The following article (reprinted here with permission) originally appeared as a chapter in the 1992 book Global Tyranny … Step by Step by William F. Jasper, who had attended the original Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro earlier that year. We have republished the chapter on the occasion of the Rio+20 Summit not only because Mr. Jasper’s analysis has held up well against the test of time, but also because the developing UN-dominated global green regime he warns against is more advanced and threatening than it was 20 years ago. — Editor
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention…. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” 1
— quoted from The First Global Revolution, a report to The Council of the Club of Rome, 1991
There are genuine ecological problems today challenging mankind’s intelligence, wisdom, and resourcefulness. Very few will deny that fact. One need not investigate very deeply into the organized “environmental movement,” however, or examine the “science” on which it hangs its hat, to realize that its repeated prophesies of apocalyptic doom have far more to do with increasing and centralizing government control over mankind than with protecting man and nature from environmentally harmful practices.
Over the past two decades, a flood of books, articles, television documentaries, and news broadcasts has given the public such a frightening forecast of ecological catastrophe that far too many individuals now appear willing to give up their freedom for “solutions” that seem always to involve massive increases in government.
It is not our purpose here to present the hard, factual evidence assembled by prominent scientific authorities to refute the many false claims of the environmental disaster lobby. There are already many excellent volumes that capably expose the fraudulent theories about ozone depletion, global warming, pollution, pesticides, cancer risks, nuclear power, PCBs, asbestos, acid rain, deforestation, carbon dioxide, biodiversity, soil depletion, etc.2 Rather, we hope to demonstrate convincingly that concerns about the environment (some overblown, others completely fabricated) are being cynically exploited by influential individuals and organizations whose goal includes building a global tyranny.
Central Planning Nightmare
The horrifying political, economic, and social consequences wrought by totalitarian government in the former communist world have been so thoroughly exposed over the past several years that there are very few today who will openly defend the Soviet economic model. Meanwhile, mounting evidence of unparalleled ecological destruction in lands formerly under communist rule has finally begun to persuade even some environmentalists that too much government is as bad for nature as it is harmful to man.3
It is now considered acceptable in “politically correct” circles to talk of “market incentives” and “market solutions” to environmental problems. But, amazingly, many of those who use these terms envision a marketplace heavily or completely regulated and controlled by government. In other words, they have not really turned away from their government-is-the-only-answer mentality.
Competitive Enterprise Institute president Fred L. Smith was one of several who journeyed to Rio de Janeiro to bring a non-statist perspective to the Earth Summit. At an “Earth Summit Alternatives” conference held during the proceedings, he stated: “Economic central planning was a utopian dream, but it became a real world nightmare. Today, the international environmental establishment seems eager to repeat this experiment in the ecological sphere, increasing the power of the state, restricting individual and economic freedom.” Thus, Smith warned, despite the horrendous record of human, economic and environmental destruction left as a legacy by these centrally planned governments, “the world is moving decisively toward central planning for ecological rather than economic purposes.”4 But the determined environmentalists in Rio were not interested in these warnings.
Decades of Persistent Globalist Planning
One of the noteworthy early calls for the creation of a global environmental agency appeared in an advertisement sponsored by the World Association of World Federalists (WAWF) in the January-February 1972 issue of The Humanist, published by the American Humanist Association. It read:
World Federalists believe that the environmental crisis facing planet earth is a global problem and therefore calls for a “global” solution — a worldwide United Nations Environmental Agency with the power to make its decisions stick. WAWF has submitted a proposal for just such an agency to be considered at the 1972 U.N. Environmental Conference to be held in Stockholm.
That first UN Environmental Conference, held in Stockholm, Sweden June 5-16, 1972, proved to be the launching pad for the worldwide campaign to establish a UN planetary environmental authority. One result of the conference was the establishment of a United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) intended as the overseer of a future monitoring system of the world’s environment. The man selected to be the first executive director of the new agency was Maurice Strong, a Canadian, who had served as secretary-general of the Stockholm event and was at the time a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation.
