- I usually add some gentle humor to these reports. Not
today. Read this and weep. Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda
to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference
here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing
less than the abdication of the West. The governing class in what was once
proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty,
prosperity, and even democracy itself. No one in the mainstream media will
tell you this, not so much because they do not see as because they do not
bl**dy care.
-
- The 33-page Note (FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/CRP.2) by the Chairman
of the "Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Co-operative Action under
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change", entitled
Possible elements of the outcome, reveals all. Or, rather, it reveals nothing,
unless one understands what the complex, obscure jargon means. All UNFCCC
documents at the Cancun conference, specifically including Possible elements
of the outcome, are drafted with what is called "transparent impenetrability".
The intention is that the documents should not be understood, but that
later we shall be told they were in the public domain all the time, so
what are we complaining about?
-
- Since the Chairman's note is very long, I shall summarize
the main points:
-
- Finance: Western countries will jointly provide $100
billion a year by 2020 to an unnamed new UN Fund. To keep this sum up with
GDP growth, the West may commit itself to pay 1.5% of GDP to the UN each
year. That is more than twice the 0.7% of GDP that the UN has recommended
the West to pay in foreign aid for the past half century. Several hundred
of the provisions in the Chairman's note will impose huge financial costs
on the nations of the West.
-
- The world-government Secretariat: In all but name,
the UN Convention's Secretariat will become a world government directly
controlling hundreds of global, supranational, regional, national and sub-national
bureaucracies. It will receive the vast sum of taxpayers' money ostensibly
paid by the West to the Third World for adaptation to the supposed adverse
consequences of imagined (and imaginary) "global warming".
-
- Bureaucracy: Hundreds of new interlocking bureaucracies
answerable to the world-government Secretariat will vastly extend its power
and reach. In an explicit mirroring of the European Union's method of enforcing
the will of its unelected Kommissars on the groaning peoples of that benighted
continent, the civil servants of nation states will come to see themselves
as servants of the greater empire of the Secretariat, carrying out its
ukases and diktats whatever the will of the nation states' governments.
-
- Many of the new bureaucracies are disguised as "capacity-building
in developing countries". This has nothing to do with growing the
economies or industries of poorer nations. It turns out to mean the installation
of hundreds of bureaucratic offices answerable to the Secretariat in numerous
countries around the world. Who pays? You do, gentle taxpayer.
-
- Babylon, Byzantium, the later Ottoman Empire, the formidable
bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, the vast empire of 27,000 paper-shufflers
at the European Union: add all of these together and multiply by 100 and
you still do not reach the sheer size, cost, power and reach of these new
subsidiaries of the Secretariat.
-
- In addition to multiple new bureaucracies in every one
of the 193 states parties to the Convention, there will be an Adaptation
Framework Body, a Least Developed Countries' Adaptation Planning Body,
an Adaptation Committee, Regional Network Centers, an International Center
to Enhance Adaptation Research, National Adaptation Institutions, a Body
to Clarify Assumptins and Conditions in National Greenhouse-Gas Emission
Reductions Pledges, a Negotiating Body for an Overall Level of Ambition
for Aggregate Emission Reductions and Individual Targets, an Office to
Revise Guidelines for National Communications, a Multilateral Communications
Process Office, a Body for the Process to Develop Modalities and Guidelines
for the Compliance Process, a Registry of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation
Actions by Developed Countries, a Body to Supervise the Process for Understanding
Diversity of Mitigation Actions Submitted and Support Needed, a Body to
Develop Modalities for the Registry of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation
Actions, an Office of International Consultation and Analysis; an Office
to Conduct a Work Program for Development of Various Modalities and Guidelines;
a network of Developing Countries' National Forest Strategy Action Plan
Offices; a network of National Forest Reference Emission Level And/Or Forest
Reference Level Bodies; a network of National Forest Monitoring Systems;
an Office of the Work Program on Agriculture to Enhance the Implementation
of Article 4, Paragraph 1(c) of the Convention Taking Into Account Paragraph
31; one or more Mechanisms to Establish a Market-Based Approach to Enhance
the Cost-Effectiveness Of And To Promote Mitigation Actions; a Forum on
the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures; a Work Program Office
to Address the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures; a Body
to Review the Needs of Developing Countries for Financial Resources to
Address Climate Change and Identify Options for Mobilization of Those Resources;
a Fund in Addition to the Copenhagen Green Fund; an Interim Secretariat
for the Design Phase of the New Fund; a New Body to Assist the Conference
of the Parties in Exercising its Functions with respect to the Financial
Mechanism; a Body to Launch a Process to Further Define the Roles and Functions
of the New Body to Assist the Conference of the Parties in Exercising its
Functions with respect to the Financial Mechanism; a Technology Executive
Committee; a Climate Technology Center and Network; a Network of National,
Regional, Sectoral and International Technology Centers, Networks, Organization
and Initiatives; Twinning Centers for Promotion of North-South, South-South
and Triangular Partnerships with a View to Encouraging Co-operative Research
and Development; an Expert Workshop on the Operational Modalities of the
Technology Mechanism; an International Insurance Facility; a Work Program
Body for Policy Approaches and Positive Incentives on Issues Relating to
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing
Countries; a Body to Implement a Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation
of Response Measures; and a Body to Develop Modalities for the Operationalization
of the Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures.
