CFR Pushes End to Sovereignty at UN's Doha Climate Summit

Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

The UN Climate Summit in Doha, Qatar, (see here and here) is in its second week, headed for completion on Friday, December 7. Most analysts and observers expect little in the way of major developments or breakthrough agreements to come out of it. With the world economy in shambles, and nearly all national governments awash in debt, there is diminishing incentive for politicians to spend scarce public funds on the much-hyped hypothetical future “threats” posed by global warming — especially when there are very real, tangible issues demanding immediate attention and funding.

However, the climate change lobby is not rolling over and calling it quits; they have too much invested to back away now. A tabulation of funding in 2007 by Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, found that the climate alarmists had received over $50 billion since 1990. That was five years ago; naturally, the price tag has gone up considerably since then.

Most of this enormous funding avalanche came from governments, with the biggest chunk coming from the U.S. federal government. State governments have also been big funders, along with foreign national governments, the European Union, United Nations agencies, the World Bank, the big tax-exempt foundations, and major Wall Street banks and corporations. This money infusion has launched a huge climate industry, with universities, institutions, think tanks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), professors, scientists, researchers, and activists all dependent on maintaining the flow of funds. The major banks and investors that have jumped on board the climate change wagon see a great deal of green to be made from the global sale of carbon credits. Trillions of dollars could change hands, but only if a carbon trading regime is forced on consumers by governments.

Foremost among the groups that have been driving the global warming alarm bandwagon is the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). There are many think tanks affecting national policies, but the CFR, long ranked as the premier brain trust, is still the most influential. The UN Climate Summit in Doha will carry the CFR imprint in many ways, as have virtually all previous global conferences. Representing the U.S. government in Doha is President Obama’s Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern. Stern, who was previously a White House assistant to President Bill Clinton, played a role in U.S. negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. He was selected as Climate Envoy by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Todd Stern is a longtime member of the CFR.

Stern’s boss, Hillary Clinton, has explicitly confirmed what critics of the CFR have often charged: that the Council unofficially runs the U.S. State Department, and has virtually taken control of the entire executive branch of the federal government, regardless of which party may occupy the White House. In a famous speech at the Council on Foreign Relations’ Washington, D.C., office in 2009, Secretary Clinton referred to the CFR’s Pratt House headquarters in New York City as the “mother ship” and said she had been there often. She was glad, she said, that the CFR’s new Washington headquarters is so close to the State Department, making it easier to be “told what we should be doing and how we should think.”

Here is the opening paragraph of her address, after being introduced by CFR President Richard Haass:

Thank you very much, Richard, and I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters. I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.

(A video of Secretary Clinton’s remarks may be viewed at the bottom of this page.)

CFR “Mother Ship” Guiding U.S. at Doha

So, what is the CFR telling Hillary Clinton and her lieutenants about “what they should be doing and how they should think” at the Doha Summit? We are not privy to any of the private consultations between Pratt House and Foggy Bottom, but there is plenty to go on from the public pronouncements of the CFR’s spokesmen and members.

In “A Transitional Climate Summit in Doha,” a November 28, 2012 CFR “Expert Brief” by Michael A. Levi, director of the council’s Program on Energy Security and Climate Change, we are told that global climate change “threatens intensifying damages primarily in the future but requires strong action to curb emissions now.” Levi warns that there are dire “reputational” consequences for U.S. failure to support a more robust and restrictive climate agenda:

If the United States is isolated in its stance on financial or process issues, then it will suffer internationally. To prevent that, U.S. strategy will need to focus as much on keeping partners like Europe and Japan on a similar page as it does on the substance of any outcome. The United States will also come under fire for failing to cut its emissions sufficiently.

Levi, who is the CFR’s top guru on climate change, is surely aware by now of the overwhelming evidence, including admissions by some of the top alarmists, that there has been no measurable global warming for the past 16 years, all of the media horror stories and Al Gore pronouncements about impending Climate Armageddon notwithstanding. And he must surely be aware that no evidence supports the contention that a government-forced reduction of emissions by the United States would have any impact whatsoever on global temperatures. However, the financial, social, and political costs would be horrendous. As critics point out, it is a prescription for “all pain and no gain” — except for the politically connected, who stand to gain immense wealth and power under the proposed UN global climate regime.

Levi ignores the steadily mounting evidence to promote the CFR’s ongoing globalist line. “International climate diplomacy provides the United States with opportunities to leverage domestic action for greater impact abroad,” says Levi. “But the United States still falls well short of what it must do at home to reduce its emissions to ever lower levels.”