This same Maurice Strong was named 20 years later to serve as secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the official name of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. A millionaire businessman with a passion for socialist, one-world causes, Strong is a radical environmentalist and New Age devotee (see Chapter 12). He is also a major player in such Insider circles as the Club of Rome and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.
In the months leading up to the major event in Rio, Strong grabbed headlines on several occasions with outlandish rantings against the United States and the middle class of the industrialized countries. Though a Canadian, Strong maintains his primary residence in the United States. During one ill-tempered fit, he declared that “the United States is clearly the greatest risk” to the world’s ecological health. This was so, he said, because, “In effect, the United States is committing environmental aggression against the rest of the world.” Including himself in the indictment, he said, “We didn’t start doing this with any mal-intent. But we’ve lost our innocence now.”5
In an UNCED report issued in August 1991, Strong wrote: “It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle-class … involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and ‘convenience’ foods, ownership of motor-vehicles, numerous electric household appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning … expansive suburban housing … are not sustainable.”6
“A shift is therefore necessary,” the UNCED chief insisted, “towards lifestyles … less geared to … environmentally damaging consumption patterns….”7 Of course, when Strong talks about “damaging consumption patterns,” he exempts his own globe-hopping, champagne-and-caviar lifestyle and that of good friends like David Rockefeller, pillar of international banking and the leading Insider of both the CFR and Trilateral Commission elites.
Rockefeller and Strong teamed up to write, respectively, the Foreword and Introduction to the revealing 1991 Trilateral Commission book, Beyond Interdependence: The Meshing of the World’s Economy and the Earth’s Ecology, by Canada’s Jim MacNeill, Holland’s Pieter Winsemius, and Japan’s Taizo Yakushiji. “… I have been privileged to work closely with the principal author, Jim MacNeill, for over two decades,” wrote the UNCED chief. “He was one of my advisors when I was secretary general of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. We were both members of the World Commission on Environment and Development and, as secretary general, he played a fundamental role in shaping and writing its landmark report, Our Common Future [a socialist/environmentalist manifesto also known as The Brundtland Report].” Moreover, revealed Strong, MacNeill “is now advising me on the road to Rio.”8
Beyond Interdependence served as the Trilateral game plan for Rio, and it had Strong’s full endorsement. “This book couldn’t appear at a better time, with the preparations for the Earth Summit moving into high gear,” said Strong. To stress its importance, he said it would help guide “decisions that will literally determine the fate of the earth.” According to this head summiteer, the Rio gathering would “have the political capacity to produce the basic changes needed in our national and international economic agendas and in our institutions of governance….” In his estimation, “Beyond Interdependence provides the most compelling economic as well as environmental case for such reform that I have read.”9
MacNeill’s “reform” proposals are summed up on page 128 of the book so enthusiastically endorsed by Strong. MacNeill and his co-authors advocated “a new global partnership expressed in a revitalized international system in which an Earth Council, perhaps the Security Council with a broader mandate, maintains the interlocked environmental and economic security of the planet.” “The Earth Summit,” wrote MacNeill and his cohorts “will likely be the last chance for the world, in this century at least, to seriously address and arrest the accelerating environmental threats to economic development, national security, and human survival.”10
The same globalist-socialist vision was presented in Global Economics and the Environment: Toward Sustainable Rural Development in the Third World, another Earth Summit guide published just prior to the UNCED confab by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).11 The common apocalyptic theme has been repeated innumerable times in environmental jeremiads coming from a bevy of one-worlders ranging from David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and Helmut Kohl to Francois Mitterrand, Willy Brandt, and Mikhail Gorbachev, and even to Ted Turner, Jane Fonda, and Tom Hayden. It’s not possible to study the environmental movement in any depth without repeatedly tripping over the recurring connection between the socialist/communist left and the corporate/banking elite personified by David Rockefeller and the organizations he has led.
