Tribune props up climate police

In today's Chicago Tribune, reporter Michael Hawthorne elevates a shadowy unelected organization as the arbiter of our future economic and environmental health.

In a story that says the city of Chicago is not meeting its own goals to reduce carbon emissions, Hawthorne sets up the Chicago Climate Exchange as the oracle of all that is right and proper in the future world order.

As part of his high-profile agenda to transform a gritty, smog-choked metropolis into a tree-lined showcase for green initiatives, Daley enrolled the city in a network of corporations and governments that pledged to curb emissions of greenhouse gases by 4 percent during the last four years. The network, called the Chicago Climate Exchange, is widely seen as a proving ground for a mandatory national system being debated in Congress.

Hawthorne goes on to recite the global warming religion like a good disciple.

In the absence of federal action, city and state governments across the nation have adopted their own initiatives to deal with emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are accumulating in the atmosphere and raising the Earth's average surface temperature. Many experts think that if steps aren't taken soon to reduce emissions, or at least slow their growth, the planet's climate could change radically.

Apparently, there is no room in the Tribune story to point out that a lot of scientists think the entire premise that man is causing global warming is much in doubt, despite an almost total media blackout of that viewpoint. A newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, was an exception today.

Hawthorne's story goes on to refer to the Chicago Climate Exchange throughout the story as a hammer against the city. I'm sure the giant PR firm Edelman is pleased it got the front page placement in the Tribune this morning, complete without an opposing viewpoint. In other words, a press release.

What the real issue here is money, self-interest, and the news media. The CCE and the global warming/religion/cult/industry has an enormous financial infrastructure behind it, and it's growing exponentially by the day. Will the news media ever examine the financial self-interest of groups like CCE? It's hardly a trivial story, considering that some real journalists have already discovered that the carbon exchange industry is rife with fraud.

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