By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley in Durban, South Africa
DURBAN, South Africa - “No high hopes for Durban.” “Binding treaty unlikely.” “No deal this year.” Thus ran the headlines. The profiteering UN bureaucrats here think otherwise. Their plans to establish a world government paid for by the West on the pretext of dealing with the non-problem of “global warming” are now well in hand. As usual, the mainstream media have simply not reported what is in the draft text which the 194 states parties to the UN framework convention on climate change are being asked to approve.
Behind the scenes, throughout the year since Cancun, the now-permanent bureaucrats who have made highly-profitable careers out of what they lovingly call “the process” have been beavering away at what is now a 138-page document. Its catchy title is “Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action Under the Convention - Update of the amalgamation of draft texts in preparation of [one imagines they mean ‘for’] a comprehensive and balanced outcome to be presented to the Conference of the Parties for adoption at its seventeenth session: note by the Chair.” In plain English, these are the conclusions the bureaucracy wants.
The contents of this document, turgidly drafted with all the UN’s skill at what the former head of its documentation center used to call “transparent impenetrability”, are not just off the wall - they are lunatic.
Main points:
Ø A new International Climate Court will have the power to compel Western nations to pay ever-larger sums to third-world countries in the name of making reparation for supposed “climate debt”. The Court will have no power over third-world countries. Here and throughout the draft, the West is the sole target. “The process” is now irredeemably anti-Western.
Ø “Rights of Mother Earth”: The draft, which seems to have been written by feeble-minded green activists and environmental extremists, talks of “The recognition and defence of the rights of Mother Earth to ensure harmony between humanity and nature”. Also, “there will be no commodification [whatever that may be: it is not in the dictionary and does not deserve to be] of the functions of nature, therefore no carbon market will be developed with that purpose”.
Ø “Right to survive”: The draft childishly asserts that “The rights of some Parties to survive are threatened by the adverse impacts of climate change, including sea level rise.” At 2 inches per century, according to eight years’ data from the Envisat satellite? Oh, come off it! The Jason 2 satellite, the new kid on the block, shows that sea-level has actually dropped over the past three years.
Ø War and the maintenance of defence forces and equipment are to cease - just like that - because they contribute to climate change. There are other reasons why war ought to cease, but the draft does not mention them.
Ø A new global temperature target will aim, Canute-like, to limit “global warming” to as little as 1 C above pre-industrial levels. Since temperature is already 3 C above those levels, what is in effect being proposed is a 2 C cut in today’s temperatures. This would take us halfway back towards the last Ice Age, and would kill hundreds of millions. Colder is far more dangerous than warmer.
Ø The new CO2 emissions target, for Western countries only, will be a reduction of up to 50% in emissions over the next eight years and of “more than 100%” [these words actually appear in the text] by 2050. So, no motor cars, no coal-fired or gas-fired power stations, no aircraft, no trains. Back to the Stone Age, but without even the right to light a carbon-emitting fire in your caves. Windmills, solar panels and other “renewables” are the only alternatives suggested in the draft. There is no mention of the immediate and rapid expansion of nuclear power worldwide to prevent near-total economic destruction.
Ø The new CO2 concentration target could be as low as 300 ppmv CO2 equivalent (i.e., including all other greenhouse gases as well as CO2 itself). That is a cut of almost half compared with the 560 ppmv CO2 equivalent today. It implies just 210 ppmv of CO2 itself, with 90 ppmv CO2 equivalent from other greenhouse gases. But at 210 ppmv, plants and trees begin to die. CO2 is plant food. They need a lot more of it than 210 ppmv.
Ø The peak-greenhouse-gas target year - for the West only - will be this year. We will be obliged to cut our emissions from now on, regardless of the effect on our economies (and the lack of effect on the climate).
Ø The West will pay for everything, because of its “historical responsibility” for causing “global warming”. Third-world countries will not be obliged to pay anything. But it is the UN, not the third-world countries, that will get the money from the West, taking nearly all of it for itself as usual. There is no provision anywhere in the draft for the UN to publish accounts of how it has spent the $100 billion a year the draft demands that the West should stump up from now on.
