Reprinted with permission of The New American magazine
Bloomberg Business, Newsweek, Salon, Slate, MSNBC, Associated Press, the Huffington Post, and dozens of other establishment media outlets are all in hyperventilation mode over alleged “censoring” of Wisconsin state employees, who are, supposedly, “banned” even from discussing or mentioning global warming or climate change. “Wisconsin Bans State Workers from Discussing Climate Change,” ran the April 8 headline at Newsweek.com, while the Huffington Post declared that “Wisconsin Bans Staff Of Public Lands Board From Talking About Climate Change,” and Bloomberg declared that “For Some Wisconsin State Workers, ‘Climate Change’ Isn’t Something You Can Talk About.”
The thesis of the stories is clear: Evil Republican officials are literally gagging state employees, forbidding them from even mentioning “global warming” or “climate change.” As is usually the case, the truth is far from according with the headlines. On April 7 the three-member Wisconsin Board of Commissioners of Public Lands voted to prohibit the small staff of the board (reportedly nine employees) from working on, or promoting, global-warming issues on office time or in official communications. There is no prohibition on the state employees “discussing” or “talking about” these issues among themselves or with others. The matter came to the fore, apparently, due to the activism of the board’s executive director Tia Nelson, the daughter of the late Gaylord Nelson, the former Wisconsin senator and governor whose main claim to fame is that he spearheaded the first Earth Day in 1970, and is usually referred to as the “founder” of Earth Day, the annual green propaganda and indoctrination festival.
The person presented as the villain in most of the stories is State Treasurer Matt Adamczyk, a Republican, who is one of the three Board members and initiated the restriction to keep the staff focused on their job of managing the Public Lands education trust funds, not promoting climate alarmism. “It’s not a part of our sole mission, which is to make money for our beneficiaries,” said Adamczyk. “That’s what I want our employees working on. That’s it. Managing our trust funds.”
“I would prefer that we didn’t have to prohibit stuff like this,” Adamczyk said. “It just seems silly that we would have to. But I’m not the one that’s been engaging on this topic for years.” Bloomberg Business did provide a clue to Tia Nelson’s political leanings, noting, “For 17 years before joining the public land agency, she ran the Nature Conservancy’s climate change initiative.” Of course, her green bona fides run deeper than that, and she doesn’t appear to have left her radical activism behind when she accepted a paid position on a public agency. According to the biography of Nelson provided by the Wisconsin Environmental Education Fund, “Ms. Nelson has developed and negotiated climate mitigation projects with industry, environmentalists and numerous governments around the world, including the United States, Belize, Bolivia and Brazil. She has conducted forest carbon workshops around the world and has been a frequent expert speaker on the topic of forest carbon offset trading.”
The WEEF bio continues: “Ms. Nelson served as an advisor to several councils including the World Bank’s Bio Carbon Fund, the Chicago Climate Exchange, and the Climate Neutral Network. She was recently appointed to the Northland College Board and also serves on the Board of Visitors for the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies, and the Friends of the Apostle Islands. In 2000, Ms. Nelson was the recipient of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Leadership Award.”
The Chicago Climate Exchange, to which Ms. Nelson was an advisor, was the fraudulent vehicle that Al Gore and Goldman Sachs hoped to ride to untold wealth by forcing everyone to pay for “carbon credits,” which they saw as a $10 trillion market. Likewise, the World Bank’s Bio Carbon Fund is an enormous scam siphoning billions of dollars into the hands of the politically connected, while brutally punishing the poorest of the poor in developing nations with perpetual energy poverty.
Most of the stories that have been popping up all over the Internet present Tia Nelson as the victim of vindictive GOP political hacks who are punishing her for her environmental activism in the distant past, many years ago. Most of them quote Nelson claiming not to have been involved in any global-warming activities since 2007 or 2008. The Bloomberg report, for example, quotes Nelson as claiming: “Just for the record, I haven’t worked on climate change in any direct manner since the year 2008 — or 2007, I think.” The same, or similar, quotes by Tia Nelson appear in many other stories. However, any reporter can perform the same simple search engine operation that this reporter did: Type in “Tia Nelson, global warming, climate change, Wisconsin” and then press the “enter” button. Guess what? Mixed in with all the dozens of “news” stories bewailing Wisconsin’s cruel “censorship” of Ms. Nelson are many links to enviro websites celebrating Nelson’s activism on behalf of the climate-change agenda — many of which have taken place since the time she allegedly stopped “working on” the issue, in 2007 or 2008.
