Despite the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009 to achieve its goal of a treaty binding the industrialized world to an economic suicide pact, the “voluntary” agreements are still a threat to the West. The UN is engaged in an effort to use the imagined environmental crisis as the justification for a program of sweeping economic redistribution that would shift trillions of dollars from the industrialized nations to the Third World. The UN is now demanding an “investment” of $1.9 trillion per year in “green technology” to meet the goals that the internationalists have set for the nations of the world. An AFP story entitled “World needs $1.9tn a year for green technology:UN” sets forth the lament of an elite for whom “real money” is measured in tens of trillions of dollars:
“Over the next 40 years, $1.9 trillion (1.31 trillion euros) per year will be needed for incremental investments in green technologies,” the UN Economic and Social Affairs body said in its annual survey.
“At least one-half, or $1.1 trillion per year, of the required investments will need to be made in developing countries to meet their rapidly increasing food and energy demands through the application of green technologies,” it added. At the moment, “external financing currently available for green technology investments in developing countries is far from sufficient to meet the challenge,” it assessed.
Over the last two years, climate change funds managed by World Bank disbursed about $20 billion, a fraction of the sum necessary for developing countries to build up clean energy technologies, sustainable farming techniques and technologies that help cut non-biodegradable waste production. Even though states agreed during a 2009 Copenhagen summit to spend $30 billion over 2010 to 2012 and $100 billion a year by 2020 in transfers to developing countries, these sums have not been realised.
In other words, the costly “feel good” language adopted at Copenhagen — though far from the crushing obligations a treaty would have imposed — still means the World Bank and the United Nations will be playing the role of an international collection agency, metaphorically beating on the doors of various heads of state until they “cough up” the demanded funds.
The cost of “going green” continues its steady upward climb with every new pronouncement from the UN. As reported for The New American in March 2010, the UN plan would eventually cost $45 trillion, with most of that cost coming from the First World:
According to the Earth Summit 2012 website, the goals of the conference will be in line with the Copenhagen agenda: Wrapping economic redistribution in a green mantle.
The United Nations General Assembly agreed to a new Earth Summit in December. The Summit will be in 2012 and will be hosted by Brazil. The themes are the Green Economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, the institutional framework for sustainable development, emerging issues and a review of present commitments.
The term “sustainable” in such a context is usually a buzzword for “governmentally controlled.” Although the plan is still wrapped in green, the dream of “poverty eradication” is coming to the fore.
And what will be the cost to the industrialized world for such “poverty eradication”? The inconceivable price tag is already at $45 trillion — and the conference is still years away. The ANI reports:
Documents written in advance of the meeting assume that the goal of the green economic transformation is the same as that of the ill-fated Copenhagen conference: a 50 percent reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
That, the paper says, will require a staggering 45 trillion dollars to accomplish. While the Copenhagen agenda was declared dead in December, the green road that leads to enormous cuts in carbon emissions by 2050 will require wealth tranfer [sic] from developed to developing country — same as the Copenhagen summit, according to documents.
Now, the $45 trillion has grown to an even more incomprehensible $76 trillion (based on the proposed 40 years of spending $1.9 trillion per year). Calling such a reckless demand “outrageous” and “unsustainable” still falls short — what is demanded is nothing less than the conversion of much of what remains of the economies of the developed world into a means of funneling wealth to the World Bank, which will, ostensibly, redistribute those funds to the Third World.
The human cost of such redistributionist schemes is regularly ignored. The shaky “science” of anthropogenic global warming is so full of holes than it has lost much of its credibility in the eyes of so many people that it is often perceived to be the pet theory of environmentalist fanatics, scientists who have staked their careers on the theory, and politicians (and others) who stand to profit either financially or politically from the schemes that have been hatched to ameliorate its supposed effects.
The problem for the environmentalists and the internationalists is that panicking nations may no longer be willing to sacrifice their future for the sake of a theory that is steadily unraveling.
The United States has yet to show any significant recovery from its own economic troubles, and the plight of Europe is steadily going from bad to worse. As reported previously for The New American, Portugal’s government bonds are now at “junk” status. As Bruce Walker wrote on July 7, the ramifications of the ongoing economic meltdown in Europe may threaten the entire EU:
The effect upon Portugal was immediate — but more ominously, in nearby Spain (the fourth of the so-called “PIGS” nations, the others being Portugal, Italy, and Greece), the stock market dropped 1.5 percent and the amount of interest required by bond purchasers rose. Spain’s economy is significantly larger than that of the other PIGS — and only somewhat smaller than the economy of France. Even worse, stocks dropped 2 percent in Italy, affected not only by the ripple of the PIGS but also because spending cuts have not seemed to help its huge national debt.
It would be worse than irresponsible for American and European governments to continue to sacrifice the well-being of their nations to pursue costly “cures” for largely theoretical environmental problems. The plan to divert $76 trillion into “green technologies” ought to be greeted, first, with inquiries into precisely who would profit from such expenditures, and, second, with a resounding rejection of such an obscene effort to loot the economies of the developed world.
