DC LEAKS: Hillary Clinton Supports GeoEngineering, err, Climate Intervention

by Jim Lee

Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta co-founded the Energy Future Coalition Steering Committee in 2002 and the latest DC Leaks contain a March 2015 meeting where they discuss how to fund geoengineering studies!  Most people know that Clinton is a climate change lobbyist’s dream come true, but nobody knew that she’s willing to block out the sun with planes spewing chemicals to save us from global warming!  This meeting follows the CIA funded reports of the National Research Council and National Academy of Science where public relations gurus decided to try to re-brand “geoengineering” as “climate intervention.” 

The story goes like this:

1. Polls show people hate the idea of controlling the weather, even to stop global warming.
2. Climate change advocates say people won’t stop polluting, so climate engineering must be studied.
3. Geoengineering advocates started calling for funding immediately following the COP21 conference, something that was planned in this meeting.
4. The CIA et al. decided that the public may be more receptive to the term “climate intervention” than “geoengineering” or even “climate engineering” because people see engineering as a bad thing.  You cannot recall the environment.  This is called framing, spin, propaganda, perception management.
5. Hillary Clinton’s campaign will seek to lobby Congress for geoengineering funding or take executive action to either fund or deploy geoengineering!  She will use Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) to sell her funding legislation.

So the spin is:

• Before > After
• Geoengineering > Climate Engineering > Climate Intervention
• Solar Radiation Management (SRM) > Albedo Modification

This meeting focuses on funding geoengineering in the future and mentions John Holdren and using ARPA-E.  Oddly enough, Bill Gates’ FICER geoengineering research fund was not mentioned, nor previous attempts at geoengineering and weather modification funding.

This really ups the stakes of this election!  Read this meeting notes below then read the references I have provided to see the full picture.  Geoengineering will kill people.  Do not allow these politicians to “frame” this debate in a way that makes people swallow the bitter geoengineering pill.  Albedo modification, solar radiation management, stratospheric aerosol injection, WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL IT, is dangerous and must not be studied.  Aerosol Geoengineering in fact should be banned before we are in a new arms race that makes the nuclear race seem insignificant.  Check out my Geoengineering Exposed page, scroll to the bottom, and read the Clarity Clause for a solution to geoengineering and weather modification worldwide.

DC LEAKS

HILLARY CLINTON CAMPAIGN GEOENGINEERING MEETING!

“Energy Future Coalition Steering Committee Meeting Notes” – May 12, 2015

DOWNLOAD – [MICROSOFT .DOCX] [PDF] [DC Leaks source]

I have provided all the relevant research below so reporters following this story get the full picture.

MEETING ATTENDEES

Steering Committee

Tom Daschle, The Daschle Group

Greg Dotson, Center for American Progress

Dan Esty, Yale University (by phone)

Vic Fazio, Akin Gump

Mike Finley, Turner Foundation

Thea Lea, AFL-CIO

Thomas Lovejoy, United Nations Foundation

Mark Safty, University of Colorado Denver

Steve Symms, Partner, Parry, Romani, DeConcini & Symms

Timothy Wirth, United Nations Foundation

 

Guests

Andrew Deutz, The Nature Conservancy

Ed Dunlea, National Academy of Sciences

Brenda Ekwurzel, Union of Concerned Scientists

Mohamed El-Ashry, United Nations Foundation

Shelley Fidler, Van Ness Feldman

David Goldston, Natural Resources Defense Council

Kalee Kreider, United Nations Foundation

Bob Perciasepe, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions

Rafe Pomerance, Polar Research Board

Ernie Shea, 25x’25

Hank Terhune, Akin Gump

Dave Titley, Penn State University

Janie Wise, Cassidy & Associates

 

MEETING HIGHLIGHTS

DAVE TITLEY

As I said, we have two reports, the reason being that most people call this geoengineering, and it’s kind of a mishmash of different techniques, all the way from painting roofs white to some sort of science fiction thing of thousands of aircrafts spraying stuff into the stratosphere, and everything in between. As we talked to people, we realized this term had very different meanings to different folks. What we are trying to do on the committee is to accurately, and without prejudice, describe what these techniques are. We’re not intervening in the Earth per se, we’re intervening in the climate.

