After the significant defeat that confronted environmental extremists at last year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, organizers for the 2010 conference in Cancun are trying to avoid a repeat of that failure. A significant reason for the failure of last year’s conference — apart from the greed of Third World nations looking to grab billions of dollars from the First World — was the unwillingness of the Chinese to join the economic suicide pact demanded by environmentalists.
Last year, the pressure was on the Senate of the United States to adopt “cap and trade” legislation, which would have redistributed billions of dollars from the U.S. economy to Third World nations that are ostensibly going to suffer from the effects of global warming. Now, the pressure is being directed toward the Chinese, in the hope of forcing the global agenda at this year’s conference.
According to an Associated Press report, a six-day conference in China preparing for the upcoming summit in Cancun will certainly not be abandoning the agenda of last year’s Copenhagen conference:
The U.N. climate chief urged countries Monday to identify achievable goals for fighting climate change ahead of a year-end meeting in Mexico, after last year’s Copenhagen summit failed to produce binding limits on greenhouse gas.
Christiana Figueres [photo, above] told 3,000 delegates at the opening of a six-day conference in China — the world’s biggest carbon emitter — that they must "accelerate the search for common ground" ahead of December talks in Cancun to make progress toward securing a global climate change treaty.
"As governments, you can continue to stand still or move forward. Now is the time to make that choice," she told delegates in the northern port of Tianjin.
"If you want a tangible outcome in December, now is the time to clarify what could constitute an achievable and politically balanced package for Cancun, and what could be subject to further work after Cancun," she said.
China has already drawn the ire of the executive board of the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism for a “scam” in which it was alleged that the Chinese were being, in essence, paid both to produce, and then to destroy, chemicals that environmentalists claim are causing global warming. Certainly this week’s conference in China highlights the increasing role of that nation in meeting the world’s need for finished goods. But as more of the world’s industrial base has shifted to the People’s Republic of China, any "cost" imposed on the Chinese will simply be passed along to their consumers — which means the United States and other Western nations will pay much of the Chinese share of Copenhagen-style global redistributionist schemes.
The AP report observes,
Last year’s U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen disappointed many environmentalists and political leaders when it failed to produce a global and legally binding treaty on curbing the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Instead, nations agreed to a nonbinding political declaration on fighting climate change.
Most UN activities may be reduced to either meaningless “feel good” pontificating, or meddlesome, even dangerous, international interference into fundamentally national issues. Last year’s conference clearly fell primarily into the first category. Now, the Cancun conference organizers hope to score a victory of the sort typifying the latter category by breaking up the Copenhagen agenda into smaller elements. Again, to cite the report:
This year, expectations have been downsized as it has become obvious that countries remain deadlocked over the same issues. Distrust has only deepened between developed and developing countries over how to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the earth to overheat. …
With a single climate package deal unlikely, the focus has turned to finding areas of agreement on essential components, including financing and transfer of clean technology and ways of reducing deforestation. …
Two of the key pieces will be financing and transparency, he said. At Copenhagen, rich countries had pledged to give $30 billion over three years in climate funding to poor nations, rising to a total of $100 billion dollars annually by 2020, but little money has materialized so far.
"It’s critical that countries move on really delivering the ‘prompt-start’ funding and show those commitments are real. We have a long history of developed countries promised a lot of money and not committing so it’s a chance for developed countries to prove this time is different," he said.
In other words, it keeps coming down to money. First and foremost, those who are deemed by the conference to be “haves” must hand over their wallets to the “have-nots.” In this context, “transparency”is not on the side of those who would be the recipients of such a redistribution of wealth, but on the part of those being coerced to fund it. Some of the schemes (such as one proposed by the World Bank) would call for transfers of as much as $500 billion a year. The UN will not be satisfied with mere promises to bankrupt the industrialized world: It demands to see results.
Given the obsessive way in which conference planners for Copenhagen and Cancun have focused on the massive financial transfers that are integral to their entire environmental scheme, it is clear that while any environmental dividend from their agenda is dubious at best, the global economic impact of their scheme is certain. The proposed course of action would be ruinous for the floundering American economy, which is already reeling from “bailouts” and the looming disaster associated with President Obama’s rewiring of the nation’s health care system. Amidst the distractions of this year’s election cycle, the long-term threat to American prosperity posed by the Left-wing agenda of the Obama administration and the greed of so-called developing nations, Americans dare not forget the lessons of last year’s Copenhagen conference. Only education of the citizenry and public pressure on elected officials can stop the globalists’ environmental agenda if a treaty comes out of this year’s Cancun conference.
Photo: U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres presses a seal to make a stamp onto a poster made by Green Peace with Chinese characters reading: "the Climate Great Wall" before the opening of the UN Climate Change Conference in Tianjin, China, Oct. 4, 2010: AP Images