A diligent survey of environmentalist activity also leads one to the conclusion that all of the official preparatory meetings and negotiations leading up to the Earth Summit were really just so much spectacle for public consumption. And the Rio gathering itself was additional “consensus” sideshow to provide an aura of planetary “democracy” for a program that was already worked out in detail by the one-worlders long ago.
Consider, for example, Lester R. Brown (CFR), the supposed anti-establishment ecofanatic who heads the very influential Worldwatch Institute, one of the driving forces behind UNCED. His best-selling 1972 book, World Without Borders, proposed a “world environmental agency” because “[a]rresting the deterioration of the environment does not seem possible within the existing framework of independent nation-states.”12 His superagency would first “assess the impact of man’s various interventions in the environment.”13 But there’s no doubt that the conclusions to be reached were already firmly cast in stone.
Brown then stated: “Once the necessary information and analysis is complete, tolerance levels can be established and translated into the necessary regulations of human economic activity.”14 His books and statist solutions are hyped by the CFR-dominated media and CFR academics, while the big CFR-controlled foundations shower his think tank with millions of dollars.
“Building an environmentally sustainable future,” Brown later said of the Earth Summit’s mission, “requires nothing short of a revolution.” This would involve “restructuring the global economy, dramatically changing human reproductive behavior and altering values and lifestyles.”15 At least no one can accuse these guys of thinking small or hiding their ultimate goals!
In State of The World 1991, the annual doomsday report issued by the Worldwatch Institute, Brown predicted that ‘the battle to save the planet will replace the battle over ideology as the organizing theme of the new world order.”16 And, with “the end of the ideological conflict that dominated a generation of international affairs, a new world order, shaped by a new agenda, will emerge.” The world’s agenda, he wrote, will “be more ecological than ideological.”17
Over and over while presuming to speak for the entire environmental movement, Brown indicated its intention to focus on the environment as the justification for establishing controls over mankind. “In the new age,” he asserted, “diplomacy will be more concerned with environmental security than with military security.”18
Pushing the Line
How prescient! How did Brown know that a few months later the New York Times would be reporting favorably in an editorial (“The New World Army,” March 6, 1992) that the UN’s “Security Council recently expanded the concept of threats to peace to include economic, social and ecological instability”? Of course, it’s not difficult to seem to be prescient if you are hooked into the Insider party line.
Ronald I. Spiers (CFR) was similarly prescient when he stated in the March 13, 1992 New York Times: “The [United Nations] Trusteeship Council should be changed from a body dealing with the vestiges of colonialism to one dealing with the environment, becoming in effect the trustee of the health of the planet.”
An earlier purveyor of this line, CFR “wise man” George F. Kennan, the author of our nation’s cold war policy of containment against communism, explained in a Washington Post column appearing on November 12, 1989 that we now live “in an age where the great enemy is not the Soviet Union but the rapid deterioration of our planet as a supporting structure for civilized life.”19
Jessica Tuchman Mathews (CFR), vice president of the World Resources Institute, followed with an article in the July/August 1990 EPA Journal asserting that “environmental imperatives are changing the concept of national sovereignty,” and “multipolarity [is] replacing the bipolar U.S.-U.S.S.R. axis around which nations used to array themselves.” Moreover, she wrote, “it is likely that international problem-solving in the decades ahead will for the first time depend on collective management, not hegemony. And it is to precisely this form of governance that global environmental problems will yield.”
In an opinion column in the New York Times of March 27, 1990, Michael Oppenheimer (CFR) warned darkly: “Global warming, ozone depletion, deforestation and overpopulation are the four horsemen of a looming 21st century apocalypse.” He assured readers: “As the cold war recedes, the environment is becoming the No. 1 international security concern.”
