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The U.N’s solution to its Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change-proclaimed threat is to send prosperous nations back to the developing stage, redistribute their unfair wealth, and set the clock back to pre-Industrial times, which were presumably kinder to the environment and all of its creatures.

This strategy would be brilliant, were it not for a few contradictions worth pondering.

Going back to the early 1970s, the dominant U.N. theme held that developed countries enjoyed disproportionate benefits and huge wealth while at the same time causing environmental damage.

A weeklong U.N.-sponsored seminar at Founex, France then produced a fool’s bargain. It established a nonbinding understanding that developing countries would agree to avoid environmental problems caused by too much development in exchange for compensation from developed nations.

Unfortunately the agreement failed to recognize ravaging social, economic and environmental consequences of too little development. As societies get wealthier, they can afford to invest in cleaner technologies which simultaneously lift people out of hopeless poverty.

IPCC promulgated alarmism over rising global temperatures which began in the late 1970s following three decades of cooling provided political leverage to enact even more crippling anti-development policies.

As Cato Institute senior fellow and UCLA professor emeritus of international studies Deepak Lal observes in his book “Poverty and Progress: Realities and Myths about Global Poverty”: “The greatest threat to the alleviation of the structural poverty of the Third World is the continuing campaign by western governments, egged on by some climate scientists and green activists, to curb greenhouse emissions, primarily the CO2 from burning fossil fuels.”

Lul observes that it is mankind’s use of mineral energy stored in nature’s gift of fossil fuels accompanying the Industrial Revolution which “allowed the ascent from structural poverty which had scarred humankind for millennia. To put a limit on the use of fossil fuels without adequate economically viable alternatives is to condemn the Third World to perpetual structural poverty.”

But that’s exactly what our current White House administration is doing. Speaking on Aug. 6 at the East-West Center in Honolulu, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry referred to climate change as “the biggest challenge… we face right now,” ranking “right up there” with “terrorism, epidemics, poverty, [and] the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

Kerry later advised African leaders to stop creating new farms and focus upon what they already have because “Certain agricultural processes can actually release carbon pollution.”

Considering that satellite measurements show that global mean temperatures have been flat over at least the past 18 years, perhaps leaders of energy-starved African and other Third World populations might be more appropriately counseled and assisted to address more urgent pollution and energy issues.

Like, for example, the circumstance that about 2.8 billion people worldwide must heat and cook with smoky open fires fueled by animal dung, wood, charcoal or coal. And the cruel fact that at least 1.2 billion lack access to electricity essential for refrigeration, including more than 300 million people in India and 550 million Africans.

Meanwhile, an Obama executive order requiring federal agencies to take climate change into account in preparing international development, loan and investment programs will deny assistance for many projects in energy-impoverished nations which would offer the most benefit. Included are vital state-of-art gas-fired plants in Ghana and coal-fired plants in South Africa which could take advantage of abundant local resources.

Support is available however for wind, solar and biofuel projects which will at best allow a few people in remote areas to have intermittently operating light bulbs. Such limited, unreliable and costly electricity won’t be nearly sufficient to support factories, shops, schools, or hospitals essential for a healthier, more prosperous future.

Obama justified his policies to Johannesburg, South Africa students, explaining that: “if everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over - unless we find new ways of producing energy.”

Yes, and while they wait for that to happen, a majority of the millions who continue to die each year from lung pollution and intestinal water and food infection diseases will be women who prepare meals along with highly vulnerable children and elderly. And unlike hypothetical events projected to occur hundreds of years in the future based upon provably failed theoretical IPCC climate computer models, this man-caused crisis is immediate, real and preventable.

President Obama recently stated before a U.N. Assembly that climate change is the “one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other.” In pursuing initiatives based upon scary U.N. voodoo science he is obviously committed to make that prophesy come true. That defining contour is a foreign policy noose which is strangling Third World access to 21st century opportunities.

Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is author of “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax,” and his professional aerospace work has been featured on the History Channel and the Discovery Channel-Canada