The real lunacy comes in the small print - all of it in 8-point type, near-illegibly printed on grubby, recycled paper. Every fashionable leftist idiocy is catered for.
Talking of which, note in passing that Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who, in the topsy-turvy looking-glass world of international climate insanity is the “science” chairman of the UN’s climate panel, has admitted that no one has been talking about climate science at the climate conference here in Durban. Not really surprising, given no real warming for getting on for two decades, no recent sea-level rise, no new record Arctic ice-melt, fewer hurricanes than at almost any time in 30 years, no Pacific atolls disappearing beneath the waves.
Here - and, as always, you heard it here first, for the mainstream media have conspired to keep secret the Madness of King Rajendra and his entire coterie of governmental and bureaucratic lunatics worldwide - is what the dribbling, twitching thrones and dominions, principalities and powers of the world will be asked to agree to.
“International Climate Court of Justice”: This kangaroo court is to be established by next year “to guarantee the compliance of Annex I Parties with all the provisions of this decision, which are essential elements in the obtaining of the global goal”. Note that, here as elsewhere, the bias is only against the nations of the West. However badly the third-world countries behave, they cannot be brought before the new court. Though none of what the draft calls the “modalities” of the proposed marsupial dicastery are set out in detail, one can imagine that the intention is to oblige Western nations to pay up however much the world government run by the Convention secretariat feels like demanding, just as the unelected tyrants of the EU demand - and get - ever-larger cash payments from the ever-shrinking economies and ever-poorer tribute-payers of their dismal empire.
The temperature target: At Copenhagen and Cancun, the states parties to the Convention arrogated to themselves the power - previously safe in the hands of Divine Providence - to alter the weather in such a way as to prevent global mean surface temperature from rising by more than 2 C above the “pre-industrial” level. They did not even say what they meant by “pre-industrial”. From 1695-1745 temperatures in central England, quite a good proxy for global temperatures, rose by 2.2 C, with about another 0.8 C since then, making 3 C in all. The previous temperature target, therefore, was already absurd. Yet the new, improved, madder target is to keep global temperatures either “1 C” or “well below 1.5 C” above “pre-industrial levels” - i.e., well below half of the temperature increase that has already occurred since the pre-industrial era. The twittering states parties are committing themselves, in effect, to reducing today’s global temperatures by getting on for 2 C. This is madness. Throughout pre-history, the governing class - Druids or Pharaohs or Mayans or Incas - thought they could replace their Creator and command the weather. They couldn’t. No more can we. But try telling that to the strait-jacketed ninnies of today’s governing “elite”. Speech after speech at the plenary sessions of the Durban conference has drivelled on about how We Are The People Who At This Historic Juncture Are Willing And Able To Undertake The Noble Purpose Of Saving The Planet From Thermageddon and Saving You From Yourselves [entirely at your prodigious expense, natch].
The emissions-reduction targets: The new target proposed by the staring-eyed global-village idiots will be a reduction of 50-85% of global greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 levels (i.e. by 65-100% of today’s levels) by 2050, with emissions falling still further thereafter. The West should cut its emissions by 30-50% from 1990 levels (i.e. by 40-65% of today’s levels) in just eight years, and by more than 95% (i.e. more than 100%) by 2050. Alternatively (for there are many alternatives in the text, indicating that agreement among the inmates in the Durban asylum is a long way off), the West must cut its emissions “more than 50%” in just five years, and “more than 100%” by 2050. The words “more than 100%” actually appear in the draft. The Third World, however, need cut its emissions only by 15-30% over the next eight years, provided - of course [ that the West fully reimburses it for the cost.
The greenhouse-gas reduction target: Greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere “should stabilize well below 300-450 ppm CO2 equivalent”. This target, like the temperature target, is plain daft. CO2 concentration is currently at 392 ppmv, and the IPCC increases this by 43% to allow for other greenhouse gases. Accordingly, today’s CO2-equivalent concentration of greenhouse gases is 560 ppmv, and the current lunacy is to cut this perhaps by very nearly half, reducing the CO2 component to just 210 ppmv, at which point trees and plants become starved of CO2, which is their food, and start to die.