It is vitally important to understand that the particular environmental problems being addressed are either greatly overblown or non-existent. As we stated previously, responsible scientists in these fields are increasingly speaking out about the excessive and fraudulent claims of the ecocrats. Yet, the cry for increased government goes on and on, emanating from one Insider “expert” after another and being shoved down the throats of the American people by the Insider-dominated media.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who is the darling of new world order promoters, has learned the line well. Addressing the 1990 Global Forum in Moscow, he called for “ecologizing” society and said: “The ecological crisis we are experiencing today — from ozone depletion to deforestation and disastrous air pollution — is tragic but convincing proof that the world we all live in is interrelated and interdependent.”20
“This means,” Gorbachev continued, “that we need an appropriate international policy in the field of ecology. Only if we formulate such a policy shall we be able to avert catastrophe. True, the elaboration of such a policy poses unconventional and difficult problems that will affect the sovereignty of states.”21 In other words, we’ll all have to get used to the idea of a global EPA under the UN dictating policies about spotted owls, wetlands, auto emissions, hair spray, barbecue lighter fluid, and anything else affecting “the environment.” Which is virtually everybody and everything.
This is a theme to which Gorbachev has frequently returned, much to the approbation of the one-world Insiders. One of his greatest fans in this regard is New York Times columnist Flora Lewis (CFR), who has praised him for going “beyond accepted notions of the limits of national sovereignty and rules of behavior.” She is thrilled by his “plan for a global code of environmental conduct,” which “would have an aspect of world government, because it would provide for the World Court to judge states.” This, she gushed with obvious delight, “is a breathtaking idea, beyond the current dreams of ecology militants…. And it is fitting that the environment be the topic for what amounts to global policing…. Even starting the effort would be a giant step for international law.”22 (Emphasis added)
Predictably, John Lawrence Hargrove (CFR), executive director of the American Society of International Law, was tickled pink over Gorbachev’s support for compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. “Before Gorbachev,” said Hargrove, “this would have been regarded as astounding.”23
To key Insider Richard N. Gardner (CFR), Gorbachev’s proposals are “solid nuggets of policy that offer constructive opportunities for the West.”24 Gardner, co-chairman of a “Soviet-American working group on the future of the U.N.,” is one of those globalists who, apparently, have been tutoring Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and other Kremlin “progressives” in new world order thinking and etiquette.25
It was Gardner, you may recall, who penned the now famous article, “The Hard Road To World Order,” in the April 1974 issue of Foreign Affairs. One of the boldest calls for world government ever to appear in the CFR’s journal, it called for building the “house of world order” through “an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece.” Moreover, it set out the CFR Insider plans for exploiting fears about environmental calamity as a vehicle for expanding the UN’s power. In this 1974 article, Gardner wrote:
The next few years should see a continued strengthening of the new global and regional agencies charged with protecting the world’s environment. In addition to comprehensive monitoring of the earth’s air, water and soil and of the effects of pollutants on human health, we can look forward to new procedures to implement the principle of state responsibility for national actions that have transnational environmental consequences, probably including some kind of “international environmental impact statement”…. [Emphasis in original]
To any farmer, rancher, logger, miner, developer, businessman, or property owner who has had to wrestle with the ordeal of attempting to comply with local, state, or federal environmental impact statements, the idea of a planetary EPA demanding similar compliance must be a nightmare too horrible to contemplate. But to the one-world corporate statists who plan on running the show, it is a glorious vision of the future. Gardner was not indulging in idle speculation and wishful thinking here. As can be seen from currently unfolding events, he was merely reporting on actual developments that he and his fellow world order architects had initiated and were nurturing along.
The Report From Iron Mountain
There are many pieces of evidence to demonstrate that the entire environmentalist “movement” and all of its phony “crises” have been created, promoted, and sustained by the Insiders for the singular purpose of conjuring up a credibly terrifying menace to replace the fear of nuclear holocaust as the impetus for world government. Because of space limitations, we will focus on just one unique document and quote from it extensively. But before we do so, it is essential that we set it up by explaining briefly the Insiders’ New Paradigm Shift.
The first try at “world order” came in the form of the League of Nations at the end of World War I. If only the nations of the world would come together in unity and begin the process of surrendering national sovereignty to a world body, went the siren song, the scourge of war would be vanquished. This type of propaganda almost produced its desired effect, but not quite. The United States was protected from armed invasion by ocean moats which made armed invasion unlikely. Moreover, the spirit of nationalism and independence still ran strong in American blood. A majority in the U.S. Senate decided, after all of the debate and wrangling, to stay out of the League of Nations. Our nation’s refusal to go along doomed the League from its start.
