut after shareholder vote
• Report: Al Gore's net worth at $200 million - CBS News
• Rich Blood A LOOK AT THE WEALTH OF AL GORE AND GEORGE W. BUSH SHOWS HOW MUCH THEY OWE THEIR FAMILIES--NOT JUST POLITICALLY BUT FINANCIALLY - November 1, 2000
• THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Personal Finances; Image of a Wealthy Gore Is Belied by a Net Worth in Senate's Minor League - The New York Times
• Al Gore is Winning at Investing | Barron's
• The Rise of Gray Divorce: Why and Why Not?
• How the Gores, father and son, helped their patron Occidental Petroleum – Center for Public Integrity

 

[Apollonian]

Here are some notes fm Carlson/FOX News on the "climate-change" religion and consequences, enforced by the gov.

 

[Apollonian]

Frequent ‘Adjustments’ to Past Temperatures by Met Office Cast Doubt on Global Warming​

BY CHRIS MORRISON
24 MAY 2023 3:00 PM

Link: https://dailysceptic.org/2023/05/24...s-by-met-office-cast-doubt-on-global-warming/




The increasing disconnection between the frequently-adjusted global surface temperature datasets and the accurate satellite measurement of the troposphere is casting further doubt on the unproven hypothesis that humans cause all or most climate change by burning fossil fuels. IPCC computer models predict a higher warming in the lower and mid-troposphere, but the latest Met Office retrospective adjustments produce 36% faster warming on the surface. “The lack of much tropospheric excess warming over surface warming suggests that changes in greenhouse gases are likely not a significant factor in current warming,” note scientists in a recently published Clintel report.
All the main surface temperature datasets have had large amounts of heating added to their retrospective records of late. Clintel notes that the recent update of the Met Office’s HadCRUT dataset showed 0.2°C more warming than its predecessor. In 2013, similar retrospective adjustments added considerable heating. As the Daily Sceptic reported last month, Professor Ole Humlum disclosed that since January 2008, the GISS database run by NASA increased its surface air temperature between 1910 to 2000 from 0.47°C to 0.67°C, a boost of 49% over this period. “Frequent and large corrections in a database unavoidably signal a fundamental uncertainty about the correct values,” noted Humlum.
Of course, the global average temperature plays a crucial part in persuading populations that there is a ‘climate crisis’, and only a collectivist Net Zero political solution holds the key to survival. But it can be seen that these frequent upwards adjustments of surface temperatures are causing inconvenient problems elsewhere in the global warming narrative. The satellite record shows that global warming ran out of steam a couple of decades ago once powerful natural El Niño effects are discounted, with any remaining change almost confined within margin of error territory. It needs only a moderately sceptical mind to question some of the recent adjustments.
According to the accurate satellite record, there have been two temperature pauses this century. The first one from around 2000 to 2014 was debated in scientific circles, and the Met Office wrote a paper on the event titled The Recent Pause in Global Warming. The latest pause has lasted since the small temperature uptick caused by one of the most powerful El Niño natural weather oscillations ever recorded in 2016.
But all signs of the pause have been expunged by HadCRUT4 and the latest update HadCRUT5. The hockey stick is alive and well at the Met Office with Clintel reporting a 37% cooling applied from 1850 to 1910, and a substantial jump of 38% from 2000 to 2020. Pause, what pause – the question springs to mind. Clintel notes that the recent past has the best data and the movements are “surprising”. In addition, with swings such as this from one version of HadCRUT to another, it is asked: “Just how accurate can their estimates of global surface warming be?” Of course, all of this movement is helpful in trying to nudge towards the invented climate ‘tipping point’ of a 1.5°C rise since 1850. As I noted last Friday, there was the regular annual media outing for the claim that temperatures could hit 1.5°C “within five years”, a story that has been doing the rounds for about five years.
This latest examination of the global temperature dataset is published in Clintel’s new detailed examination of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Reports, and is titled The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC. In a wide-ranging assessment, the Clintel scientists find that the UN climate body emphasises worst-case scenarios, rewrites climate history and has a “huge bias” in favour of bad news. We have covered this important new work in detail here, here and here. A spokesman for Netherlands-based Clintel has told the Daily Sceptic that the mainstream media have ignored its work, while the Dutch national press agency refused to circulate a press release.
The key take-away was the finding that the IPCC based 42% of it predictions and impact suggestions on a scenario called SSP5-8.5 that assumes up to 5°C of warming within less than 80 years. Even the IPCC believes the scenario is of “low likelihood”. In addition, this implausible scenario impacts about 50% of all climate science literature, much of which forms the basis of “screaming headlines”.
The comparison of the surface temperature record – complete with all its potential corruptions such as urban heat effects, poor device-siting and constant retrospective adjustments – against the satellite record, is of considerable interest. Clintel notes climate models backed up by scientific logic suggest that with additional warming on the ground, temperatures in the lower troposphere should actually be higher. This is due to the effect of condensing water vapour releasing latent heat that warms the surrounding area. Clintel finds that the Met Office surface datasets is warming 36% faster than the UAH satellite record, compiled since 1979 by the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The linear trend since that date is warming of 0.19°C per decade for HadCRUT, compared with only 0.14°C per decade from UAH. The authors note that this suggests “there are problems with the land-based temperature data or the processing of it”.

