The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Doha, Qatar, concluded on Saturday, December 8, accomplishing somewhat less than “a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world,” a goal that conference chief Christiana Figueres had announced at the start of the global summit.
Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), presided over the Doha summit (also known in UN-speak as COP18, for the 18th Conference Of Parties) which was scheduled to run from November 26-December 8. The conference ran into overtime, ending on December 9, but still failing to deliver the “deliverables” demanded by Figueres, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and their supportive lobby of “green” activist NGOs.
Chief among their demands was extending the Kyoto Protocol, a binding agreement on emissions reductions adopted in 1997 at the UNFCCC in Kyoto, Japan. However, only 37 of the 194 nations meeting at Doha signed on to an extension of Kyoto, and many of their commitments were tenuous at that. The United States never officially joined, thanks to refusal by the U.S. Senate to ratify the Kyoto agreement that Vice President Al Gore had helped negotiate and President Bill Clinton had signed. Canada has dropped out of Kyoto and Russia and Japan have refused to renew their commitments. India and China, which are responsible for the biggest increases in man-made “greenhouse gas” (GHG) emissions, are on pace to greatly expand those emissions. Together, India and China account for 76 percent of the 1,200 coal-fired power plants currently under construction or planned for construction globally.
In a December 4 address to the high-level segment of COP18, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke in apocalyptic terms of the “existential” threat to humanity and the planet posed by the “crisis” of climate change. He stated:
Let us be under no illusion. This is a crisis. A threat to us all. Our economies. Our security. And the well-being of our children and those who will come after.
The danger signs are all around. One third of the world’s population lives in countries with moderate to high water stress. Land degradation affects 1.5 billion people. Icecaps are showing unprecedented melting; permafrost is thawing; sea levels are rising. The abnormal is now the new normal.
Like many other conference speakers and attendees, Secretary-General Ban cited the recent droughts, floods, and Tropical Storm Sandy as proof of the dire consequences of man-made global warming, even though many studies and scientists (including scientists who usually fall into the climate alarmist category) have stated that there is no evidence to support claims that “extreme weather” has been increasing in frequency and/or magnitude in recent years, or that extreme events (hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, etc.) have anything to do with increased CO2 levels. Marc Morano of Climate Depot has released a new 35-page report compiling these latest scientific studies and statements. According to the report, entitled “Extreme Weather Report 2012,” “Latest peer-reviewed studies, data & analyses undermine claims that current weather is ‘unprecedented’ or a ‘new normal.'” This recapitulates a key fact that most media reports and alarmist charges fail to mention: that even many of the major alarmist agencies, organs, and spokesmen have admitted there has been no measurable global warming for the past 16 years.
Nevertheless, undaunted by facts, Ban Ki-moon dramatically warned:
From the United States to India, from Ukraine to Brazil, drought decimated essential global crops. Across the Sahel, from Mali to the Horn of Africa, tens of millions of people endured another year of vulnerability, at the mercy of the slightest climate shock. No one is immune to climate change — rich or poor. It is an existential challenge for the whole human race — our way of life, our plans for the future.
“A complete transformation of the economic structure of the world”
The UN’s would-be autocrats and their fellow globalists must speak in hyperbolic, catastrophic terms and in total disregard of scientific facts if they are to ratchet up the fear factor sufficiently to justify the extreme economic, social, and political measures they have planned. How extreme are their proposed policies? They unabashedly admit they are advocating a top-down, centrally-planned “complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.”
UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres told a press conference on December 3, 2012:
It must be understood that what is occurring here, not just in Doha, but in the whole climate change process is a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world. That does not happen overnight. It should happen much quicker than it is happening, but it cannot happen overnight.
“This Conference of the Parties,” Figueres told the press conference, “will produce a second commitment period to the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding agreement.” “It will have the necessary amendments to go into a second commitment period as of January 1, 2013,” she continued, noting also, “We are also moving toward a universal legally based agreement by 2015 to go into effect in 2020.”