The second try at world order followed World War II, and it culminated in the creation of the United Nations. The arrival of the atomic bomb and long-range delivery systems (bombers, missiles, etc.), together with CFR dominance of the White House and growing CFR influence in the media and the Senate,26 provided the Insiders with the combination they needed to get the UN Charter ratified. But a UN with no real authority was still just half, or even less than half a loaf. Significant vestiges of national sovereignty still presented real barriers to full-blown world government.
For 40 years, the Insiders relied on fear of “the bomb” to keep America tied to the United Nations. If we dared quit the world body, went their argument, there would surely be nuclear war with the communists and global annihilation. Coexistence was our best available option, at least until such time as the UN became powerful enough to guarantee its version of peace. But, even while “the bomb” was serving its purpose well, long-range planning was underway to employ the threat of environmental cataclysm in future campaigns to build the world organization into a world government.
During the summer of 1963, it appears that Insiders in the Kennedy Administration convened a Special Study Group of 15 men who met at a secret facility at Iron Mountain, New York. Their mission: Come up with alternatives to war that would provide the same social and political “stabilizing” function.27
Two and a half years later the group produced its findings. They were not intended for public consumption. One member of the group, however, felt it should be made available for the American people. In 1967, therefore, it was published without identifying any of its authors under the title, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.28 It proved to be an instant sensation and generated heated public debate. Was it an authentic report? A brilliant satire? A cruel hoax? Subsequent events, plus the release of other government studies (such as have been discussed in previous chapters) and the admissions by many of those at the center of the environmentalist movement concerning their true goals, argue for the report’s authenticity. In addition, professor John Kenneth Galbraith later admitted he was “a member of the conspiracy” (the words are his) that produced the book.29
The Iron Mountain group found that “Credibility, in fact, lies at the heart of the problem of developing a political substitute for war.” Such a substitute “would require ‘alternate enemies,’ some of which might seem … farfetched in the context of the current war system.” The participants considered a number of general social welfare programs as possible substitutes: health, transportation, education, housing, poverty, etc., but were not satisfied with any of them. “It is more probable, in our judgement,” they opined, “that such a threat will have to be invented….”30
“When it comes to postulating a credible substitute for war capable of directing human behavior patterns in behalf of social organization,” said the researchers, “few options suggest themselves. Like its political function, the motivational function of war requires the existence of a genuinely menacing social enemy.” The “alternate enemy,” they contended in the report, “must imply a more immediate, tangible, and directly felt threat of destruction. It must justify the need for taking and paying a “blood price” in wide areas of human concern.”31 With this in mind, the group felt, the possible substitute enemies they were considering were insufficient.
According to the report, however, “One exception might be the environmental-pollution model, if the danger to society it posed was genuinely imminent. The fictive models would have to carry the weight of extraordinary conviction, underscored with a not inconsiderable actual sacrifice of life….”32 These considerate experts even determined to provide for the spiritual needs of those they were “helping.” They believed that “the construction of an up-to-date mythological or religious structure for this purpose would present difficulties in our era, but must certainly be considered.”33 Ecology seemed to be the best bet:
It may be … that gross pollution of the environment can eventually replace the possibility of mass destruction by nuclear weapons as the principal apparent threat to the survival of the species. Poisoning of the air, and of the principal sources of food and water supply, is already well advanced, and at first glance would seem promising in this respect; it constitutes a threat that can be dealt with only through social organization and political power. But from present indications it will be a generation to a generation and a half before environmental pollution, however severe, will be sufficiently menacing, on a global scale, to offer a possible basis for a solution.34
With respect to the time required to create widespread fear of a phony pollution crisis, that estimate seems to have been pretty accurate. The schemers even suggested “that the rate of pollution could be increased selectively for this purpose; in fact, the mere modifying of existing programs for the deterrence of pollution could speed up the process enough to make the threat credible much sooner. But the pollution problem has been so widely publicized in recent years that it seems highly improbable that a program of deliberate environmental poisoning could be implemented in a politically acceptable manner.”35
“Economic surrogates for war,” said the group’s report, “must meet two principal criteria. They must be ‘wasteful,’ in the common sense of the word, and they must operate outside the normal supply-demand system. A corollary that should be obvious is that the magnitude of the waste must be sufficient to meet the needs of a particular society. An economy as advanced and complex as our own requires the planned average annual destruction of not less than 10 percent of gross national product if it is effectively to fulfill its stabilizing function.”36
With this diabolical thought in mind, the seemingly insane EPA mandates requiring the expenditure of billions of dollars on minuscule or non-existent cancer risks, the sacrificing of thousands of jobs and businesses for a variety of “endangered species,” and all of the other seemingly crazy governmental policies begin to make sense.
