Speaking of those who market fear to make money

Tim Flannery is at it again, flogging yet another book. The weather exploiters Peter Foster,  Financial Post  Tim Flannery, the radical Australian environmentalist, quoted Adam Smith this week during a CBC Radio interview, thus surely sending the great economist spinning once more in his Edinburgh grave. Promoting his latest book, Now or Never, on The Current, Mr. Flannery cited the Sage of Kirkcaldy's warning against attempts by businessmen to influence policy: "The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [merchants or manufacturers], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention." True indeed, which makes it intriguing that Mr. Flannery should regard Al Gore, who has made, and stands to make, hundreds of millions of dollars from promoting government subsidy and regulation, as one of his heroes. Even more strange, or perhaps just spectacularly hypocritical, that Mr. Flannery-- whose previous book, The Weather Makers, was a bestseller -- should head something called the Copenhagen Climate Council, which is a morass of the kind of corporatist influence against which Adam Smith was warning. The council's members include Combat Climate Change, which represents -among others --GE, Unilever, Citigroup, BP and Siemens. Then there is The Climate Group, whose corporate members include Bloomberg, Coca Cola, Dell, Google and IBM. Another member is the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, which was set up by the UN's former chief Global Salvationist, Maurice Strong, to push the crypto-socialist blueprint hatched by the Brundtland Commission. Then we have the World Economic Forum, yet another mercantilist organization of the self-appointed Great and Good, where Mr. Strong again had enormous influence until he was inconveniently implicated in the UN oil-for-food corruption scandal.

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