The greenhouse-gas peak targets: Global greenhouse gas emissions, say the mentally-challenged Durban droolers, should peak in not more than eight years’ time, and perhaps as soon as two years’ time. Western greenhouse-gas emissions should peak immediately (or perhaps by next year, or maybe the year after that) and must decline thereafter. The greenhouse-gas emissions peak in third-world countries will be later than that of the West, and - no surprises here - will depend on the West to pay the cost of it.
“Historical responsibility”: The nations of the West (for which the UN’s code is “Annex I parties") are from now on required to beat their breasts (or at least their strait-jackets) and acknowledge their “historical responsibility” for increasing CO2 emissions and giving us warmer weather. The draft says: “Acknowledging that the largest share of the historical global emissions of greenhouse gases originated in Annex I Parties and that, owing to this historical responsibility in terms of their contribution to the average global temperature increase, Annex I Parties must take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.” This new concept of “historical responsibility” - suspiciously akin to the “war-guilt” of post-1918 Germany, declared by the imprudent governments of the world at the Versailles conference, which was no small cause of World War II - further underscores the rapidly-growing anti-Western bias in the UN and in the Convention’s secretariat.
Who pays? Oh, you guessed it before I told you. The West pays. The third world (UN code: “non-Annex-I parties") thinks it will collect, so it will always vote for the UN’s insane proposals. But the UN’s bureaucrats will actually get all or nearly all the money, and will decide how to allocate what minuscule fraction they have not already spent on themselves. As a senior UN diplomat told me last year, “The UN exists for only one purpose: to get more money. That, and that alone, is the reason why it takes such an interest in climate change.” The draft says: “Developed-country Parties shall provide developing-country Parties with new and additional finance, inter alia through a percentage of the gross domestic product of developed-country Parties.” And, of course, “The extent of participation by non-Annex-I parties in the global effort to deal with climate change is directly dependent on the level of support provided by developed-country Parties.”
The get-out clause: One or two Western countries - Canada and Japan, for instance - have begun to come off the Kool-Aid. They have worked out what scientifically-baseless nonsense the climate scam is and have said they are not really playing any more. To try to keep these and the growing number of nations who want out of “the process” bankrolling the ever-more-lavish UN, an ingenious escape clause has been crafted: “The scale of financial flows to non-Annex-I parties shall be based on the assessments of their needs to deal with climate change.” Since climate is not going to change measurably as a result of Man’s emissions, any honest assessment of the needs of third-world countries “to deal with climate change” is that they don’t need any money at all for this purpose and shouldn’t get a single red cent. The UN is now the biggest obstacle to the eradication of poverty worldwide, because its pampered functionaries divert so much cash to themselves, to an ever-expanding alphabet-soup of bureaucracies, and then to heroically lunatic projects like “global warming” control. Time to abolish it.
World government: The Copenhagen Treaty draft establishing a world “government” with unlimited powers of taxation and intervention in the affairs of states parties to the UN Framework Convention fortunately failed. Yet at the Cancun climate conference the following year 1000 new bureaucracies were established to form the nucleus of a world government, with central control in the hands of the Convention’s secretariat and tentacles in every region and nation. The draft “agrees that common principles, modalities and procedures as well as the coordinating and oversight functions of the UNFCCC are needed” - in short, global centralization of political, economic and environmental power in the manicured hands of the Convention’s near-invisible but all-powerful secretariat. No provision is made for the democratic election of key members of the all-powerful secretariat - in effect, a world government - by the peoples of our planet.
