Thousands of delegates representing almost 200 governments and dictatorships are gathering in Doha, Qatar, in a desperate bid to keep climate change alarmism alive long enough to create a United Nations-run planetary carbon regime. However, as the climate hysteria continues its march toward irrelevance following the spectacular implosion of UN global warming theories and multiple scandals in recent years, delegates at this year’s Conference of the Parties (COP18) know they are in a race against time.
Among the highest priorities of climate alarmists and UN types is the extension of a deeply controversial 1997 treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of the year. The dubious agreement — it calls on governments ruling wealthier countries to limit carbon emissions by imposing restrictions on citizens and businesses — does not apply to the United States, in large part because the U.S. Senate refused to ratify it.
So far, the Brussels-based European Union and several governments have agreed to renew Kyoto, with autocratic regimes around the world seeking funds lining up to support the effort as well. Multiple others, however, including more than a few powerhouses like Russia, Japan, and Canada, cited various reasons for their refusal to extend the emissions protocol past the 2012 expiration date.
“I think we cover at most 14 percent of global emissions,” complained EU “chief negotiator” Artur Runge-Metzger, referring to the governments and self-styled “authorities” that have agreed to approve a successor to the international treaty. Despite the economic tsunami swamping Europe, Runge-Metzger said the emerging EU super-state was willing to continue bribing third world regimes with taxpayer money if they agreed to assorted demands.
Another goal of the conference is to finalize the creation of an international mechanism for mass wealth redistribution — essentially transferring vast sums of money from taxpayers in more prosperous and liberty-minded countries to the generally dictatorial regimes ruling poorer nations. Almost $30 billion has already been transferred in recent years following an agreement reached at the 2009 UN global warming summit in Copenhagen.
However, proponents of the controversial redistribution scheme, dubbed the Green Climate Fund, hope to increase the sums involved to at least $100 billion annually once the “Fund” becomes operational. Eventually, advocates of the plot — mostly international bureaucrats, tax-funded alarmist organizations, and socialist regimes ruling over nations impoverished by socialism — are seeking astronomical amounts of taxpayer cash from the West amounting to trillions of dollars.
“We have a precious opportunity over the coming days, and we must make full use of it,” declared the president of the COP 18, Deputy Prime Minister of Qatar Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah. As the conference began on November 26, Al-Attiyah, whose government presides over one of the highest per-capita emissions rates in the world, urged attendees to obey previous climate agreements and “speedily implement already-agreed decisions,” the UN’s “news service” reported.
UN “Climate Change Secretariat” Christiana Figueres, meanwhile, sounded a similarly alarmist tone, demanding that governments accelerate the effort to impose economy-destroying global rules while increasing the size and scope of international wealth redistribution schemes. According to the UN climate boss, member governments can reverse alleged warming trends, but “time is running out,” so they must act now.
“Expert analysis consistently says that we do have the possibility to keep on track and that to act now is safer and much less costly than to delay,” she claimed in a statement, apparently oblivious to the latest global temperature data. “In the last three years, policy and action towards a sustainable, clean energy future has been growing faster than ever. But the door is closing fast because the pace and scale of action is simply not yet enough. So, Doha must deliver its part in the longer-term solution.”
In a separate statement outlining the wishes of alarmists and UN bureaucrats, Figueres also claimed that a “faster response” to alleged global warming was not only possible, but “necessary.” Even before the conference, though, a motley parade of UN bureaucrats with bloated tax-funded salaries was demanding ever-greater sums of taxpayer funds with increasingly alarmist rhetoric.
“The international community must be prepared to give much more than money,” decreed UN “Independent Expert on Human Rights and International Solidarity” Virginia Dandan. “We need world leaders with the courage to rise above narrow political and economic self-interest, towards fulfilling the promise of sustainable development made in Rio+20, and the eradication of poverty that is both the cause and effect of deeply entrenched inequalities and human rights deprivations, particularly of the most marginalized and vulnerable.”
As The New American reported from the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio earlier this year, with climate hysteria quickly becoming a joke, advocates of increasingly centralized powers of coercion have now started to focus more on dealing with poverty — at least in terms of their rhetoric. However, as countless experts explained, the goals are still the same: a more powerful and expensive planetary regime under the UN that would control virtually every facet of human existence.
Countless so-called “non-governmental organizations,” known as NGOs for short and often financed by taxpayers, dispatched legions of spokesmen and officials to warn humanity about the dangers of refusing to accept UN control to supposedly “save” the environment. Supposed news agencies were more than happy to reprint them without question. Despite the increasingly shrill hysteria, however, opposition to the international scheming continues to grow by leaps and bounds — especially in the United States, where some state governments have even passed laws banning anti-liberty UN “sustainability” plots like Agenda 21.
Numerous establishment analysts are already predicting that this year’s “climate change” summit will probably end in “failure” on December 7. A piece by Reuters that sounded more like a press release from government-funded warming alarmists than a news article, for example, claimed that so-called “climate negotiators” were likely to do little more than pay “lip service” to the “need to rein in” carbon emissions due to alleged planetary warming — all supposedly caused by human activities.
“A likely failure to agree a [sic] meaningful extension of the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, a legally binding plan for cutting emissions by developed nations, would also undercut work on a new deal meant to unite rich and poor in fighting global warming from 2020,” the Reuters “journalists” wrote in the dubious article. “And countries [governments] are showing little sign of raising ambition.”
At least one expert who spoke with TNA in Rio de Janeiro at the UN sustainability summit said the climate conference in Doha could well be the final COP with the global body’s theories continuing to crumble under scrutiny. As The New American reported last month, global temperature data from the U.K. Met Office and the now-discredited Climatic Research Unit at the center of ClimateGate shows that there has been no observable warming for some 16 years. That means the climate models and UN theories predicting massive temperature increases over that time period were deeply flawed at best.
However, even if the threat of UN “sustainability” and “climate change” schemes is averted, which at this point is far from certain, the dangers to freedom and national sovereignty are far from over. Also this December, for example, an obscure UN agency known as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will meet in Dubai in an effort to impose a global regulatory regime over the Internet complete with censorship and even a “kill switch.”
In fact, virtually no realm of human life has escaped the UN’s increasingly brazen attempted power grabs in recent years. And analysts say that without a continued massive wave of opposition, the trend will accelerate as the planetary entity seeks to usurp ever greater amounts of money and power from national governments and humanity.
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is currently based in Europe. He can be reached at [email protected].
Photo: AP Images
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