Intervention, by definition, is an intentional action to make something better, and that’s at least the purpose. Now, we’ve all probably watched too much reality TV in the last 15 years, and we know that interventions sometimes have unexpected and not always great side effects. We think climate intervention is a more accurate and non-prejudicial, neither good nor bad, way of simply describing what it is we’re trying to do.

…

I’m going to talk about albedo modification. What do you do to simulate a volcano? You put aerosols up into the stratosphere, 50, 60, 70 thousand feet up into the atmosphere. The other thing you can do, at much lower levels – like a few thousand feet – is brighten the tops of the clouds off the west coast of continents. We call this albedo modification and not solar radiation management. We simply do not know enough to manage the sun’s radiation. So what are we doing? We’re reflecting sunlight, but to think we’ve got this nice, fine-tuned dial that we can set and everything’s going to be just fine is frankly the height of hubris. This is why we use the term albedo modification rather than solar radiation management.

This slide shows some of the risks that albedo modification poses. It messes about with the ozone and the stratosphere. Many modeling studies, as well as observations from nature volcanoes, show that it changes how precipitation falls – so does it mess with the monsoons in south Asia? The rainfall in the Amazon, even if you’re doing things half a world away? The more you try to understand the regional variability, the less certainty we have in that; different models give you different answers.

…

The third scenario is that the United States is not the only country with a vote. Another country or even a non-state actor might say, “I don’t like the climate in my part of the world, and I’m going to do something about it because you guys haven’t done anything.” So the President calls up her science advisor and says, “So, what should I tell these people? Should we ignore it? Should we say, okay, fine, and join them? Or should we say, unless you cease and desist within 72 hours, the full weight and power of the United States will come down on you?” What would the advice be to the President, to our most senior leadership, if that happened? If you don’t know the risks, if you haven’t done the science before that, it gets really hard to answer those questions. So that’s why we’re recommending the R&D. Much of the R&D we think should be done first actually benefits our understanding of the basic climate system anyway.

It turns out that our understanding of aerosols is not all that great, and that’s a huge part of understanding the albedo modification. Just understanding aerosols better would actually help us a lot.

Our ability to monitor the climate long term is not very good, and it may not be getting better. The committee recommends that we do need to be able to better monitor our climate – the long-term time series are very important, and staggering from system to system is not really the best way to do that.

 

…

RAFE POMERANCE

They asked [Eric] Holdren if we should we have a geoengineering research program, and he said, “Of course.” That was a political problem. I think the way forward is for the Executive Branch to respond to the Academy report and say, “What are we going to do?”, and they have to come up with a way to do that in the context of Paris. We’re not going to launch a big effort before Paris; we can’t, because any big, explicit effort of research, even if we agree to do it, is too risky as a political matter going into a global negotiation like that.

 

…

RAFE POMERANCE

The Academy chose not to define this as a so called ‘climate emergency’. That’s an interesting issue – what is it then? Are we in it?

DAVE TITLEY

We could spend a whole year coming up with scenarios on climate emergencies. My feeling is we could spend a whole year on that and then not pick the one that becomes a climate emergency.

RAFE POMERANCE

Someone has to define it, though.

…

KALEE KREIDER

If you look in the aerosols section of Working Group I, they also indicate that our knowledge of the underlying system as it relates to aerosols is really quite poor. …

It’s not just Paris that’s driving that we’re not getting research in geoengineering, it’s the fact that the U.S. Congress doesn’t want to fund research. I think it would be a mistake for us to think it’s just a climate problem; it’s a congressional funding for scientific and medical research problem.

…

JEN WILCOX

Just the CO₂ piece. In terms of what we might be able to learn from fracking with water, a lot of the concern associated with CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery or CO₂ sequestration is the risk associated with inducing seismic events. …

It was to essentially separate CO₂ from the off gas of oil refining, and it would need to be very pure if that’s the source of CO₂ we’re going to use for carbonated beverages.

