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 A two-week-long series of UN climate-change talks in Bangkok attended by delegates from 180 countries ended on October 9, with their most notable result being a dispute between richer and poorer nations over whether to renew or abandon the Kyoto Protocol, the only existing global agreement that addresses so-called climate change. The next UN-sponsored climate talks will be held in Barcelona, which will be the last round of such talks before the summit in Copenhagen in December.
A reporter for Radio Australia observed of the Bangkok event: “It’s a severe disappointment for the UN, barely two weeks after its secretary-general Ban Ki Moon told the General Assembly that climate change poses the greatest single threat to the human race.”
A BBC reporter quoted Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who lamented: "Just two months before Copenhagen, the Bangkok climate negotiations did little to move the ball forward. Bold steps are clearly needed from the world's leaders to break the deadlock in the negotiations, and time is running short."
However, the same report quoted a more optimistic statement from Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN climate convention (UNFCCC): "This session has shown that it can be done. All of the ingredients for success are on the table, and what we must do now is to hold back from self-interest and let the common interest prevail."
De Boer related that the delegates at Bangkok discussed three different options for what should be accomplished at Copenhagen in December, including 1) a completely new document; 2) an extension of the Kyoto Protocol; or 3) a "series of decisions" to be made at the Copenhagen talks.
A major divide surfaced during the Bangkok talks between developing and already-developed nations, with the former tending to favor a continuation of Kyoto’s strict regulations on industrialized nations mandating cuts in carbon emissions below their existing targets.
Meena Raman of Friends of the Earth Malaysia stated in a press release quoted by multiple news organs: "So far it looks like the Copenhagen talks could deliver a toothless agreement based on vague pledges that cannot deliver the deep greenhouse cuts that science and justice demand of rich nations."
"Other countries are using the US’s position as an opportunity to try and avoid stringent legally binding emissions cuts which they should implement at home."
A report from AFP quoted Malta's Michael Cutajar, co-chair of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) talks, whose statement reflected views typical of developing nations: "My feeling is that the ball, immediately, is in the developed country court to make it clearer what they are looking for.”
During another press conference several minutes later, U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing countered Cutajar’s statement: "I think the ball is in the court of all countries.”
According to Bloomberg News, during the press conference Pershing voiced his opinion that the United States may not agree to cut greenhouse-gas emissions in a new treaty this year because there is no domestic law to implement it and that without legislation advancing in Congress, the United States would find it difficult to pledge an emissions target for itself. "It will be extraordinarily difficult for the U.S. to commit to a specific number in the absence of action from Congress,” Pershing said. “The question is open as to how much we can do. It’s not really possible to answer.”
If getting such legislation through Congress is on Pershing’s “wish list,” then active resistance to such “climate change” bills might potentially thwart the efforts of those who would try at Copenhagen to impose economically devastating regulatory shackles on the United States.
In reality, viable climate legislation designed to enable the global-warming crowd already exists in embryonic form. An expensive new “energy tax” bill, H.R. 2454, — known as the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009,” or alternately as the Waxman-Markey climate change bill — was approved by the House of Representatives by a vote of 219 to 212 on June 26. Even President Obama has admitted: “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
A vote by the Senate could occur as early as late October, but more likely in November or December. If the Senate passes a cap-and-trade bill, then the House and Senate would have to convene a conference committee, iron out their differences, and then have a final vote on a conference report cap-and-trade bill.
So there are opportunities to derail legislation that just might serve to validate Jonathan Pershing’s pessimistic expectations for the United States being able to make a firm commitment for making drastic cuts in so-called greenhouse-gas emissions at Copenhagen.
Those who may not have heard “the rest of the story” about global warming may wonder why the United States and other highly industrialized nations should resist signing on to the climate change treaties — other than for the obvious economic harm they will bring.
The most important reason to resist such economically (and sovereignty threatening) climate treaties is that the unbearable burdens they would impose are pointless! Though most of the global-warming doomsayers cited in reports about climate change assume that any variation in average global temperatures is anthropogenic (i.e., caused by humans), a large group of respected scientists and climate experts insist that so-called global warming — if it exists at all — may be a natural phenomenon that threatens neither the Earth nor the creatures (including humans) that inhabit it.
Furthermore, an increase in global temperatures, from any causes, is uncertain. A report compiled by Roy Spencer, Ph.D., a climatologist and former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, states that data that he and colleague John Christy compiled from the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite indicates that average global temperatures have actually declined in recent years!
As award-winning NASA astronaut/geologist and moonwalker Jack Schmitt, who flew on the Apollo 17 mission and was formerly a member of the Norwegian Geological Survey and the U.S. Geological Survey has stated: “The ‘global warming scare’ is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making.”
Many of the solutions proposed by the global warming crowd advocate that the more developed nations not only cut their own carbon emission, but also send massive aid packages to less-developed nations to pay for their emissions-reduction programs as well. Such plans would merely redistribute the world’s wealth from its productive to the non-productive sectors.
So-called climate-change restrictions must be stopped in their tracks, both in the legislative and diplomatic realms. Failure to do so will further erode our economy until the United States ceases to be one of the “developed, wealthy” nations the Third World loves to excoriate.
Photo of Yvo de Boer: AP Images
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