 

[Apollonian]

Fair Warning: Dogs Are Next on the Climate Agenda!​

May 25, 2023 9:40 pm by IWB
by Chris Black

Link: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/fair-warning-dogs-are-next-on-the-climate-agenda/

>can’t drive old cars
>can’t eat real meat
>can’t own a pet

---

No brakes on this dystopian hell train.

See also The best clip you'll see on climate change...

See also Elon Musk Fires Warning Shot at AP – “Either Back Up Your Claims AP with Actual Source Data or Retract Your Story”

Babies are pollutants coming soon.
All of the other things are testing grounds.
Now, if you ask me, every climate change supporter needs to be rounded up and executed in order to help the environment.

 

[Apollonian]

David Stockman On The Phony Climate Change Catastrophe... And Why Americans Will Foot The Bill​

BY TYLER DURDEN
SATURDAY, JUN 10, 2023 - 09:30 AM
Authored by David Stockman via Doug Casey's InternationalMan.com,

Link: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/d...-catastrophe-and-why-americans-will-foot-bill

When it comes to capital waste, there is nothing more destructive in all of history than the current disastrous campaign to eliminate CO2 emissions in the name of saving the planet from a phony climate change catastrophe.

Two mindless projects of national impoverishment.​

These are embodied in a proposed regulatory dragnet to force 67% of new auto sales into EVs by 2032 and a Washington-funded green energy plan to induce America’s great oil companies to build the equivalent of energy pyramids, likely resulting in corporate hari kari not too far down the road.
Literally, trillions of perfectly good capital stock–such as IC engine autos and coal-fired power plants—will be dismantled well before their useful lives are completed. And this wasted capital stock will be replaced with low and no efficiency interruptible wind and solar electric power and completely asinine schemes like carbon capture from the ambient air that will be heavily subsidized by Uncle Sam.
But to cut to the chase, the carbon capture scheme to which Occidental Petroleum, for example, plans to allocate billions is the equivalent of building 21st century energy pyramids.
CO2 Air Capture Contraption

The Original Egyptian Pyramids

Huge amounts of energy and materials will be used to build and operate these monstrosities, but unlike present day remnants of the Egyptian pyramids, we doubt that some future owners will even be able to charge tourist admission, meaning that the return to society on investment will be somewhere between nichts, nada, nugatory and nothing.
This loony idea apparently stems from the fact that Occidental recently took a stake in Carbon Engineering, a startup backed by Bill Gates, which developed a system to capture, purify and compress CO2. And, oh, Warren Buffett is Oxy’s controlling shareholder, to boot. It’s no wonder this once great American company is being led off the deep-end by these two and its Fortune 100 style woke CEO, Vicki Hollub.
In any event, these contraptions are to sit out by their lonesome in the open expanses of Texas, employing giant fields of fans which pull plain old ambient air into huge containers. Therein massive amounts of energy and chemicals will be deployed to bind with the CO2 to separate it from the air, eventually creating pellets. The pellets will then be heated to release pure carbon dioxide, which, in turn, will be compressed to be transported through pipelines and funneled deep underground.
Naturally, Oxy’s executives have been led to believe that they are doing god’s work, with a big helping hand from Uncle Sam’s lavish subsidies. For instance, Richard Jackson, Occidental’s president of U.S. onshore resources and carbon management, is clearly drinking the cool-aid in big gulps: “We can turn CO2 into value,” he said.
Well, no, they will be doing just the opposite: Turning valuable ambient CO2, on which the plant and animal life of the planet depends, into dead material to be buried deep in the earth, and at enormous waste of economic resources.
Thus, Occidental estimates its initial cost to remove a metric ton of CO2 would be between $400 and $500. It claims that as it manufactures more plants and efficiencies kick in, it will be able to roughly halve that to between $200 and $250 a ton by the end of the decade.