-
- The world government's powers: The Secretariat will have
the power not merely to invite nation states to perform their obligations
under the climate-change Convention, but to compel them to do so. Nation
states are to be ordered to collect, compile and submit vast quantities
of information, in a manner and form to be specified by the secretariat
and its growing army of subsidiary bodies. Between them, they will be given
new powers to verify the information, to review it and, on the basis of
that review, to tell nation states what they can and cannot do.
-
- Continuous expansion: The verb "enhance", in
its various forms, occurs at least 28 times in the Chairman's note, Similar
verbs, such as "strengthen" and "extend", and adjectives
such as "scaled-up", "new" and "additional",
are also frequently deployed, particularly in relation to funding at the
expense of Western taxpayers. If all of the "enhancements" proposed
in the note were carried out, the cost would comfortably exceed the annual
$100 billion (or, for that matter, the 1.5% of GDP) that the note mentions
as the cost to the West over the coming decade.
-
- Intellectual property in inventions: Holders of patents,
particularly in fields related to "global warming" and its mitigation,
will be obliged to transfer the benefits of their inventiveness to developing
countries without payment of royalties. This is nowhere explicitly stated
in the Chairman's note, but the transfer of technology is mentioned about
20 times in the draft, suggesting that the intention is still to carry
out the explicit provision in the defunct Copenhagen Treaty draft of 15
September 2009 to this effect.
-
- Insurance: The Secretariat proposes, in effect, to interfere
so greatly in the operation of the worldwide insurance market that it will
cease to be a free market, with the usual severely adverse consequences
to everyone in that market.
- The free market: The failed Copenhagen Treaty draft stipulated
that the "government" that would be established would have the
power to set the rules of all formerly free markets. There would be no
such thing as free markets any more. In Cancun, the Chairman's note merely
says that various "market mechanisms" may be exploited by the
Secretariat and by the parties to the Convention: but references to these
"market mechanisms" are frequent enough to suggest that the intention
remains to stamp out free markets worldwide.
-
- Knowledge is power: The Chairman's note contains numerous
references to a multitude of new as well as existing obligations on nation
states to provide information to the Secretariat, in a form and manner
which it will dictate. The hand of the EU is very visible here.
-
- It grabbed power from the member-states in four stages:
first, acting merely as a secretariat to ensure stable supplies of coal
and steel to rebuild Europe after the Second World War; then as a registry
requiring member states to supply it with ever more information; then as
a review body determining on the basis of the information supplied by the
member states whether they were complying with their obligations on the
ever-lengthier and more complex body of European treaties; and finally
as the ultimate law-making authority, to which all elected parliaments,
explicitly including the European "Parliament", were and are
subject. Under the Cancun propsoals, the Secretariat is following the path
that the plague of EU officials here have no doubt eagerly advised it to
follow. It is now taking numerous powers not merely to require information
from nation states but to hold them to account for their supposed international
obligations under the climate-change Convention on the basis of the information
the nations are now to be compelled to supply.