Pressure From Above and Below
Much more also begins to make sense. Like the long-standing symbiotic relationship between the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Ford Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, Exxon, IBM, Procter & Gamble, et al. on one hand, and Friends of the Earth, Nature Conservancy, Planned Parenthood, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Environmental Defense Fund, et al. on the other. Pressure from above and pressure from below: the American people caught in a pincer attack.
At the Rio summit, this strategy was clearly discernible as the ecofanatics and the corporate collectivists linked arms and called on the United Nations to take charge of protecting the world’s atmosphere, forests, oceans, fresh water, coastal areas, mountainous areas — virtually the entire planet. But that’s not all. The new world order globalists want much more than just possession and control of the material environment. They want possession of your mind and soul as well.
Echoing the dire warnings of eco-destruction with which we’ve become familiar, the UNCED booklet In Our Hands: Earth Summit ’92 asserted in its closing paragraph: “The world community now faces together greater risks to our common security through our impacts on the environment than from traditional military conflicts with one another.” Then, with a pagan hubris that would do credit to the Iron Mountain gang, it proclaimed: “We must now forge a new ‘Earth Ethic’ which will inspire all peoples and nations to join in a new global partnership of North, South, East and West.”37
Fallout From Rio
The full meaning and significance of the Rio summit, hailed as history’s largest gathering of world leaders, will not become known for months, or even years. No one has yet had a chance to read, let alone digest, all of the fine print in the voluminous agreements and documents hammered out during its two fractious weeks of negotiations. One thing is certain: What was produced at Rio will be the source of much future argument, negotiation, lobbying, and legislation. As Maurice Strong, secretary-general of the conference, put it, “This is a launching pad, not a quick fix.”38 The leaders of the huge environmental lobbying network in Washington, DC fully realize this and are gearing up for sustained warfare over the many issues addressed at the summit.
The summit, unfortunately, did produce some “accomplishments.” We list some (both official and unofficial) that will be around to haunt, harass, and increasingly trouble us in the years ahead:
- Agenda 21, the 800-page blueprint for governmental action addressing everything from forests to deserts, oceans, rivers, women’s rights, and health care, has set in motion a continuously evolving process of environmental policy formation.39
- A commitment was made to establish a new Commission on Sustainable Development to monitor national compliance with the environmental targets agreed upon at the summit.40
- This new commission will also review the development assistance contributions from the industrial countries to make sure they provide sufficient funds to implement the Agenda 21 policies.41
- A new International Green Cross organization was formed to provide worldwide “emergency” environmental assistance. Mikhail Gorbachev was named to lead it.42
- President Bush called for an international conference on global warming by January 1, 1993 at which nations are to report on specific plans to reduce greenhouse gases.43
- President Bush pledged to double U.S. aid to international efforts aimed at the “protection” of forests.44
- The neo-pagan cult of nature worship, long prevalent in environmental and New Age circles, was formally launched as the new world religion (see Chapter 12).
- Environmentalism was elevated to new heights within the realm of international statecraft.