But so what? Waste is waste.​

In turn, this deadweight loss to society will be compounded by federal tax credits. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by Sleepy Joe in 2022, rewards companies that capture and store atmospheric CO2 with a $180 tax credit per metric ton contained permanently.
So it’s obvious how Oxy intends to make this pencil out, given that the implied cost of carbon capture amounts to $90 to $180 dollars per barrel of oil equivalent. That is, the taxpayers will fork-over the cost!
But there’s more. In its wisdom Washington will be mandating energy producers, auto producers, airlines, most other businesses, and eventually households, too, to purchase CO2 credits from schemes like Oxy’s carbon capture boondoggle for the privilege of engaging in daily economic life and commerce.
And that is just plain malefic. Oxy will be making money double-charging Americans for the idiocy of carbon capture—first in the tax credits and then in the higher cost of everyday goods and services impacted by the mandates to purchase carbon credits.
Here’s the thing. This sweeping attack on rationality and economic productivity might make sense if Co2 were a super-dangerous pollutant—one which threatened massive medical and economic harm to mankind.
But that is not remotely the case. The campaign against CO2 is a secular religious crusade against what amounts to the soft underbelly of industrial civilization. It’s as if a rampaging sect of misanthropes went looking for the molecule on which the planet’s very life and prosperity depend, found CO2 and declared it as the horrific poison of modern life.
Yet the very science of the matter and the history of the planet reveal the anti-CO2 crusade for what it is - a contemporary form of witchcraftery.

 

[Apollonian]

‘Boiling Oceans’ Alarm Sounded by Media – But No Mention that Total Ocean Heat Has Risen Just 0.03% in 125 Years​

BY CHRIS MORRISON
11 JUNE 2023 7:00 AM

Link: https://dailysceptic.org/2023/06/11...-ocean-heat-has-risen-just-0-03-in-125-years/




In early April, the Guardian ran a story reporting that the world’s ocean surface temperature was at an “all time high” of 21.1°C, and this was leading to “marine heatwaves” around the globe. “The current trajectory looks like it’s heading off the charts, smashing previous records”, said arch-climate activist Professor Matthew England from the University of New South Wales. The story did what it was supposed to do and upped climate alarm, but, curiously, less publicity has been given to the recent fall to 20.8°C in just seven weeks.
The ‘boiling oceans’ trope is very popular these days in climate alarmists circles, not least because so many other scare stories around corals, polar ice and global warming are having to be retired. A month later, the Guardian’s Graham Readfearn followed up his ‘off the charts’ cherry-picked claptrap by promising there was a “huge payback” because the oceans had been absorbing the world’s “extra heat”. It was said that the United Nations’ climate assessment laid out “the unfathomable heat gain” between 1971 and 2018 of 396 zettajoules, equivalent to the power of 25 billion Hiroshima atomic bombs. In fact the UN’s sixth assessment report lays out a graph on page 350 showing a steady 500 zettajoules increase in ocean heat since 1900. There are 1,514,000 zettajoules of heat in the ocean, and the fact that this is a tiny 0.03% increase is not considered worthy of mention.
The Guardian’s claimed record is supplied by data from the U.S. weather service NOAA that measures only the warmest part of the ocean between 60°S and 60°N. Much of the world’s climate is determined by heat transfer from the tropics to the poles. At the moment, an El Niño is brewing in the Pacific which warms the top of the ocean and can transfer heat across the world. It is a natural oscillation, but alarmist scientists are rushing to claim any warming as human-caused climate change. The Guardian quotes a NOAA researcher Dr. Mike McPhaden who says a prolonged period of La Niña cold is coming to an end. Needless to say, the effect of these two oscillations have nothing to do with any changes caused by greenhouse gases, but with El Niño riding to the rescue, McPhaden suggests “we are likely seeing the climate change signal coming through loud and clear”.
Perhaps some basic physics at this point may help, although Guardian readers and those of a nervous ‘settled’ climate science disposition may care to look away now. Only a tiny fraction of the world’s heat resides in the atmosphere. If the atmospheric temperature rose by a huge 27°C and all that heat was then transferred to just the first 72 metres of the ocean, it would only be enough to raise sea temperatures at that level by 1°C. This is according to the latest work by the Clintel Foundation, a group of scientists who have recently produced a detailed analysis of the latest IPCC assessment work. It is noted that accurate data from the top ‘mixed’ level of the ocean has only been available for about 19 years. Various sea-surface and mixed-layer temperature measurements are said to have different trends, “some up, and some down”. From 100m to 2,000m it seems there is a current century warming trend of 0.4°C, about half that reported for the atmosphere at the Earth’s surface. Since El Niño and La Niña effects do not change water at this level, the rise is noted to be “remarkably linear”.
Of course heat transfers between atmosphere and ocean occur, but it is pushing it a bit to suggest all or most of the current warming in the ocean is caused by an atmosphere containing a tiny fraction of the heat already stored beneath the water. And it is pushing it even further to suggest that most oceanic warming is caused by humans adding just 4% to all atmospheric carbon dioxide, a gas that is only measured in trace quantities at around 400 parts per million. It is beneath the water that we can profitably find some answers about changing oceanic temperatures.
In a paper published last year, a group of oceanographers working out of the University of Miami found that warming in the Indian Ocean since 2000 could not be explained by air to sea heat transfers alone. It was found that warming down to 700m was driven by significant changes in oceanic fluxes and not by surface influences. In fact during the 2010s it was found that net air-sea fluxes are “near zero”. Reporting on the findings, the climate site No Tricks Zone noted that the Indian Ocean covers approximately 20% of the ocean surface, but the basin accounted for one half of overall warming in the global ocean’s top 700m from 2000 to 2019. No Tricks Zone observes that scientists have pointed out that internal ocean processes and natural circulating heat can explain decadal-scale warming and cooling in the global ocean.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Stop Press: Let’s not forget that according to Greta Thunberg “all of humanity” is going to be wiped out in exactly 10 days time.

