Posted on 05/28/2002 3:35:32 AM PDT by kattracks
Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - Global warming and its effects, if left unchecked, could foment more terrorism, former President Bill Clinton said Monday.
Speaking at a $375-a-head automobile-launch function in Auckland, New Zealand, Clinton said the collapse last March of a large chunk of the Antarctic ice-shelf had provided "fresh evidence of the reality of global warming."
About one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the world come from cars and trucks, Clinton told the 750 guests, referring to pollutants environmentalists hold responsible for climate change.
Eliminating that source through various environmentally sound vehicle projects could "make a third of this problem go away," he added.
In what he said was an "unsolicited statement of support," Clinton thanked the event's hosts, German car manufacturer BMW, for its work in developing environmentally-responsible autos for the future, including work on hydrogen-powered engines.
"This is a big deal. I think the United States should have done more [in this regard] when I was president. And if I could have persuaded the Congress that global warming was real instead of some subversive plot to make us poor, we would have done more."
Clinton asserted that if the planet's climate warmed for the next 50 years at the rate of the last 10, "You will lose whole island nations in the Pacific [and] we will lose 50 feet of Manhattan island where I go to work every day."
"Farmers won't be able to grow food anymore. That will create tens of millions of food refugees, and all kinds of fertile fields for terrorism and disruption."
When the ice shelf Clinton mentioned, which was bigger than Rhode Island, broke off, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado attributed it to "strong climate warming in the region" - about half a degree Celsius each decade for at least the past half century.
The Clinton administration backed and signed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which aimed to counter climate change by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. It required the U.S. and three dozen other nations to cut emissions by specified amounts.
But shortly after taking office, President Bush announced Washington would not ratify the "fatally flawed" agreement, which he said would hurt the American economy and U.S. workers.
Clinton Monday offered another view. "It's now no longer true that we have to put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to get rich, stay rich or grow richer," he said. "We're going to have to prove that we can do it in an economic way."
Speaking without notes for almost an hour, the former president entertained his listeners, including Prime Minister Helen Clark, with anecdotes, including references to his first job working at a Buick dealership, where the work was "hard and dirty ... good preparation for politics."
He also recalled his last visit to New Zealand, for a 1999 Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation conference, when some of his staff had tried the New Zealand-originated pastime of bungy-jumping.
Clinton said he had passed up the opportunity, seeing the activity as too similar to politics - "everyone watching you taking a flying leap into the unknown, half the people hoping the [rubber latex] strap will break ..."
'More partners, fewer terrorists'
Much of Clinton's address focused on the need to build a global community.
While he said the effort to fight and prevent terrorism and to limit production of weapons of mass destruction was important, "it will not give you the world you want for your kids. We also have to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists."
The world had become highly interdependent, with "collapsed borders and shortened distances," and the spread of information and technology. But it had yet to become an "integrated, global community."
Wealthy nations had to work to remove the economic, social and political paradoxes that feed humiliation and abasement, Clinton said, by increasing trade and foreign aid, and being a force for peace, especially in the Middle East and South Asia.
He chastised the U.S. for spending a smaller percentage of its budget on aid than any other donor nation. While applauding Bush's announcement in March of a boost in foreign aid, Clinton said even with that increase, the U.S. will be spending slightly less than it did as a percentage of income in 1995. "We have to do better."
"I talked about this 'til I was blue in the face, and it was a giant yawner for most people before Sept. 11. Now people are ready to listen and learn."
The "more partners, fewer terrorists" theme has become a recurrent one for Clinton since last September's terrorist attacks.
A quick internet search shows he used the phrase, or variations of it, in numerous speeches around the world, including in Georgetown University (Nov. 2001), Calgary, Alberta (Nov.), Little Rock, Arkansas (Dec.), in Britain (Dec.), the University of California, Berkeley (Jan.), Adelaide, Australia (Feb.), Montreal (Feb.), Tufts University (Mar.) and the University of Nevada (Apr.)
Several New Zealand media reports noted that Clinton is reportedly paid in the vicinity of $250,000 for a single speech - with one report breaking it down to $5,280 a minute, and $88 a second.
Apart from the dinner tickets, BMW also charged around 20 VIP guests almost $12,000 each for a 30-minute cocktail meeting and photograph session with Clinton earlier in the evening.
See also:
Global Warming Models Labeled 'Fairy Tale' By Team of Scientists (May 14, 2002)
Pacific Nations May Sue US, Australia over Greenhouse Gases (Mar. 5, 2002)
E-mail a news tip to Patrick Goodenough.
Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.
Plus he is also admitting that politics is dirty...at least his kind is. Hahaha!
Should I? Arrrrrrrggg...
Okay.
Especially for interns under your desk, Slick.
There. I feel better already.
It really figures that he was a used-car salesman. Does anyone see just how he makes the leaping link between the two issues of the non-existent global warming and terrorism?
You have nailed it on the head.
If you say so, Bill. Yeah, I really believe you go to work everyday...
Dear Ex-President Clinton,
There are many of us in America who would like very much for you to be silent, and go away much like Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter have in the past. I have watched as you have pretended to still be President, talking to the Saudi Prince just before President Bush, and prior to this, going to China just before the incident where a Chinese pilot broguth down our EP-3 Spyplane. I have watched you meddle in the affairs of the current administration. You have done a great disservice to our nation by muddying up the waters, and changing the dynamic between our President, and foreign nations. Why are you doing all of these things? Is it because you need to be the center of attention, or is it that your Russian handlers want you to disrupt the rest of the world?