- Propaganda: The Chairman's note contains several mentions
of the notion that the peoples of the world need to be told more about
climate change. Here, too, there is a parallel with the EU, which administers
a propaganda fund of some $250 million a year purely to advertise its own
wonderfulness to an increasingly sceptical population. The IPCC already
spends millions every year with PR agencies, asking them to find new ways
of making its blood-curdling message more widely understood and feared
among ordinary people. The Secretariat already has the advantage of an
uncritical, acquiescent, scientifically illiterate, economically innumerate
and just plain dumb news media: now it will have a propaganda fund to play
with as well.
-
- Damage caused by The Process: At the insistence of sensible
nation states such as the United States, the Czech Republic, Japan, Canada,
and Italy, the Cancun outcome acknowledges that The Process is causing,
and will cause, considerable economic damage, delicately described in the
Chairman's note as "unintended side-effects of implementing climate-change
response measures". The solution? Consideration of the catastrophic
economic consequences of the Secretariat's heroically lunatic decisions
will fall under the control of yup the Secretariat. Admire
its sheer gall.
-
- Damage to world trade: As the power, wealth and reach
of the Secretariat grow, it finds itself rubbing uncomfortably up against
other supranational organizations. In particular, the World Trade Organization
has been getting antsy about the numerous aspects of the Secretariat's
proposals that constitute restrictions on international trade. At several
points, the Chairman's note expresses the "decision" in
fact, no more than an opinion and a questionable one at that that
the Secretariat's policies are not restrictive of trade.
-
- The Canute provision: The conference will reaffirm the
decision of its predecessor in Copenhagen this time last year "to
hold the increase in global average temperature below 2 degrees Celsius
above pre-industrial levels", just like that. In fact, temperature
in central England, and by implication globally, rose 2.2 Celsius in the
40 years 1695-1735, as the Sun began to recover from its 11,400-year activity
minimum, and rose again by 0.74 C in the 20th century. There has been no
warming in the 21st century, but we are already well over 2 Celsius degrees
above pre-industrial levels. The Canute provision, as some delegates have
dubbed it (after the Danish king of early England who famously taught his
courtiers the limitations of his power and, a fortiori, theirs when he
set up his throne on the beach and commanded sea level not to rise, whereupon
the tide came in as usual and wet the royal feet), shows the disconnect
between The Process and reality.
-
- Omissions: There are several highly-significant
omissions, which jointly and severally establish that the central intent
of The Process no longer has anything to do with the climate, if it ever
had. The objective is greatly to empower and still more greatly to enrich
the international classe politique at the expense of the peoples of the
West, using the climate as a pretext, so as to copy the European Union
by installing in perpetuity what some delegates here are calling "transnational
perma-Socialism" beyond the reach or recall of any electorate. Here
are the key omissions:
-
- The science: The question whether any of this vast expansion
of supranational power is scientifically necessary is not addressed. Instead,
there is merely a pietistic affirmation of superstitious faith in the IPCC,
where the conference will "recognize that deep cuts in global [greenhouse-gas]
emissions are required according to science, and as documented in the [IPCC's]
Fourth Assessment Report."
-
- The economics: There is no assessment of the extent to
which any of the proposed actions to mitigate "global warming"
by cutting emissions of carbon dioxide or to adapt the world to its consequences
will be cost-effective. Nor, tellingly, is there any direct comparison
between mitigation and adaptation in their cost-effectiveness: indeed,
the IPCC was carefully structured so that mitigation and adaptation are
considered by entirely separate bureaucracies producing separate reports,
making any meaningful comparison difficult. Though every economic analysis
of this central economic question, other than that of the now-discredited
Lord Stern, shows that mitigation is a pointless fatuity and that focused
adaptation to the consequences of any "global warming" that may
occur would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective, the
Cancun conference outcome will continue to treat mitigation as being of
equal economic utility with adaptation.
-
- Termination: Contracts have termination clauses to say
what happens when the agreement ends. Nothing better illustrates the intent
to create a permanent world-government structure than the absence of any
termination provisions whatsoever in the Cancun outcome. The Process, like
diamonds, is forever.
- Democracy: Forget government of the people, by the people,
for the people. Forget the principle of "no taxation without representation"
that led to the very foundation of the United States. The provisions for
the democratic election of the new, all-powerful, legislating, tax-raising
world-government Secretariat by the peoples of the world may be summarized
in a single word: None.