The CFR’s Levi was also a lead voice in the “extreme weather” catastrophe choir claiming that the deaths and damage from Tropical Storm Sandy could be laid at the feet of human-caused global warming. In a November 5 column, “Hurricane Sandy and Climate Change: Three Things to Know,” Levi hymned a predictable refrain. “Increased human emissions of greenhouse gases are leading to more risk of dangerous weather extremes,” he said. “Reducing this risk requires cutting U.S. and global greenhouse gas emissions.”

Levi and the CFR ignore completely the numerous climate experts, including many well-known alarmists who point out that not only did Sandy and other recent “extreme weather” have nothing to do with global warming, but that contrary to many recent media stories, there is no evidence of any increase in recent decades in either the number or magnitude of hurricanes and other extreme weather incidents.

Unburdened by any adherence to science and facts, the CFR pushes its same one-world agenda. “In Sandy’s aftermath,” says the CFR, we should work for “increasing global cooperation” on climate change. “At the international level, the United States should similarly seize on opportunities to work collaboratively with other countries on climate change challenges,” says Levi. Translated from global-speak: Exploit every possible tragedy and weather anomaly as an opportunity to establish, empower, and enrich the UN and related global institutions.

Do we exaggerate? You be the judge. In a July 5, 2012 CFR Issue Brief entitled, “The Global Climate Change Regime,” we are warned that “Climate change is one of the most significant threats facing the world today.” Anthropogenic global warming (AGW), says the CFR, threatens us all with “widespread disasters in the form of rising sea levels, violent and volatile weather patterns, desertification, famine, water shortages, and other secondary effects including conflict.”

Haass: World Government or Anarchy

What must we do to avert these calamities? Among other things, says the CFR, we must “create a global consensus regarding the creation of major greenhouse gas emissions targets and isolating intransigent countries.” What, exactly, the CFR means by targeting and isolating “intransigent” countries is not spelled out in that piece. But anyone who studies CFR programs, policies, and publications quickly realizes that the organization favors a world government — run by “wise men” and “eminent persons” such as themselves. And their envisioned world government — their new world order — does not contemplate tolerance for “intransigence” by sovereign nations. In fact, national sovereignty, according to the CFR, is the bane of world order.

CFR President Richard Haass (pictured above) says “states must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies if the international system is to function.”

In a February 21, 2006 column entitled, “State sovereignty must be altered in globalized era,” Haass states:

Some governments are prepared to give up elements of sovereignty to address the threat of global climate change. Under one such arrangement, the Kyoto Protocol, which runs through 2012, signatories agree to cap specific emissions. What is needed now is a successor arrangement in which a larger number of governments, including the US, China, and India, accept emissions limits.

“All of this suggests that sovereignty must be redefined if states are to cope with globalization,” Haass avers. “At its core, globalization entails the increasing volume, velocity, and importance of flows — within and across borders — of people, ideas, greenhouse gases, goods, dollars, drugs, viruses, e-mails, weapons and a good deal else, challenging one of sovereignty’s fundamental principles: the ability to control what crosses borders in either direction.”

According to Haass and the CFR, the only answer to this predicament is a progressive weakening of national sovereignty and a steady move to global government. “Globalization thus implies that sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but that it needs to become weaker,” says Haass. “States would be wise to weaken sovereignty in order to protect themselves, because they cannot insulate themselves from what goes on elsewhere. Sovereignty is no longer a sanctuary.”

Haass opines that “Our notion of sovereignty must therefore be conditional, even contractual, rather than absolute.” Which, of course, means that our Constitution, which specifically defines and limits the powers of the U.S. federal government, would be completely conditional, at the whim of those who are defining of what our sovereignty consists.

“The goal,” says Haass “should be to redefine sovereignty for the era of globalization, to find a balance between a world of fully sovereign states and an international system of either world government or anarchy.”

World government or anarchy — those are our only options, according to the Pratt House luminaries. During the decades of the 1960s through the 1990s, the internationalists muted their calls for world government, preferring fuzzier labels, such as “international law,” “the rule of law,” and “interdependence” to avoid generating the popular alarm that a transparent attempt to subject U.S. citizens to UN rule would engender.

However, since they have been already wildly successful, over the past several decades, in building the superstructure of an UN-based world government (see our recent article and global maps in “The United Nations: On the Brink of Becoming a World Government”), they are dropping much of the pretense and more boldly asserting true objectives.