I see your comrades on TV, singing the praises of Al Gore, your wife in name only Hillary, and your previous administration. What is it that your administration accomplished in 8 years, other than helping to create a recession, helped fuel the fires of terrorism, and perpetrate legislative reforms that Stalin would be proud of? Your administration passed more laws, stole more land, stole more liberties, enacted more socialist reforms, and crippled our military and intelligence gathering capability. Was this an accident? No it was not. You were trained to destroy our nation from the beginning.
How can a backwater white trash drug addled kid, grow up to be president? How is it that you skirted the requirements to be a President? Don't you have to be a veteran to be President, which you were not. If what you were defines what being a veteran is, then all of the AWOL soldiers who took dishonorable discharges should be given a reprieve, and have their documentation amended. I'd like to know who it was that took you out of that hospital in Arkansas, who dried you out enough to help you run for governor? Who was it that gave you a Rhodes Scholarship to go to school in England, and with your wife Hillary, go to get your final training in Russia? I'd like to know, seeing as how there are many of us out here that are skeptical as to your real abilities.
I and many others wonder what you learned in Russia that you couldn't have learned in England, or in the United States? What is it that the Russians taught you, and Hillary? With that said, did you get your mission accomplished for the Russians, or the Chinese? Who committed the murders of Ron Brown, and VInce Foster, or better yet, the murders of some of the people who were close to you in Arkansas, or the two officers at Waco who were your bodyguards at one time? Who helped you hide your extramarital affairs with a black woman who bore you a son? Who was it that helped you hide the fact that you're a pathological liar, a cheat, a rapist, a murderer, a treasonous pig? Who helped you engineer the sale of the Forest Hills Oil Reserve? Who helped you and Al Gore pocket as much money as you could from the sale of that oil, as well as the pharmaceutical companies you and your wife were invested in?
Who arranged the meetings for you to accept campaign contributions from China, and drug cartels? Who helped you sell top secret computer and missile technologies to China, as well as get them into the WTO, and give them preferred trade status? Who helped you turn a Free America into a police state full of fear? What was the purpose of your treachery? Who were you that all of this would come about all the while you were getting oral sex from Monica Lewinsky? Why didn't you do your duty and eliminate the threat of Osama Bin Laden when you knew about it in 1995, after the OKC bombing or what about the bombing of the USS Cole? Wasn't that also part of your agenda? What about your legacy? The legacy of lies, treason and death? Who are you to have left my country in such straits? Who were you to come into our country from Russia, and start the downward slide of our freedoms, rights, and sovereignty?
Now that I've asked you all the questions that nobody else will ask you in the media, I will hope that you do realize that you are unwanted here. Your contributions to America have been a legacy of evil, and undying evil I might add. Your executive orders, your lack of carrying out your constitutional duties, are just the beginning of a list that makes Aldrich Ames look like the pope. Your 8 years in office resulted in terrorist attacks, the weakening of our military, our intelligence gathering capability destroyed, inter-offices bureaucracy that prevents agencies from communicating to each other, more gun laws on the books than ever, more intrusion into our private lives, pressures on the private sectors, the blood of countless hundreds on your hands from Waco, The Oklahoma City Boming, The USS Cole attack, The missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan to cover up the Lewinsky Testimony, the people who have been around you who died under mysterious circumstances, and lastly the Word Trade Center tragedy. All of these people died because you were not doing your constitutional duties while in office. You were too busy making money for yourself, and some people around you. You were forwarding the communist agenda. You were destroying the rights of Americans, and creating a culture of fear. You have succeeded in destroying the America I once knew, but when you are gone Your footnote in the history of this country will be that of petty treasonous dictator, the little man who tried to destroy a nation. You are Nothing. The Chinese who bought you, parade you out to their people for amusement. They laugh at you. You are a sideshow freak, just like your wife in name only. She's a leninist pig who will also be remembered as the witch she is. A liar, a cheat, and one who tried to destroy the constitutional rights of every person in America.
Since you hate my country so much Mr. Clinton, leave it. Take your ill gotten money, and your carpetbagger wife and go to some socialist, leninist utopia where you can be vaunted as the diabolical despot you truly are. I am reviled by your presence, as the majority of America is as well. Leave my country, as it doesn't tolerate despots, and would be dictators. Leave my country today, and begone from our memories. Let us Americans live in peace, so that we may forget your trespasses against this nation.
Sincerely,
Tommy Allison
Just a couple of fact corrections:
1. You don't have to be a vereran to be elected President, although being a draft dodger who loathes the military should be automatic disqualification.
2. It was the Elk Hills NAval Oil Reserve that Algore orchestrated the sale of to his finincial angels at Occidental Petroleum (a dozen or so years after the democrat-controlled Congress refused to allow President Reagan to sell it off to apply the revenue to the National Debt).
Just a little more gobbledy-gook, mindless and inane word drool from #42.To think people 'pay' to hear this.....LOL
,,, a bungy jump without the bungy rope for Billy-Jeff? I don't want you Yanks thinking you're exclusive with the disaster you had as President for two terms. It's looking like our present disaster may have a second term too after the coming NZ elections.
Is New Zealand about to get Her first "Black President"? One "who feels your pain"? One whos married to a witch? One who "did not have sexual relations with THAT woman"?...........
The people of the United States are entitled to assume that their President is telling the truth. The pattern of misrepresentation and half-truths that emerges from our investigation reveals a presidential policy cynically based on the premise that the truth itself is negotiable.
It is a sad chapter in American history, but I cannot condone what I have heard; I cannot excuse it, and I cannot and will not stand for it."
Congressman Caldwell Butler (Republican) speaking about Nixon in 1974
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