Obama's ties to Industry in Cap-and-Trade

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." - FOX News Story

This is some pretty good insight as to why the President is hell bent on driving up the energy prices by instituting the cap-and-trade system. He claims that he will lower taxes to offset the rise in prices to consumers, but seriously who believes that?