Reporting to the world government: From 2013/14, the world government will oblige Western nations to prepare reports and submit them to it every two years. The format of these reports is specified in obsessive detail over several pages of the draft. The reports will describe the extent of their compliance with the mitigation targets imposed by the various treaties and agreements. The West will be obliged to to continue reporting “greenhouse-gas emission inventories”, for which “common reporting formats and methodologies for the calculation of emission, established at the international level, are essential”. Separately, Western nations will now be required to provide information on the financial support they have pledged to assist third-world countries in mitigating greenhouse-gas emissions and adapting to “the adverse effects of climate change”. The world government also expects to receive reports from Western nations on their financial contributions to the Global Environment Facility, the Least Developed Countries’ Trust Fund, the Special Climate Change Fund, the Adaptation Fund, the Green Climate Fund and the Trust Fund for Supplementary Activities”. Western nations must also provide information on the steps taken to promote technology development and transfer to third-world countries, and on how they have provided “capacity-building support” to third-world countries, and on numerous other matters. The inexorable increase in compulsory reporting was one of the mechanisms by which the unelected Kommissars of the anti-democratic European Union acquired absolute power over the member states. EU advisors have been helping the UN to learn how to use similar techniques to centralize global power just as anti-democratically in its own hands.
Review of Western nations’ conduct: Once the multitude of mechanisms for Western nations’ compulsory reporting to the world government are in place, the information gathered by it will be used as the basis of a continuous review of every aspect of their compliance with the various agreements and concords, whether legally-binding or not. Teams of five to eight members of the Convention’s secretariat will scrutinize each Western nation’s conduct, and will have the power to ask questions and to require additional information, as well as to make recommendations that will gradually become binding. The world government will then prepare a record of the review for each Western nation, including reports of various aspects of the review, an assessment of that nation’s compliance, questions and answers, conclusions and recommendations (eventually instructions) to that nation, and a “facilitative process” (UN code for a mechanism to compel the nation to do as it is told by people whom no one has elected).
Finance: One of the 1000 bureaucracies established at Cancun is the Standing Committee on Finance, which the draft says will have the power of “mobilizing financial resources” through flows of public and private finance, “mobilizing additional funding”, and requiring and verifying the reporting of finance provided to third-world Parties by the Western nations through a new Financial Support Registry. Finance for third-world countries is to be scaled up “significantly”, and Western countries will be obliged to provide “a clear work-plan on their pledged assessed contributions” from 2012-2020 “for approval by the Conference of the Parties”. Taxpayers will be compelled to provide the major source of funding through public expenditure.
Green Climate Fund: Western nations are urged to “commit to the initial capitalization of the Green Climate Fund without delay”, to include “the full running costs” and “the funding required for the formation and operating costs of the board and secretariat of the Green Climate Fund”. Here, as always, the UN bureaucrats want their own pay, perks, pensions and organizational structure guaranteed before any money goes to third-world countries.
Worldwide cap-and-trade: The draft establishes a “new market-based approach/mechanism...to promote the reduction or avoidance of greenhouse-gas emissions” - once again for Western countries only. Also, “Ambitious, legally-binding emission reduction targets for developed-country Parties ... are essential to drive a global carbon market”. What this means, in the plain English that is almost entirely absent from the 138-page draft, is worldwide compulsory cap-and-trade, centrally imposed and regulated, imposed on Western countries only.
Patent rights: Under the guise of action to prevent “global warming” that is not happening at anything like the predicted rate, coded references to the extinction of patent rights in third-world countries are creeping into the text. For instance, “identification and removal of all barriers that prevent effective technology development and transfer to developing-country Parties”; and “the removal of all obstacles, including intellectual property rights and patents on climate-related technologies to ensure the transfer of technology to developing countries”. As an inventor with patents to my name, I can predict what effect any such provision will have. It will prevent the establishment and development of patent offices in continents such as Africa, which - thus far - has contributed remarkably little to the world’s inventions, not least because the structure for protecting and encouraging inventors is rickety or non-existent.
Shipping and aviation fuels were previously excluded from the scope of the Convention and are now to be included. International shipping and aviation are described as “a source of financial resources for climate change actions”. More money for UN bureaucrats.
The new bureaucracies: As though the 1000 bureaucracies created at Cancun were not enough, another bureaucracy is to be created “to oversee, monitor and ensure overall implementation of capacity-building activities consistent with the provisions of the Convention”. There will also be a new “International Climate Court of Justice” (see above). A “Financial Support Registry” is also to be set up.
The new special-interest group: Meet the “Parties that are alternative-energy-disadvantaged”. No wind, no sun, no renewables - so, handouts from the West, please.