We have more than a hint of the world government plan in the title of the aforementioned CFR Issue Brief, “The Global Climate Change Regime.”

“Regime” is a term the globalists would not likely have used even a couple of decades ago, since that would have been a dead giveaway as to where they planned to take us. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “regime” as: “mode of rule or management,” “a form of government (a socialist regime),” or “a government in power.”

We get another substantial hint from the CFR web page hosting the “The Global Climate Change Regime,” which notes that it is part of the CFR’s “multimedia Global Governance Monitor from the International Institutions and Global Governance program.”

When the UN-appointed Commission of Global Governance issued its 1995 report, Our Global Neighborhood, its authors went to great pains to (falsely) assure readers that in promoting “global governance” they were in no way promoting “global government.” This writer pointed out that their semantic dodge was a distinction without a difference, and that despite their dissimulation, everything they proposed screamed “global government,” with global legislative, executive, judicial, and policing powers.

As we have reported previously (Rooting for World Government) Jacques Attali, a committed world government proponent and an advisor to former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, flatly stated in 2008: “Global governance is just a euphemism for global government.” That is precisely what many critics (including this writer) had been saying for years.

Coordinating the Global-warming Charade

Over the past two decades, the CFR journal Foreign Affairs has published numerous articles hyping the global-warming non-crisis, and its fellows and members have fright-peddled the AGW scare stories in countless op-eds and interviews in the major (CFR-dominated) media. The Council’s many task forces, panels, and speaker programs have pumped the false alarms of melting polar caps and rising sea levels to influential opinion molders, policymakers, and legislators. On a global scale, the CFR influences an even wider audience of opinion molders, policymakers, and legislators through its Council of Councils, an important adjunct of the CFR’s International Institutions and Global Governance (IIGG) program. The Council of Councils is a formal association of 25 of the CFR’s “sister” organizations. These include: Canada’s Center for International Governance Innovation; the French Institute of International Relations; the German Institute for International and Security Affairs; Italy’s Institute of International Affairs; the Polish Institute of International Affairs; and, of course, Britain’s The Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), also known as Chatham House.

The CFR-Pratt House/RIIA-Chatham House axis has proven to have been a potent propaganda transmission belt. Their climate-change alarm chorus gets considerable global heft from The Economist, which boasts an undeserved reputation as a journal of substance. The writers and editors of The Economist are regulars in the CFR/RIIA salons and reliably retail the one-world gospel. In a November 21 report prepping readers for Doha, entitled, “Warming up: What to Expect From the Next Big Report on Climate Change,” The Economist puts great stock in the UN’s thoroughly discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and suggests that our failure to secure a global climate regime is tantamount to “playing Russian roulette with the planet.”

In a December 1 piece entitled “Theatre of the Absurd,” the journal complained that “After three failures, this year’s UN climate summit has only modest aims.” The Economist article cites a new World Bank jeremiad that postulates calamitous planetary results from a projected 4-6 degree Centigrade global temperature rise. Oceans “would rise by 0.5-1 metres by 2100, devastating coastal cities and bearing especially heavily on East and South Asia.”

The frightening scenario — a repeat of numerous previous false alarms — continues:

Three-quarters of tropical forests could die, including many in Indonesia, India and the Philippines, adding further to global warming. Crop yields would fall overall and droughts would become more common and severe … “A 4°C world,” says the report, “can and must be avoided.”

Of course, the CFR/RIIA Insiders have learned that they cannot always rely on their propaganda organs to produce sufficient public support in a timely manner to accomplish their goals. They must also have their people on the inside. As noted previously, they have that inside track with Hillary Clinton and Todd Stern. Another key CFR advantage comes in the person of Jonathan Pershing, Mr. Stern’s assistant. Prior to joining the administration, Pershing, a scientist, was a top honcho at the World Resources Institute, (WRI) one of the Big Green think tank/lobby groups in the forefront of the push for world government, in the name of saving the environment. Mr. Pershing is not a CFR member, but for many years he answered to the WRI board of directors, which (like so many other organizations, corporations, and foundations) is saturated with CFR members.

The current WRI board of directors includes the following CFR members:

James A. Harmon, chairman
Harriet C. Babbitt, vice chair
Bill Richardson
Alison Sander
Jonathan Lash
Daniel L. Doctoroff
Daniel Cruise