Here is a fairly recent example from 2014, where Ms. Nelson, introduced in her official capacity, was a major speaker at a climate activist event:
“Spurring Collaboration and Action”
June 06, 2014
On June 7, 8:30 am to 3:30 pm, the public is invited to participate in the first Door County Climate Change Forum at The Lodge at Leathem Smith in Sturgeon Bay. The forum is organized by the Climate Change Coalition of Door County (CCCDC). Their goal is to initiate dialogue to spur collaboration and action by many Door County organizations and individuals to address, mitigate and adapt to climate change in our region. Speakers include Tia Nelson, executive secretary of the Wisconsin Board of Commissioners of Public Lands and co-chair, Governor Doyle’s Global Warming Task Force.
Here is an example from 2013:
NWEI’s Biannual Conference in La Crosse Explores Leadership, Action and Community July 25, 2013 Tia Nelson (daughter of Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson) talked about her father’s success at capacity building, the story of Earth Day, and how both shifted the environmental movement.
A photo of Nelson addressing the above-mentioned conference bears this caption: “Tia Nelson offers a keynote on leadership and Earth Day.”
Next is Nelson in 2010 actively promoting draconian CO2 restrictions and covering the Badger State with windmills, as part of her costly and unsustainable “renewable energy” legislative proposal. (2010, of course, is 2-3 years after the 2007-2008 cut-off date Nelson has given as the termination of her active participation in climate-change politics, a claim that her media allies have uncritically accepted, have failed to verify, but have repeated nonetheless):
“Wis. opens decade’s first new climate efforts”
Evan Lehmann, E&E reporter, ClimateWire
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Wisconsin lawmakers are leaping into a barbed debate on emissionless electricity, making it perhaps the first state to launch a major climate initiative in a new year that promises to be shaped by swirling politics, rugged economics and question marks in Congress. Discussions begin tomorrow on a state plan seeking a 22 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions within 12 years.
A haystack of programs would be used to meet that goal, including a major upsizing of Wisconsin’s existing renewable portfolio standard, new incentives for residents who produce their own power, and demands for cleaner car fuels….
Tia Nelson, who co-chaired the governor’s climate group that produced the recommendations, said the bill will invigorate state investment in a range of renewable energy and efficiency efforts. Jobs will follow. But she noted that criticism from opponents in manufacturing is likely to be close behind. “We think on the merits, we’ll prevail,” said Nelson, the daughter of former Wisconsin Gov. and U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson. “But it’s hard to tell because people haven’t started shooting yet.”
There are many additional examples. True, we do not know in each case whether or not Ms. Nelson improperly used her taxpayer-provided time, staff, computers, phones, office supplies, and other facilities to indulge herself in what is obviously her favorite political hobbyhorse, if not her political obsession. However, in view of the fact that she has spent, literally, her entire life as a radical environmental activist, and in light of her continued activism, as shown above, it hardly seems unreasonable for the Wisconsin Board of Commissioners to take the relatively mild step of telling her and the employees she supervises to lay off the political activism and stick to their jobs of serving the people of Wisconsin by managing their trust fund portfolios. And it is hardly newsworthy, let alone worthy of sending media mavendom off in high dudgeon and agitation. What is genuinely newsworthy, and worthy of real indignation — but will never see the light of day in any “investigative journalism” project of the “mainstream media” — is the fact that there are thousands of Tia
Nelsons occupying taxpayer-provided sinecures in federal, state, and local government agencies, boards, and departments, as well as in taxpayer-supported universities, colleges, high schools, middle schools, and grade schools. They constitute an enormous Fifth Column inside the body politic. They each have their rights as individual citizens, of course, to their own political beliefs, but they do not have the right to abuse their offices, their authority, or their access to resources to push their ideology and their political agenda on the rest of their fellow citizens who are paying their salaries.
