Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a “climate emergency.” As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the “trigger” placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee.

As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points out, the Kerry-Boxer bill requires the declaration of a “climate emergency” if the concentration of carbon dioxide and other declared greenhouse gases in the atmosphere exceeds 450 parts per million (ppm). It was at about 286 ppm before the Industrial Revolution and now sits at around 368 ppm.

That figure was picked out of a hat because the warm-mongers believe that’s the level at which the polar ice caps will disappear, boats can be moored on the Statue of Liberty’s torch and dead polar bears will wash up on the beaches of Malibu.

The Senate version includes a section that gives the president authority, under this declared “climate emergency,” to “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions … to address shortfalls” in achieving greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions.

What the “appropriate actions” might be are not defined and presumably left up to the discretion of the White House. Could the burning of coal be suspended or recreational driving be banned? Sen. David Vitter, R-La., asked the EPA for a definition and received no response.

Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Chris Horner says “this agenda transparently is not about GHG concentrations, or the climate. It’s about what the provision would bring: almost limitless power over private economic activity and individual liberty for the activist president and, for the reluctant leader, litigious greens and courts” packed by liberal Democrat appointees.

“Environmental groups have been working to deny grazing rights to America’s ranchers for decades. They do so by claiming violations of environmental policy, suing federal environmental agencies and ultimately, tying up ranchers’ time and resources in costly, and often baseless, court battles,” said Jeff Faulkner, Western Legacy Alliance (WLA) member. “What makes this situation worse is the fact that these environmental groups such as Western Watersheds Project and the Center for Biological Diversity are shaking down federal government programs so they can access taxpayer dollars to fund their radical agendas.”

Two of the federal programs that are seemingly handing out millions, and possibly billions, to environmental groups are the EAJA and the Judgment Fund.

The EAJA was established approximately 30 years ago by Congress to ensure that individuals, small businesses and/or public interest groups with limited financial capacity could seek judicial redress from unreasonable government actions that threatened their rights, privileges or interests.

According the U.S. Department of the Treasury website, the Judgment Fund, which was created in the 1960’s, “…is available for most court judgments and Justice Department compromise settlements of actual or imminent lawsuits against the government. Congress has added a number of administrative claim awards (settlements by agencies at the administrative level, without a lawsuit). The Judgment Fund has no fiscal year limitations, and there is no need for Congress to appropriate funds to it annually or otherwise. Moreover, disbursements from it are not attributed to or accounted for by the agencies whose activities give rise to awards paid. Absent a specific statutory requirement, the agency responsible is not required to reimburse the Judgment Fund.”

Since 2003, the Judgment Fund has paid out $4.7 billion in judgments, including the reimbursement of attorney’s fees. It appears environmental groups have accessed millions of taxpayer dollars from this fund; however, the Web site reporting these payments does not indicate to whom the payments were made or for what purpose. Additional investigation reveals that the same environmental groups benefiting from EAJA payments are accessing the Judgment Fund to millions of dollars each year.

An article at Fox News about the open letter noted:

American taxpayers are being forced to fund thousands of lawsuits filed against the federal government by environmental organizations — with their lawyers clocking thousands of hours and charging fees of up to $650 an hour.

The U.S. government hands out millions of dollars each year to various environmental organizations to help protect fish, wildlife and other aspects of the environment. And every year, those same groups spend millions suing the government over everything from forest policy and carbon emissions to water quality and wolf habitats.

Who paid the attorneys fees? The American taxpayers did.

In the lucrative world of environmental law, the biggest defendant is the federal government, and taxpayers foot the bill. The nation’s ten largest environmental groups have sued the government more than 3,000 times in a nine-year period, according to legal fund the Western Legacy Alliance, an Idaho-based legal fund that defends ranchers and farmers.

Now, the growing number of cases is beginning to attract the attention of some lawmakers in Congress.

Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., has written to the Department of Justice asking for an investigation, pointing out that much of the money being paid comes out of the Equal Access to Justice Act fund, which Congress set up for the indigent and public interest groups to recover legal fees.

Right now, the government does not account for how much is paid out to whom or for what reason.

“These are taxpayer dollars that are being used by the federal government to compensate people who have sued the federal government. I believe that taxpayers have the right to know who those people are and how much they’ve been paid,” Lummis told Fox News. 

They should not expect any help from the current Administration, however.

Bloomberg noted: Billionaire George Soros, looking to address the “political problem” of climate change, said he will invest $1 billion in clean-energy technology and donate $100 million to an environmental advisory group to aid policymakers. [He] announced the investment in Copenhagen on Oct. 10 at a meeting on climate change sponsored by Project Syndicate. The group is an international association made up of 430 newspapers from 150 countries.

…Soros’s announcement comes two months before 190 nations will gather in the Danish capital for a final round of negotiations on a new climate treaty that includes provisions to finance clean- energy projects in developing nations. Talks last week in Bangkok were marked by a dispute between richer and poorer nations over whether to renew or abandon the Kyoto Protocol, the only existing global agreement to reduce carbon dioxide, which is blamed for global warming.

Soros, 79, also will establish the Climate Policy Initiative, a San Francisco-based organization to which he will donate $10 million a year for 10 years.

…So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below – emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down skeptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.

Not surprising, then, that Steve McIntyre reports:

Earlier today, CRU cancelled all existing passwords. Actions speaking loudly.

Hackers have broken into the data base of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – one of the world’s leading alarmist centers – and put the files they stole on the Internet, on the grounds that the science is too important to be kept under wraps.

The ethics of this are dubious. But the files suggest, on a very preliminary glance, some other very dubious practices, too, and a lot of collusion – sometimes called “peer review”. Or even conspiracy.

“The files contain so much material that it is going to take some time t o put it all in context,” says Ball.  “However, enough is already known to underscore their explosive nature.  It is already clear the entire claims and positions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on falsified manipulated material and is therefore completely compromised.

“The fallout will be extensive as material continues to emerge.  Reputations of the scientists involved are already destroyed, however fringe players will continue to be identified and their reputations destroyed or sullied.”

While the mainstream media is bending into pretzels to keep the scandal under the rug, Climategate is already the biggest scientific scandal in history because of the global policy implications.