Transformation of “everyone on the planet”
A couple of weeks earlier, on November 21, several days before the opening of the Doha conference, Figueres was interviewed by The Guardian, one of the UK’s most influential leftist dailies, and a major media sponsor of climate change alarmism. During the course of the interview, Figueres expounded on the supposed necessity of a government-mandated “guided transformation” and “centralized transformation” to affect “the life of everyone on the planet.”
UNFCCC Executive Secretary Figueres told The Guardian:
One reality is the reality of what science is demanding and which we have to hold front and center as our guiding light for our work here. We also have the obligation and the honor to support the political process that governments are putting together to address the urgency and the challenge that they have in front of them. And those two things are equally real. There’s a huge gap between the two, and it is our very challenging task to encourage the closing of that gap. It is the most inspiring job in the world because what we are doing here is we are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science. So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different.
The “centralized transformation” Figueres so earnestly advocates would indeed “make the life of everyone on the planet very different.” It would also take central planning far beyond the realms already practiced during the most totalitarian epochs of Communist dictators Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. Mao and Stalin in their wildest dreams could not have imagined a global regime for measuring CO2 and regulating every breath, every cooking fire, every watt of electricity, virtually every activity, of every person on earth.
However, Christiana Figueres and Ban Ki-moon are simply channeling the globalist spirits of other elitists that have been exploiting environmental issues for decades as excuses for ending national sovereignty and empowering the United Nations with world government authority. (See here, here, and here.)
As we have reported here, and graphically illustrated with placements on an interactive world map of the alarming proliferation of UN institutions, projects, and programs, (See “The United Nations: On the Brink of Becoming a World Government”) the drive for world government under the United Nations is much further along than most Americans imagine.
What about Sustainable Freedom?
Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), almost no one in the official delegations, the press corps, or the NGO choir at Doha challenged the totalitarian “central planning” foundation of the regime proposed by the UNFCCC and enunciated by Executive Director Figueres. Almost no one. As in past UN climate conferences, The Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) mobilized a Truth Squad of experts to attend the summit and set the record straight — for any who were willing to think outside the box prescribed by the UN and its media-droid cheering section.
In a December 5 blog post CFACT squad member Craig Rucker charged that “UNFCCC boss Christiana Figueres’ dreams spell a nightmarish future for Earth’s citizens.”
Mr. Rucker noted:
Aside from the fact that someone (Al Gore, international bankers and their kin) will make a killing off any carbon trading schemes — and that the UN bureaucracy is seeking to pad its own employment rolls and pocketbooks — the sad reality is that none of the shenanigans at Doha (or at any previous or future UNFCCC dog and pony show) is likely to improve the well-being of the billions of humans in so-called developing countries one whit.
“These people,” says Rucker, “need cheap, reliable, abundant energy and the infrastructure it can support, in order to climb out of abject poverty, lengthen life spans grossly shortened by disease and malnutrition, and terminate the tyranny of neo-colonialists who, in the name of ‘preventing climate change,’ continue to rule over them with iron fists.”
Rucker continued:
By now, everyone knows that “global warming” or “climate change” or “weird weather” is nothing but a smokescreen for those like Figueres and Obama, who view economic growth as either evil or environmentally intolerable — and thus think taking from the rich and giving to bureaucrats who claim to represent the poor will even things out, and is the highest and best thing we can do.
Although COP18 ended without producing a new Kyoto Protocol and failed to produce the new funding mechanisms and wealth transfer commitments proposed by alarmists, there is still much cause for concern that the UN “transformation” agenda will proceed via Obama administration executive orders. CFACT Truth Squad member Paul Driessen, in a piece entitled, “Triple Threat: UN, EPA and Congress,” warns that even without Kyoto-imposed CO2 reductions, the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed regulations of CO2 and other emissions, and the Interior Department’s use of the Endangered Species Act to lock up millions of acres of forest and oil and natural gas reserves, can accomplish much the same thing as the climate alarmists attempted at Copenhagen, Cancun, Doha, and other climate conferences.
Photo of UN Climate Conference in Doha, Qatar: AP Images
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