 

[Apollonian]

How to Cut $2 Trillion of Fat from the Federal Budget​

by David Stockman | Brownstone Institute November 19th, 2024 2:37 PM

Link: https://www.infowars.com/posts/how-to-cut-2-trillion-of-fat-from-the-federal-budget/

The soaring public debt is now so out of control that the Federal budget threatens to become a self-fueling financial doomsday machine.

Image Credit: BING Image Creator

A goal of $2 trillion of budget savings is crucial to the very future of Constitutional democracy and capitalist prosperity in America. In fact, the soaring public debt is now so out of control that the Federal budget threatens to become a self-fueling financial doomsday machine. So more power to the DOGE of Musk and Ramaswamy. In spades!
For want of doubt, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 on a call to bring the nation’s inflationary budget under control, the public debt was $1 trillion.
By the time Donald Trump was elected the first time it had erupted to $20 trillion, which has now become $36 trillion. And under current built-in spending and tax policies it will hit $60 trillion by the end of the current 10-year budget window.
Thereafter, however, soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable fiscal wildfire. On paper, the public debt would power upward unabated to $150 trillion by mid-century under the CBO’s latest projection. Yet even the latter is based on a Rosy Scenario budget model that assumes Congress never again adopts a single new tax cut or spending program and that the US economy steams along without a recession, inflation recurrence, interest flare-up, or other economic crisis during the entirety of the next quarter-century!
Of course, long before the public debt actually hits $150 trillion or 166% of GDP per the CBO’s current long-term projection, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.
So we need to be clear that the team of Musk and Ramaswamy is talking about savings of $2 trillion per year and relatively soon, too. We make this clarification because we see the usual clueless commentators on Bubblevision saying, “Oh, they must be talking about $2 trillion over 10 years or at least a multi-year period of time.”
But we don’t think they meant that at all because Elon’s statement on the matter at the Madison Square Garden rally was very clear, and, quite frankly, if realized over 10 years or even 5 years it would be hardly worth the bother. That’s because the nation’s fiscal doomsday machine will be accumulating interest expense so fast as to make $2 trillion of savings spread over a decade little more than a rounding error. To wit, Federal interest expense has already passed the $1 trillion per year mark, which figure will hit $1.7 trillion by 2034 according to CBO and would top $7.5 trillion per year at minimum by our calculations by mid-century.
That is, if something drastic is not done now—like a $2 trillion annual budget savings soon—America will be paying more interest on the public debt within 25 years than the entirety of the Federal budget—Social Security, defense, Medicare, education, highways, interest, and the Washington Monument—today.
So, yes, Musk surely did mean $2 trillion per year in this interchange:

“How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted, $6.5 trillion (annual) Harris-Biden budget?” Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street CEO and Trump’s transition team co-chair, asked Musk at the former president’s recent rally held at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Without offering specifics, Musk said in response that he thinks “at least $2 trillion” in a brief moment that has since gained widespread attention online and drawn mixed reactions from budget world.

