Newly empowered Republican lawmakers are threatening to protect U.S. taxpayers from being fleeced again by the Obama administration, which in late 2014 recklessly promised to send another $3 billion of American tax money to a United Nations climate fund. Under the guise of fighting global warming, the UN scheme is mostly aimed at redistributing wealth from what remains of the Western middle class to Third World dictators. However, after the GOP trounced establishment-backed climate alarmists in the mid-term election, lawmakers say Congress is almost certain to scale back funding — if not end it completely — for the increasingly extremist and discredited global warming plots pushed by the White House and the dictator-dominated UN.
Especially problematic for the Obama administration and the global-warming theorists at the UN is the anticipated takeover of the Senate Environment Committee by Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a staunch climate realist who has for years resisted and ridiculed the hysteria put forward by alarmists. For months, Hollywood bigwigs, the establishment press, and pseudo-environmentalists have been frothing over Inhofe’s chairmanship and the effects it is expected to have on White House efforts to shackle Americans to more UN global-warming machinations. And already, Inhofe and others are vowing to protect the taxpayer.
Of course, all U.S. government spending is in the hands of Congress, which the Constitution put in charge of the “purse strings” for good reason. So if lawmakers refuse to appropriate funds for the administration’s “climate” scheming, Obama’s hands are tied — even his infamous “pen and phone” cannot conjure taxpayer funds out of thin air to send to the UN and its largely autocratic members. And so far, newly empowered GOP lawmakers, who crushed global-warming theorists in the November landslide election, have indicated that they do not plan to allow more U.S. taxpayer funds to be squandered on UN climate schemes.
“If they think they are going to get all that money for the fund, they’re mistaken,” a senior aide to Senator Inhofe recently told Fox News, referring to the $3 billion Obama pledged to the UN fund and its member regimes without any semblance of legislative or constitutional authority to do so. “You’re going to see us being more aggressive about not sending more money to the U.N. and elsewhere for climate change.” Aides cited in the Fox report also noted that Inhofe’s skepticism surrounding increasingly discredited global-warming theories is shared by other Republicans. And for Inhofe, reining in the climate scheming will be a “top priority,” his aide told Fox.
If lawmakers are serious about ending the climate gimmicks, analysts said it could deal a devastating blow to ongoing UN efforts to foist a planetary global-warming regime on humanity later this year at a summit in Paris. The UN climate fund is seen as a key component of the whole scheme. Without it, there will be no U.S. taxpayer dollars to bribe Third World regimes misruling poorer nations into further destroying their economies and impoverishing their populations by imposing crushing UN anti-carbon dioxide schemes to ration energy.
Obama’s announcement of the $3 billion pledge was made in Australia, where the ruling government has also been working to rein in global-warming alarmism to placate outraged citizens. In addition to repealing the deeply unpopular “carbon tax” imposed by the previous government, Australian authorities also vowed not to fund any more UN “socialism masquerading as environmentalism.” The death of economy-destroying carbon taxes in Australia was hailed as a major victory by climate skeptics around the world, and more than a few analysts suggested that it may have been the beginning of the end for the UN’s controversial global-warming scheming.
Perhaps seeking to blunt the damage to the global-warming cause by Australia’s newfound climate realism, Obama announced his pledge in mid-November at the Australian University of Queensland in Brisbane. “We are going to contribute $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund so we can help developing nations deal with climate change,” Obama proclaimed without elaborating on where he thought he was going to get the $3 billion from. By “nations,” he meant governments and dictatorships. It was the most significant pledge to the UN’s controversial slush fund for Third World regimes thus far — but now, it appears that the increasingly aggressive White House may not be able to deliver.
Indeed, Inhofe himself blasted the president’s bizarre pledge right after it was made. “President Obama’s pledge to give unelected bureaucrats at the UN $3 billion for climate change initiatives is an unfortunate decision to not listen to voters in this most recent election cycle,” Inhofe said in a statement rebuking the White House released following Obama’s announcement. “His climate change spending priorities, estimated to be $120 billion since the beginning of his Administration, were on the ballot, and Americans spoke.”
