In 2000 and 2001, while Barack Obama served as a board member for a Chicago-based charitable foundation, he helped to fund a pioneering carbon trading exchange that is likely to fill a critical role in the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme that President Obama is now trying to push rapidly through Congress.During those two years, the Joyce Foundation gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself "North America's only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide."
One of those gases is carbon dioxide, the most ubiquitous greenhouse gas and the focus of the most far-reaching -- and contentious -- efforts to combat "climate change." On Monday, Obama's Environmental Protection Agency declared carbon dioxide a public health threat.
The President of the Joyce Foundation in 2000, when the foundation made its first grant to the Climate Exchange, was Paula DiPerna, who is now executive vice president of the Chicago Climate Exchange in charge of corporate recruitment and public policy, as well as president of CCX International.
DiPerna left the foundation in November 2001 and joined the Exchange. It was the same year in which the foundation gave its second and much larger grant to the exchange. The Exchange finally launched in 2003.
Reached at her office in New York, DiPerna said President Obama, who in 2000 was a candidate for Congress, was involved as a director of the foundation and voted on the proposal but declined to detail that involvement other than that "he read the proposal and voted on the grant."
She referred subsequent questions to the exchange's communications office.
In response to questions from FOX News about Obama's relationship to the project a White House spokesman said "the President has long believed that a market-based cap-and-trade system is the best way to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions and to promote our energy security. The success of the cap-and-trade approach in reducing acid rain demonstrates that providing incentives for companies to reduce their emissions is effective."
Obama's espousal of cap-and-trade, a system that is intended, among other things, to increase the price of fossil fuels and force their replacement by energy sources that produce less greenhouse gases, has drawn fire from many economists as a huge energy tax that will weigh heavily on an economy that is already in steep recession. The price tag has been put high as $2 trillion dollars over eight years. That figure, nearly three times higher than originally projected, was given in a White House briefing to Senate staffers last week and reported by US News and World Report and the Washington Times.
The scheme has also drawn attacks from 28 U.S. Senators, including West Virginia's Robert Byrd and Michigan's Carl Levin, both Democrats, who have criticized Obama for floating the idea that he would attach the measure to the current budget reconciliation process, to avoid a filibuster in Congress.