Obviously, the sprawling Federal government and its prodigious expanse of spending and debt literally defies easy comprehension and graspable solutions. After all, the current annual budget of $7 trillion amounts to Federal spending of nearly $20 billion per day and $830 million per hour. And when you talk about the 10-year budget outlook, comprehension literally fades away completely: The current CBO spending baseline for 2025-2034 amounts to $85 trillion or just shy of the annual GDP of the entire planet this year.
So based on experience we suggest building the $2 trillion case around a target year and several big buckets of savings by type. The latter can then be used to build a detailed but comprehensible plan for arraying and conveying the desperately needed house-cleaning of the Federal budget.
In that context, FY 2029 makes the most sense as a target year since it would represent the 4th and outgoing Trump budget; and also one which would give sufficient time for phasing in some of the sweeping cuts that will be needed, but not so far in the distant future as to be largely irrelevant to the here and now of fiscal governance during Donald Trump’s second term.
We’d also suggest three big buckets of savings, which we would short-hand as follows:

• Slash the Fat…by eliminating unnecessary and wasteful agencies and bureaucrats wholesale.
• Downsize the Muscle…by curtailing national security capacities and functions not needed for an America First policy.
• Cut the Bone…by reducing low-priority entitlements and subsidies that the nation cannot afford, and which a reasonable view of societal equity does not require.

Needless to say, when it comes to the vast wasteland of the Federal budget there are innumerable ways to skin the cat. But based on our own experience of more than a half-century of familiarity with the Federal budget as both a participant and an informed observer, we judge the following mix to be the most plausible and balanced way to get to the $2 trillion of annual savings by FY 2029.
To be sure, even this relatively judicious mix is sure to ignite firestorms on the banks of the Potomac like never before, but it can be strongly justified and defended for the reasons we will lay out in several subsequent installments.

• Slash the Fat: $300 billion or 15%.
• Downsize the Muscle: $500 billion or 25%.
• Cut the Bone: $1.2 trillion or 60%.

Suffice here to say that even the first bucket would leave them screaming to high heaven in the Swamplands of DC. But even that $300 billion savings could be accomplished only by eliminating entirely the estimated $50 billion annual cost of Biden’s misguided Green New Deal, including all EV credits and subsidies, and $150 billion per year of other forms of corporate welfare and subsidies embedded in the budget and tax code.
We will amplify the details of this $200 billion of inherent fat and waste in Part 2. But suffice it here to say that attacking the usual shock effect lists of outrageous studies, stupid foreign aid projects, or even payments to dead people, as is often used to illustrate wasteful spending, will get you barely a fractional decimal point of the savings target, as desirable as eliminating this nonsense might be in its own right.
For instance, the savings from eliminating “Dr. Fauci’s Monkey Business on NIH’s Monkey Island” from the list below would amount to just 0.002% of the $2 trillion target, while eliminating the “USAID Fund to Boost Egyptian Tourism” would save just o.0003% of the target.
Even some of the larger ideas of this sort, such as more timely elimination of dead people from the Social Security rolls, would not get you very far, either. That’s because 1.1 million Social Security recipients pass on their rewards each year, and departing beneficiaries would be receiving an average benefit currently of $1,907 per month. So one month of dead people on the rolls costs the not inconsiderable sum of $2.1 billion.
At the present time, however, that does not actually happen. The rolls are purged every month based on newly filed death certificates, and this encompasses the termination of payments to anyone who died during the month, including the last day. So the average duration on the rolls of Social Security decedents is 15 days, which computes to $1.050 billion of payments.
Thus, the average duration of dead people on the rolls might well be cut by two-thirds if the Musk and Ramaswamy team could come up with some more efficient software to monitor, report, recalculate last month’s benefits, and then terminate decedents. In turn, that means getting the dead people off Social Security 10 days faster would amount to a savings of $700 million per year or about 0.04% of the $2 trillion target. That is to say, there is undoubtedly room for efficiency improvements and elimination of outright waste and stupidity everywhere in the Federal budget, but it unfortunately adds up to rounding errors.
Stated differently, if it doesn’t “scream and bleed” politically it won’t likely make a dent in achieving the $2 trillion goal. There is just plain nothing antiseptic about slashing the Federal budget.
In this regard, it would take an average 47% cut in the current nondefense Federal headcounts of 1.343 million, including the elimination of a dozen or more agencies entirely, to achieve the balance of $100 billion of savings in the Slash the Fat category.
And that’s a comprehensive figure based on an average cost per Federal employee of $100,000 in pay per year plus $44,000 in average benefits and fringes—escalated to $160,000 per bureaucrat by FY 2029. In Part 2, we will lay out the most plausible and judicious route to the Slash the Fat category with respect to both $200 billion of corporate welfare and Green New Deal waste and $100 billion of excess nondefense payroll.
Then in Part 3, we will lay out how to cut $500 billion per year of unneeded muscle from the national security budget, followed by $1.2 trillion per year of bone from the entitlement and domestic welfare basket.

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