By Conor Coughlin,
On January 4th, the EPA announced the first mass-marketed Smart Home Energy Management System to earn ENERGY STAR certification, which received zero media coverage by groups like the Trusted News Initiative and their “industry partners” conducting coordinated bans on all ENERGY STAR-related issues for decades. The EPA’s press release informs us that the new Samsung SmartThings Home Energy service has integrations that span thousands of partner brands but never explain why Americans should be forced to buy products and services from EPA-selected corporate partners. We’re all supposed to pretend that if the members of the World Economic Forum, Commonwealth Club in California, and the Prosperity Partnership in Washington State think ENERGY STAR is a trusted partner, we should also. Nobody bothers to question when Congress authorized the Dept of Energy to create profit-driven enterprises or to market EPA products on behalf of the USA to our global trade partners. Don’t ask to see the process employed by DOE to select Samsung Corp as the sole provider for that national network or seek any technical data on the product’s performance. It’s none of your business!
Indirectly, the EPA brand has been the subject of several Conspiracy Theories since at least 2011, when Mother Jones magazine posted “The Right’s Top 5 EPA Conspiracy Theories“. Should we just forget when radicals declared Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) was a crazy right-winger for suggesting that Obama’s plans to ‘skyrocket’ electrical rates would create a “Global Warming Secret Police,” or when conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi was warning that the “energy police are about to invade your home with ‘smart meters.’ According to the Guardian newspaper, Corsi had a long list of conspiratorial views about the American press “of being anti-Islamic, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, homophobic and of exploiting racial prejudices in an attempt to ‘scare white America.'”
What wasn’t considered controversial by the media was a Guardian article from Dec.3, 2010, about a secret plot by the CIA and State Dept to right the outcome of the U.N.’s Copenhagen climate deal as described in “WikiLeaks cables reveal how the U.S. manipulated climate accord.” The Guardian article claimed, “Perhaps the most audacious appeal for funds revealed in the cables is from Saudi Arabia, the world’s second-biggest oil producer and one of the 25 richest countries in the world. A secret cable sent on February 12th records a meeting between U.S. embassy officials and lead climate change negotiator Mohammad al-Sabban. “The kingdom will need time to diversify its economy away from petroleum, [Sabban] said, noting a U.S. commitment to help Saudi Arabia with its economic diversification efforts would ‘take the pressure off climate change negotiations.'” Is the fact that Exxon-Mobile and the Saudi Basic Industries Corp (Sabic) are now building the largest natural-gas processing plant in the world to export Texas natural resources abroad also a conspiracy theory?
When FBI Director Christopher Wray showed up at the annual WEF meeting to discuss working with government and private partners to tackle cyber threats, was he discussing efforts to protect American citizens from exploitation by business predators? Or was he working on his side job, which may include peddling EPA products? This is a valid question, Considering that the DOE had essentially abandoned all efforts to reduce GHG emissions through energy efficiency years ago in favor of a Clean Energy Economy in which carbon-trading schemes were the most significant money-making ventures for the political elites. In 2006, when former CIA Director James Woolsey provided the keynote speech on “Harvesting Clean Energy, National Security, and the Path to Energy Independence,” did it signal that actual energy efficiency technologies were no longer desirable to the State. James Woolsey was at the 6th annual N.W. Harvesting Clean Energy conference, a massive research program allegedly searching for cost-effective energy efficiency technologies for America’s Industrial Sector, the largest electricity consumer on the planet. The stated goal of that N.W. research program was to assist technology providers in overcoming the barriers put in place by bureaucrats and utility bosses. But saving energy suddenly went out of vogue. Instead, the program shifted to accommodate the DOE’s new $100 billion Save Energy Now boondoggle to fund a mere 200 “industrial assessments” by a few universities. That quickly became the DOE’s cost-effective solution for beating Global Warming, which also served as the vehicle to drive the environmental justice agenda onto American campuses at every level. That pathetic program was followed by Obama’s EPA; Lead By Example guidelines released in 2009, which instructed state bureaucrats to claim EPA products saved 25% to 50% more energy than similar products. That encouraged the political view that agency budgets could be leveraged for responsible environmental investments, which appeared perfectly normal to the savvy entrepreneurs in government looking to make some green from the EPA’s “Goose That Lays The Golden Eggs.” I don’t deny that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but is it true?”
The EPA press release from January 4th included the following; “ENERGY STAR® is the government-backed symbol for energy efficiency, providing simple, credible, and unbiased information that consumers and businesses rely on to make well-informed decisions. Thousands of industrial, commercial, utility, State, and local organizations—including about 40% of the Fortune 500®—rely on their partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deliver cost-saving energy efficiency solutions.” If you believe that the EPA has been providing unbiased information that consumers rely on to make well-informed decisions, then you probably also believe that Communist China, WEF, and the UNIDO are as trustworthy as FBI Director Wray.
Cross Posted with N4mation.