…

DAVID GOLDSTON

I’m going to go back to albedo modification. I want to underscore the reasons to do the research besides thinking that this is actually something we want to engage in. Some of it is figuring out why we might not want to do this. The other is, as Dave mentioned, if other countries (as well as non-state actors) wanted to engage in this, how would we even evaluate whether this is something to worry about or whether something happened that actually made a difference? Someone engages in albedo modification, and then another country takes offense that it’s caused some problem there – how would we even know?

[EDITOR’S NOTE: We better know otherwise the ENMOD ban on weather warfare is useless]

…

BRENDA EKWURZEL

When we run models, it’s incredibly scary when you take away the offsetting from the aerosols, and it’s gone very fast. If we are weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, what does that mean? Just from a climate science and rogue actor standpoint, we have to understand the aerosols better and need to invest in research.

…

RAFE POMERANCE

What the Academy has basically proposed is a portfolio approach – reduce carbon from energy, utilize carbon sequestration, and think about albedo modification. All of it requires R&D. We have a small agency called ARPA-E, which is high-risk research, modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This effort needs to model its budget on DARPA, which is $5 billion a year for the Pentagon. We need $5 billion for the planet. We need the R&D to solve this.

TIM WIRTH

But we’re not going to get a pot of money saying “climate change.” What does AAAS give as the total dollar amount, not the percentage, that they say has to be running through NIH, NOAA, and NSA?

DAVE TITLEY

All non-defense is $66 billion as is, and 50% of that is health.

 

End of Quotes. References below.

Previous Geoengineering and Weather Modification Funding Attempts

• FAILED: H.R. 2995 (109^th): Weather Modification Research and Technology Transfer Authorization Act of 2005. Rep. Mark Udall (Democrat)
• FAILED: S. 517 (109^th): Weather Modification Research and Development Policy Authorization Act of 2005. Sen. Kay Hutchison (Republican)
• FAILED: S. 601 (111^th): Weather Mitigation Research and Development Policy Authorization Act of 2009
• Geoengineering I – Assessing the Implications of Large-Scale Climate Intervention | on YouTube
  • US House of Representatives | Subcommittee on Energy and Environment
    Thursday, November 05, 2009 | Link
• The Regulation of Geoengineering – Science and Technology Committee UK Parliament | on YouTube
  • Geoengineering HOC SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE
    Thursday, January 13, 2010 | Link
• Geoengineering II – The Scientific Basis and Engineering Challenges | on YouTube
  • US House of Representatives | Subcommittee on Energy and Environment
    Thursday, February 04, 2010 | Link
• Geoengineering III – Domestic and International Research Governance | on YouTube
  • US House of Representatives | Subcommittee on Energy and Environment
    Thursday, March 18, 2010 | Link

CIA Climate Intervention Reports

• Climate Intervention Reports Release Event Webcast
• Climate Intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration and Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth CIA, NRC, NAS official page
• Five Take-home Points from the NAS “Climate Intervention” Report – Simon Nicholson. “Will the “climate intervention” rebranding stick?” Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment (FCEA), formerly known as the DC Geoengineering Consorteum, lol.
• Re-branding Geoengineering: Climate Intervention and Gatekeeping – Jim Lee, March 2015
• The CIA, Weather Warfare, and Climate Terrorism – Jim Lee, February 2015
• US defense experts, CIA: We cannot detect “rogue geoengineering” – Jane Seidel, NOAA January 2015 [video]
• Playing God With the Planet – The Ethics & Politics of Geoengineering – thread on Ken Caldeira’s Geoengineering Google group where I wax on re-branding geoengineering vs Ken, Mick West, Stephen Salter, John Latham, and a slew of other geoengineers. August 2013
• CIA Backs $630,000 Scientific Study on Controlling Global Climate, “Conspiracy theorists, rejoice!” – Mother Jones, July 2013
• C.I.A. Closes Its Climate Change Office – NY Times, November 2012