The new buzzwords: Welcome to the notion of “equitable access to global atmospheric space”; “Mother Earth” [I kid you not: its in the draft]; “climate-resilient infrastructure” and “paradigm shift towards building a low-carbon society”. These buzzwords are in addition to pre-existing buzzwords such as “climate justice” and “climate debt” - the latter being the notion that because the West has emitted more carbon dioxide than the rest it owes the Third World lots of money.
“Rights of Mother Earth”: The draft burbles insanely about “The recognition and defence of the rights of Mother Earth to ensure harmony between humanity and nature, and that there will be no commodification [whatever that may be] of the functions of nature, therefore no carbon market will be developed with that purpose”.
“Right to survive”: “The rights of some Parties to survive are threatened by the adverse impacts of climate change, including sea level rise.” At 2 inches per century? Oh, come off it! The Jason 2 satellite shows that sea-level has dropped over the past three years.
The science is at last to be reviewed in a manner that appears independent of the discredited IPCC. However, no details of the method of review are provided, and other parts of the schizophrenic draft say we must defer to the science put forward not by the peer-reviewed learned journals but by a political body whose reports are not peer-reviewed in the usual sense.
Legally-binding treaty: According to the draft, the aim is to create a “legally-binding instrument/outcome”. This is UN code for an international Treaty. The US will sign no such treaty. Nor will Canada, Japan, France, India and many other countries. On the basis of drafts as in-your-face idiotic as this, no legally-binding climate treaty will ever be signed: which is just as well, because no such treaty is necessary.
War and the maintenance of defence forces and equipment are to cease because they contribute to climate change. Just like that. The UN draft text asserts: “Stopping wars, defending lives and ceasing destructive activities will protect the climate system; conflict-related activities emit significant greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere.” A wave of the UN’s magic wand and peace will reign throughout the Earth, the sun will shine (but not too much) the rain will fall (just where and when needed), and non-gender-specific motherhood and non-commodificated apple pie will be available to all. Ouroborindra, ba-ba hee! It does not seem to have occurred to the Druids of the UN that they have near-totally failed to prevent wars on Earth - the original purpose for which it was founded. Yet now, in their gibbering, spastic arrogance, they think to command the weather. Canute, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
Source: WSJ
The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom.
How do religions die? Generally they don’t, which probably explains why there’s so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can’t kill what wasn’t there to begin with.
Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it’s worth asking what.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
This week, the conclave of global warming’s cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes “catastrophic and irreversible,” according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.
Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.
The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won’t be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won’t make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they’ve spent it all on Greece.
Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent’s heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. “Green” technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.
All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don’t die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.
That’s where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the “hide the decline” emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.
But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren’t going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise - if much at all. Greenland isn’t turning green. Florida isn’t going anywhere.
The reply global warming alarmists have made to these dislosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.’s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its “watered down” predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.
Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn’t end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.
And there is this: Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that’s another way religions die.
Robert Ferguson, President, Science and Public Policy Institute
By Larry Bell, Forbes
Reprinted with permission of author
One year after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged at least $100 billion annually by 2020 to help Third World countries address climate problems attributed to America and capitalism at the U.N.-sponsored World Climate-Change Summit in Copenhagen, the Cancun meeting that followed focused primarily upon formulating a plan of action to implement that commitment. This commenced literally with a vengeance, producing the design for a new $100 billion per year “Green Climate Fund” (GCF). Its purpose is nothing less than to fundamentally transform the global economy...beginning with ours.
And the key players? They include George Soros, a World Bank representative, and Lawrence Summers, former director of the White House National Economic Council and assistant to President Obama for economic policy. Be advised to take what is envisioned very seriously.
The first GCF meeting of the 40-member design team, the “Transitional Committee” (TC), took place in Mexico City on April 28-29. Its charge was to prepare “operational specifications” for the GCF in time for approval at U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Durban, South Africa last week. You can bet that its primary goal will be to finalize financing strategies to squeeze those annual $100 billion installments out of American consumers unencumbered by Congressional approvals.