New Green World Order
One of the major organizational players (both out front and behind the scenes) at Rio and in the preparations leading up to the summit was the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute. An interview with Lester Brown (CFR), founder and president of Worldwatch, appeared in the June 3rd issue of Terraviva, a special daily newspaper distributed to participants during the Earth Summit. In it, Brown predicted that “ecological sustainability will become the new organising principle, the foundation of the ‘new world order,’ if you will.”45
Brown actually admitted that the new world order he sought meant giving up national sovereignty. Here is how he put it:
One hears from time to time from conservative columnists and others that we, as the United States, don’t want to sign these treaties that would sacrifice our national sovereignty. But what they seem to overlook is that we’ve already lost a great deal of our sovereignty.
We can no longer protect the stratospheric ozone layer over the United States. We can’t stabilise the U.S. climate without the cooperation of countries throughout the world. If even one major developing country continues to use CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), it will eventually deplete the ozone layer. We can’t protect the biological diversity of the planet by ourselves. We’ve lost sovereignty; we’ve lost control.46
What it really gets down to, said Brown, is that “we can no longer separate the future habitability of the planet from the distribution of wealth.”47 No surprise there. With socialists like Brown advocating the extremes of social engineering, redistribution of the wealth is what it always gets down to — ultimately.
“But,” suggested the Terraviva interviewer, “the current climate here in the U.S. seems very hostile to foreign aid.” Acknowledging the dilemma, Brown responded: “It might take a few more scares to get this country energised.”48 No doubt the eco-saviors have “a few more scares” up their sleeves to “energize” those of us non-believers who value our freedom.
The influential Worldwatch Institute study, After the Earth Summit: The Future of Environmental Governance by Hilary F. French, has this to say on the subject:
National sovereignty — the power of a country to control events within its territory — has lost much of its meaning in today’s world, where borders are routinely breached by pollution, international trade, financial flows and refugees…. Because all of these forces can affect environmental trends, international treaties and institutions are proving ever more critical to addressing ecological threats. Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community, and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise-unmanageable problems.49
What French then stated has a very strong bearing on what additional mischief may result from the summit:
[T]he past twenty years’ experience has yielded some instructive lessons in environmental negotiations — which the world community can now apply to the far larger challenges looming on the horizon. Paradoxically, one way to make environmental agreements more effective is in some cases to make them less enforceable — and therefore more palatable to the negotiators who may initially feel threatened by any loss of sovereignty. So-called ‘soft law’ — declarations, resolutions, and action plans that nations do not need to formally ratify and are not legally binding — can help to create an international consensus, mobilize aid, and lay the groundwork for the negotiation of binding treaties later.50 [Emphasis added]
“Agenda 21,” said French, “an action plan on nearly all aspects of sustainable development expected to emerge from UNCED, would fall into this category [of so-called ‘soft law’].”51 She continued her explanation of how the environmental treaty process will work:
When a binding treaty is necessary, the “convention-protocol” approach, which was used in both the transboundary air pollution and the ozone talks, is now the dominant model. Under this approach, a “framework” treaty is agreed to first that generally does not involve any binding commitment, but represents a political commitment to take action at a later date. It also strengthens the joint research and monitoring programs needed to build enough scientific consensus and knowledge to convince countries to eventually commit to specific targets. The framework treaty is then followed by specific protocols on various aspects of the problem.52
Operators like French are not moaning because they didn’t get everything they wanted in the Rio agreements and treaties. They got their feet in the door, and that’s what matters most. New York Times writer William K. Stevens recognized this important lesson as well. In the June 14, 1992 Times, he noted that “blandness can sometimes prove a surprisingly effective bludgeon. The parcel of treaties signed here have been portrayed by disappointed advocates as pitiful gutless creatures with no bite. But they have hidden teeth that will develop in the right circumstances.” That is why Richard E. Benedick, the former State Department official who helped negotiate the ozone layer treaty, has observed that the Earth Summit “should not be judged by the immediate results, but by the process it sets in motion.”53