-
- How did this monstrous transfer of power from once-proud,
once-sovereign, once-democratic nations to the corrupt, unelected Secretariat
come about? The story begins with Sir Maurice Strong, an immensely wealthy
UN bureaucrat from Canada who, a quarter of a century ago, established
the IPCC as an intergovernmental, political body rather than as a scientific
body precisely so that it could be maneuvered into assisting in the UN's
long-term aim, reiterated at a summit of senior UN officials this May by
Ban Ki-Moon himself, of extinguishing national sovereignty and establishing
a world government.
-
- The Process began in earnest in 1988, when the IPCC was
established. Shortly thereafter, on a June day in Washington DC deliberately
chosen by Al Gore because it was unusually hot, his political ally and
financial benefactor James Hansen appeared before a Congressional committee
and put before it a wildly-exaggerated graph predicting global warming
over the coming 20 or 30 years. Yet June 2008, the 20th anniversary of
his testimony, was cooler globally than June 1988, and worldwide warming
has happened at less than half the rate he predicted.
-
- The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 allowed environmental groups
and world "leaders" to grandstand together. >From that summit
emerged the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which began holding
annual conferences on "global warming".
-
- The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 committed its signatories
to cut back their national CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. Most are
not going to make it. The US Senate, with Al Gore as its president, voted
95-0 to reject any treaty such as Kyoto, which bound only the West while
leaving developing nations such as China to emit carbon dioxide without
constraint.
-
- Very little progress had been made by the time of the
Bali conference in 2007: but at that conference a "road-map"
was constructed that was to lead to a binding international treaty in Copenhagen
in 2009.
- Just one problem with that. The US Constitution provides
that, even if the President has signed a treaty, his signature is meaningless
unless the treaty has been debated in the Senate, which must ratify it
by the votes of at least 67 of the 100 Senators. It became clear to everyone,
after the Obama administration failed to cajole or bully even 60 Senators
into passing the Waxman/Markey cap-and-tax Bill, that no climate treaty
would pass the Senate.
-
- Worse, the Secretariat grossly overreached itself. Believing
its own propaganda to the effect that none but a few vexatious, fossil-funded
sceptics believed that "global warming" would be small enough
to be harmless, it drafted and posted up on its website a 186-page draft
Treaty of Copenhagen, proposing to turn itself into an unelected world
government with unlimited powers to impose direct taxation on member nations
without representation, recourse or recall, to interfere directly in the
environmental policies of individual nations, and to sweep away all free
markets worldwide, replacing them with itself as the sole rulemaker in
every marketplace (treaty draft, annex 1, articles 36-38). Some quotations
from the draft reveal the sheer ambition of the UN:
-
- "The scheme for the new institutional arrangement
under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government;
facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism. The government will be
ruled by the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation,
and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds
and the related facilitative processes and bodies." (Copenhagen Treaty
draft of September 15, 2009, para. 38).
- The three central powers that the UN had hoped to grant
itself under the guise of Saving The Planet from alleged climate catastrophe
were as follows:
-
- "Government": This use of the word "government"
is the first use of the term to describe a world government in any international
treaty draft.
-
- "Financial mechanism": The "financial
mechanism" was a delicate phrase to describe a new power of the UN
to levy unlimited taxation directly on the peoples of its member states:
taxation without representation, and on a global scale.
- "Facilitative mechanism": This mechanism would,
for the first time, have given the UN he power directly to coerce and compel
compliance on the part of its member states, by force if necessary. The
Treaty draft describes it as
- " a facilitative mechanism drawn up to facilitate
the design, adoption and carrying out of public policies, as the prevailing
instrument, to which the market rules and related dynamics should be subordinate."
- In short, there was to be a New World Order, with a "government"
having at its command a "financial mechanism" in the form of
unlimited rights to tax the world's citizen's directly, and a "facilitative
mechanism" that would bring the rules of all formerly free markets
under the direct control of the new UN "government", aided by
an already-expanding series of bureaucracies.
-
- At no point anywhere in the 186 pages of the Treaty draft
do the words "democracy", "election", "ballot",
or "vote" appear. As the EU has already demonstrated, the transfer
of powers from sovereign democracies to supranational entities brings those
democracies to an end. At the supranational level, in the UN, in the EU
and in the proposed world government, decisions are not made by anyone
whom we, the voters, have elected to make such decisions.