“The President’s climate change agenda has only siphoned precious taxpayer dollars away from the real problems facing the American people,” Inhofe added. “In a new Congress, I will be working with my colleagues to reset the misguided priorities of Washington in the past six years. This includes getting our nation’s debt under control, securing proper equipment and training to protect our men and women in uniform, and repairing our nation’s crumbling roads and bridges. These are the realistic priorities of today.”
UN alarmists and Third World regimes waiting for their share of climate loot were, at least until recently, hoping that the UN fund would eventually transfer $100 billion per year in bribes from Western taxpayers to compliant regimes willing to join the imploding climate bandwagon. The UN wealth redistribution/bribe mechanism is controlled by a board that includes operatives from the ruthless communist dictatorships ruling mainland China and Cuba, as well as representatives of Islamist dictatorships that U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said publicly were funding the terrorist group ISIS.
However, despite having already passed a massive spending bill fully funding most of Obama’s lawless decrees through September, U.S. lawmakers have also taken some initial steps to rein in Obama’s climate schemes. The trillion-dollar “Cromnibus” bill, for example, despite being attacked by conservatives outraged about GOP “surrender,” reportedly contained language specifically preventing any of the taxpayer funding from being squandered on the UN’s Green Climate Fund. The saga is not over yet, however.
The administration is expected to formally request the funds in its proposed budget for 2016. According to Inhofe’s senior aide, though, Republicans in Congress plan to “really get into the weeds at each agency” in deciding where to cut funds through budget amendments. The lawless EPA and its own climate schemes are expected to be a top target. For the grandiose global climate schemes envisioned by the White House, the UN, and many of its member regimes, that almost certainly means less funding — if any at all — is likely to be forthcoming on that front, too.
“For the past eight years, Senate Majority Leader [Harry] Reid prevented lots of amendments from going forward, and limited members’ ability to engage in the process,” the Inhofe aide was quoted as saying by Fox. Now that the situation has changed with firm GOP control of the Senate, newly empowered Republicans are likely to put what was described as a “major chill” on global-warming funds. Multiple Republican lawmakers have also suggested that, with Reid out of the way, the climate agenda was set to be put on ice.
Obama’s radical agenda disguised as concern over global warming — warming that stopped almost two decades ago, according to the satellite temperature record — is likely to face numerous other challenges as well. Of course, even the Democrat-controlled Congress was unable to impose a “cap-and-trade” scheme to extract more wealth from Americans and further control economic activity under the guise of reducing emissions of what many scientists call the “gas of life.” The EPA imposed much of it by fiat instead. Later this year, the UN and Obama are also hoping to foist a massive global CO2 regime on humanity.
For that to apply within the United States, Obama would have to — at a bare minimum — obtain Senate ratification of the scheme, if not a properly ratified constitutional amendment. With Republicans in the majority and treaty ratification requiring approval by two-thirds of the Senate, that appears to be virtually impossible for the foreseeable future. Obama has outlandishly tried, using semantic gimmicks, to claim that the UN global-warming regime is not a “treaty.” For the most part, however, his attempt was ridiculed as the ravings of a desperate administration that is running out of options.
Meanwhile, without any semblance of authority from Congress or the U.S. Constitution, Obama has been working feverishly to impose much of his global-warming agenda on the American people using his “pen and phone.” Through a bewildering array of executive orders, presidential memoranda, and an avalanche of radical regulations cooked up by out-of-control regulatory agencies, the White House has sought to limit CO2 emissions, commandeer state and local governments, extract more climate loot, and much more. However, if lawmakers are to be believed, many of those schemes are likely to be axed as soon as Congress has its next opportunity to defund them.
With the dubious global-warming theories advanced by Obama and the UN imploding on the world stage in spectacular fashion, climate alarmists are hoping to impose their planetary “climate” regime on humanity as quickly as possible. With firm resistance from Congress, though, that establishment dream, and taxpayer nightmare, appears to be on the verge of melting away. Still, Americans should put as much pressure as possible on lawmakers to fulfill their oaths of office and their campaign promises to defund Obama’s agenda. Only sustained efforts by the American people will be able to stop the UN and the White House from fulfilling their radical agenda.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected].
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