Siemens was mentioned in ClimateGate emails (see below) by a scientist hoping to get money from them to fund one of his projects.
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2/13/2009, "At Siemens, Bribery Was Just a Line Item," PBS.org, FrontlineWorld, Schubert and Miller, story also published in NY Times
"What is striking...is how entrenched corruption had become at a sprawling, sophisticated corporation that externally embraced the nostrums of a transparent global marketplace built on legitimate transactions.
Mr. Siekaczek (pronounced SEE-kah-chek) says that from 2002 to 2006 he oversaw an annual bribery budget of about $40 million to $50 million at Siemens. Company managers and sales staff used the slush fund to cozy up to corrupt government officials worldwide."...
- Ed. note: The US Justice Dept. went easy on Siemens so it could keep the pipeline open to US taxpayer dollars:
"Although court documents are salted throughout with the word "bribes," the Justice Department allowed Siemens to plead to accounting violations because it cooperated with the investigation and because pleading to bribery violations would have barred Siemens from bidding on government contracts in the United States. Siemens doesn't dispute the government's account of its actions....
It paid $5 million in bribes to win a mobile phone contract in Bangladesh, to the son of the prime minister at the time and other senior officials, according to court documents. Mr. Siekaczek's group also made $12.7 million in payments to senior officials in Nigeria for government contracts.
In Argentina, a different Siemens subsidiary paid at least $40 million in bribes to win a $1 billion contract to produce national identity cards. In Israel, the company provided $20 million to senior government officials to build power plants. In Venezuela, it was $16 million for urban rail lines. In China, $14 million for medical equipment.
- And in Iraq, $1.7 million to Saddam Hussein and his cronies....
Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Myanmar and Somalia are the five countries where corporate bribery is most common, according to Transparency International. The S.E.C. complaint said Siemens paid
- its heftiest bribes in China, Russia, Argentina, Israel and Venezuela....
"Bribery was Siemens's business model," said Uwe Dolata, the spokesman for the association of federal criminal investigators in Germany. "Siemens had institutionalized corruption."
Before 1999, bribes were deductible as business expenses under the German tax code, and paying off a foreign official was not a criminal offense. In such an environment, Siemens officials subscribed to a straightforward rule in pursuing business abroad, according to one former executive. They played by local rules....
Siemens bribed wherever executives felt the money was needed, paying off officials not only in countries known for government corruption, like Nigeria, but
- also in countries
according to court records....
==================
1/6/09, Siemens bribery judgment a "wake up call for the "global energy industry."..
- 9/20/10, "Climate Deal May Need Company Lobbying, Figueres Says," Bloomberg,
"Success at climate-change talks in Mexico may depend on companies such as Siemens AG and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. prodding governments into action,
- said Christiana Figueres, the United Nations climate chief.
Companies should lobby governments to recognize the business opportunities that arise from curbing global warming, Figueres today told a group that tracks carbon emissions by the world’s largest companies. Helping developing countries deliver more energy with fewer warming gases represents
- a “huge opportunity,” she said at a conference in New York."
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- SIEMENS is mentioned in ClimateGate emails, 10/5/09 and 10/6/09:
- A day later, Oct. 6, an emailer says he's in talks with Siemens about money for CO2 research. (Phil Jones blames "right wing web sites" for their troubles):
Subject: Co2 Data
From: Martin Lutyens
To: Andrew Manning
Dear Andrew,
I just came across an article in The Week, called "The case of the vanishing data". It
writes in a rather wry and sceptical way about your UEA colleagues Phil Jones and Tom
Wigley , saying that only their "homogenised" or "adjusted" historical data is
available, and the original, raw data has gone missing. Apparently some other
environmental gurus now want to look at the original data and were "fobbed off".
According to the article,
- the adjusted data forms the basis for much of the climate change debate and , because others now want to look at the source data,
- it is "at the centre of an academic spat that could have major implications for the climate change debate".
who may just be stirring it.
The article concludes"In short, the data invoked to verify the most significant
forecasts about the world's future,
- have simply vanished."
- what to say if asked.
Martin Lutyens
+44 (0) 207 938 2387
+44 (0) 796 646 2661
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia"
==========================
Date, Oct. 6, 2009, (Phil Jones getting fed up with allegations and blames "right wing websites." Emailer Andrew says he's in talks with Siemens):
"From: Phil Jones
To: Andrew Manning
Subject: Re: Fwd: Co2 Data
Date: Tue Oct 6 08:38:04 2009
Andrew,
Getting a bit fed up with these baseless allegations....
It is the right wing web sites doing all this, presumably in the build up to Copenhagen.
---------------------
At 00:13 06/10/2009, Andrew Manning wrote:
Hi Phil,
Is this another witch hunt (like Mann et al.)? How should I respond to the below?
(I'm in the process of trying to persuade Siemens Corp. (a company with half a million employees in 190 countries!) to donate me a little cash to do some CO2 measurments here in the UK - looking promising,
- so the last thing I need is news articles
Kind regards,
Andrew"....
==================
"News organizations have staked their credibility on the claim that climate science is "settled.""
11/25/2009, "Global warming industry becomes too big to fail," Timothy Carney, Washington Examiner
"So the warming crowd, these e-mails show us, suffers from the same conflicts of interest and profit motives that are frequently attributed to skeptics. When Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" came out, Gore charged that global warming deniers were trying to protect profits. Gore quoted fabled muckraker Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something
- when his salary depends upon him not understanding it."
Climate scientists derive both their sense of purpose and their paychecks from a perceived climate crisis. We shouldn't be surprised, then, to see them putting their pet cause ahead of scientific standards. For instance, climate scientist Giorgio Filippo in a 2000 e-mail wrote about the drafting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's assessment of climate research: "Essentially, I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes. I think this will set a dangerous precedent, which might mine the IPCC credibility, and I am a bit uncomfortable that now nearly everybody seems to think that it is just ok to do this."
These are the scientists who drive climate policy.
Some critics writing about the leaked e-mails say they expose a "fraud," a "hoax," and a conspiracy. The warming crowd claim that everything is being taken out of context.
But Manning's e-mail cannot be ignored, because it is self-evidently true. If the catastrophic-man-made-climate-change hypothesis melted down,
Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle probably put it best: "That doesn't mean their paradigm is wrong; rather, it means we need to be less romantic about the practice of science. No scientific consensus is ever as powerful as its proponents claim, because no scientists are ever as perfect as we'd like to imagine."
And scientists aren't the only ones with skin in the game. Take manufacturing and transportation giant Siemens, for instance, whom Manning was wooing. In 2006, the company joined the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which has been a key lobbyist for the sort of greenhouse gas cap-and-trade scheme at the heart of the climate bill currently before Congress. Siemens and other members of USCAP have invested billions in buying up greenhouse gas credits, alternative energy sources like wind and solar power, and carbon capture and sequestration (the attempt to trap CO2 underground). E-mails show CRU scientists pushing corporate donors to fund their climate science as a way of advancing carbon capture.
Governments have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into climate research. News organizations have staked their credibility on the claim that climate science is "settled." With all this on the line for scientists, media, business, and government, are we really going to let some contrary data get in the way?
The leaked e-mails don't necessarily show a conspiracy, but they do show that the industry built upon belief in man-made global warming
- has become too big to fail."
================
7/26/11, "Fighting Climate Change by Not Focusing on Climate Change," Time Magazine, Bryan Walsh
.
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