According to plans, the U.N. would be granted taxing authority that will effectively transform its role of governance to “government” and preempt our national sovereignty. This falls in line with proposals prepared by a 20-member “High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing” assembled by U.N. Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon for the purpose of calling upon nations “to fundamentally transform the global economy-based on low-carbon, clean energy resources.” Resulting recommendations are to institute:
•a carbon tax
•a tax on international aviation and shipping
•a financial transaction tax
•a wire tax for producing electricity
•redirection of 100% of all fossil fuel subsidies for international climate action.
Fox News reported possession of position papers indicating topics covered in meetings involving Ban ki-Moon and 60 of his top lieutenants during a two-day 2010 Australian Alpine Retreat discussing ways to put their sprawling organization in charge of world agendas. Those topics included:
•how to restore “climate change” as a top global priority after the Copenhagen fiasco
•how to continue to try to make global redistribution of wealth the real basis of that climate agenda, and widen the discussion further to encompass the idea of “global public goods”
•how to keep growing U.N. peacekeeping efforts into missions involved in police, courts, legal systems and other aspects of strife-torn countries
•how to capitalize on the global tide of immigrants from poor nations to rich ones, to encompass a new “international migration governance network”
•how to make “clever use of technologies to deepen direct ties with what the U.N. calls “civil society”, meaning novel ways to bypass its member nation states and deal directly with constituencies that support U.N. agendas.
An underlying position paper theme those top U.N. bosses grappled with was how to cope with the pesky issue of national sovereignty that interferes with their global governance goal. As one paper put it: “the U.N. should be able to take the lead in setting the global agenda, engage effectively with other multinational and regional organizations as well as civil society and non-state stakeholders, and transform itself into a tool to help implement the globally agreed objectives.”
It went on to state: “it will be necessary to deeply reflect on the substance of sovereignty, and accept that changes in our perceptions are a good indication of the direction we are going.”
And just how much of this sovereignty sabotage has to do with sinking capitalism, stifling consumption and achieving global wealth redistribution? A bunch.
As an opening session explained: “The real challenge comes from the exponential growth of the global consumerist society driven by ever higher aspirations of the upper and middle layers in rich countries, as well as the expanding demand of emerging middle-class in developing countries. Our true ambition should be therefore creating incentives for the profound transformation of attitudes and consumption styles.” A paper prepared by Secretary General Ban’s own climate change team called for “nothing less than a fundamental transformation of the global economy.”
Such ambitious goals will of course require lots money to carry out...our money, along with new taxing authority. And manufactured carbon-based climate change alarmism provides an excuse to get it.
In 2004 the United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) published a study addressing possible scenarios for implementing a global tax. It asked “How can we find an extra US $550 billion for development funding? Our focus is on flows of resources from high-income to developing countries.” The conclusion? “Any foreseeable global tax will be introduced, not by a unitary world government, but as the result of concerted action of nation states...The taxation of environmental externalities is an obvious potential source of revenue.” It went on to say “We are presupposing that the tax is indeed levied on individuals and firms in the form of a carbon levy.”
Another UNU-Wider publication states: “Support for an international ‘carbon tax’ has been growing since the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit focused international attention on the damage to the environment caused by excessive use of fossil fuels worldwide...Over 20% of the tax yields would originate in the U.S.”
As Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change admitted in an Investor’s Business Daily interview, “The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month [December, 2010] is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.”
Read much more here.
Read Lord Monckton’s detailed on what the UN treaty entails and how it will help decimate the world economies to benefit the bureaucrats here. Two extracted comments:
Green Climate Fund: Western nations are urged to “commit to the initial capitalization of the Green Climate Fund without delay”, to include “the full running costs” and “the funding required for the formation and operating costs of the board and secretariat of the Green Climate Fund”. Here, as always, the UN bureaucrats want their own pay, perks, pensions and organizational structure guaranteed before any money goes to third-world countries.
The UN is now the biggest obstacle to the eradication of poverty worldwide, because its pampered functionaries divert so much cash to themselves, to an ever-expanding alphabet-soup of bureaucracies, and then to heroically lunatic projects like “global warming” control. Time to abolish it.