-
- The exposure of the draft treaty in major international
news media panicked the UN into abandoning the draft before the Copenhagen
conference even began. Instead, the UN is now legislating crabwise, as
the European Union does, with a series of successive annual agreements,
the last of which was the Copenhagen Accord, each transferring more power
and wealth from individual nations to its supranational bureaucracy. The
latest of these agreements is being finalized here in Cancun.
-
- The European Union, which has stealthily stamped out
democracy over the past half-century by a series of treaties each transferring
a little more power and wealth from elected hands in the member states
to unelected hands in Brussels, has been advising the Secretariat on how
to do the same on a global scale.
-
- After the spectacular bloody nose the Secretariat got
in Copenhagen, it was most anxious not to endure a second failure in Cancun.
To this end, it obtained the agreement of the German government to host
a monthly series of conferences in Bonn in the early part of 2010, some
of which were open to outside observers and some were behind closed doors
in a comfortable suburban palace, where the new way of legislating for
the world in secret first came into use.
-
- The Chinese regime, anxious to get a piece of the action,
agreed to host an additional session in Tientsin a few weeks ago. The purpose
of this near-perpetual international junketing which the national
delegates have greatly enjoyed at our expense was to make sure that
nearly all of the elements in the Cancun agreement were firmly in draft
and agreed well before Cancun, so as to avoid what too many journalists
have tediously and obviously described as a "Mexican stand-off".
-
- It is precisely because of all this massive and expensive
preparation that the note by the Chairman, whose main points are summarized
above, may well reflect what is finally decided and announced here in a
couple of days' time. The Chairman is not simply guessing: this Note reflects
what the Secretariat now confidently expects to get away with.
- However, following the Copenhagen disaster, our grim
future New Masters are taking no chances. They persuaded their friends
in the mainstream news media, who cannot now easily back out of their original
declarations of blind faith in the Church of "Global Warming"
and are as anxious not to lose face as the Secretariat is, to put it about
that at Cancun this year and even at Durban next year very little of substance
will occur.
-
- The intention is that, after not one but two international
climate conferences, the second of them in Rio in 2012 on the 20th anniversary
of the Earth Summit that began it all, the Secretariat will have become
so wealthy and will have accreted so much power to itself that no one
not even the US Senate will dare to resist ratifying the Treaty of
Rio that brings democracy to an end worldwide and fulfils Lord Mandelson's
recent statement that "we are now living in a post-democratic age."
-
- Over my dead body. The people know best what is best
for the people. The governing class no doubt knows what is best for the
governing class, but does not necessarily know what is best for the people,
and must always be kept in check by the ballot-box.
-
-
- If we are to have a world government at all (and, as
the science of "global warming" alarm continues to collapse,
the current pretext for world domination by a privileged few is wearing
more than a little thin), then it is essential that the world government
should be an elected government, and that, as Article 1, Section 1 of the
US Constitution makes plain when it grants "All legislative power"
to the elected Congress and to the now-elected Senate, none shall make
laws for the world or impose taxes upon the world except those whom the
people of the world have elected by universal secret ballot.
-
- Right and we KNOW that there is no such thing anymore
as either a free or fair election - anywhere, all such exercises are nothing
more than fixed approvals of the powers that be and whatever they determine
will happen magically does happen, because ELECTIONS are not just unworkable
they are now totally controlled and are a fruad upon any who participate
in them - kirwan
-
- How can we, the people, defeat the Secretariat and keep
the democracy we love? Simply by informing our elected representatives
of the scope, ambition, and detail of what is in the Cancun agreement.
The agreement will not be called a "Treaty", because the Senate,
particularly after the mid-term elections, will not pass it. But it can
still be imposed upon us by the heavily Left-leaning Supreme Court, which
no longer makes any pretense at judicial impartiality and may well decide,
even if Congress does not, that the Cancun agreement shall stand part of
US law on the ground that it is "customary international law".
-
- Or the population of this country could take to
the streets of every major city and DEMAND that this entire enterprise
be thrown out entirely! Given something as important as this over to the
thoroughly corrupted congress - is the same thing as surrendering to an
invading army: It is CRIMINAL in the extreem and if it gets affirmed in
any way it will DESTROY THIS once viable NATION - forever! (k)
-
- What to do? Send this blog posting to your legislators.
It is their power, as well as yours, that is being taken away; their democracy,
as well as yours, that will perish from the Earth unless this burgeoning
nonsense is stopped.
|