And the Rio Summit has set a great many processes in motion. In her aforementioned work, After the Earth Summit, Hilary French noted: “Events in Rio also may lay the groundwork for a more ambitious reform of the United Nations proposed for 1995. An independent group of current and past world leaders including Willy Brandt, Jimmy Carter, Vaclav Havel, Julius Nyerere, and Eduard Shevardnadze has recommended that a World Summit on Global Governance be held that year Ñ the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations.”54
Pretext for Control
Every call to action, every solution offered by the green globalists, always leads to a loss of freedom and more power in government. The final goal is always centralization of that power in the United Nations. For those truly concerned with protecting the environment, that is exactly the wrong direction to be heading. As Dr. Fred Smith has explained and documented with many studies: “Wherever resources have been privately protected, they have done better than their politically managed counterparts — whether we are speaking of elephants in Africa, salmon streams in England, or the beaver in Canada. Where such rights have been absent or suppressed, or not creatively extended, the results have been less fortunate.”55
The world should not be speeding toward a centrally-planned environment. That is precisely what has been proven so ecologically destructive throughout the world. Rather, we should be “extending property rights to the full array of ecological resources that have been left out in the cold”56 and rolling back the socialist controls that are preventing people from finding solutions through voluntary arrangements and freedom of choice in the open marketplace.
It is becoming ever more obvious that the plans of the planet guardians and green globalists we have described have virtually nothing to do with saving endangered species, protecting the ozone layer, or whatever else they are using as cover for their real goal. Instead, their plans have everything to do with forging the chains for a UN-dominated world dictatorship.
Chapter 7 – The Global Green Regime Notes
1. Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution, A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), p. 115.
2. See, for examples: Petr Beckman, The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (Boulder, CO: Golem Press, 1976); Sherwood B. Idso, Ph.D., Carbon Dioxide and Global Change: Earth in Transition (Tempe, AZ: IBR Press, 1989); Jay H. Lehr, Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992); Samuel McCracken, The War Against the Atom (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1990); Julian L. Simon and Herman Kahn (eds.), The Resourceful Earth: A Response to Global 2000 (New York: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1984); and S. Fred Singer, Global Climate Change (New York: Paragon House, 1989).
3. See, for examples: Murray Feshback and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992); and Jon Thompson, “Eastern Europe’s Dark Dawn: The Iron Curtain Rises to Reveal a Land Tarnished by Pollution,” National Geographic, June 1991.
4. Dr. Fred L. Smith, in speech delivered at an Earth Summit Alternatives conference held during the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, recorded by author, portions of which appeared in his “Solution’s from Rio,” The New American, July 27, 1992, p. 16.
5. Maurice F. Strong, quoted by Paul Raeburn, Associated Press, “Ecology Remedy Costly,” Sacramento Bee (CA), March 12, 1992.
6. Maurice Strong, “The relationship between demographic trends, economic growth, unsustainable consumption patterns and environmental degradation,” an UNCED PrepCom report, August 1991, quoted by GreenTrack International, Report 26 — August 15, 1991, Libertytown, MD, p. 3.
7. Ibid.
8. Maurice Strong, Introduction to Jim MacNeil, Pieter Winsemius, and Taizo Yakushiji, Beyond Interdependence: The Meshing of the World’s Economy and the Earth’s Ecology. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. ix.
9. Ibid., pp. ix-x.
10. Ibid., p. 128.
11. Roger D. Stone and Eve Hamilton, Global Economics and the Environment: Toward Sustainable Rural Development in the Third World (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1991).
12. Lester R. Brown, World Without Borders. New York: Vintage Books, 1972, p. 308.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., pp. 308-09.
15. Lester R. Brown, as quoted in the Arizona Republic editorial, “Road to Ruin,” for March 26, 1992.
16. Lester R. Brown, “The New World Order,” in Lester R. Brown et al., State of the World 1991: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), p. 3.
17. Ibid., p. 18.
18. Ibid.
19. George Kennan, “This Is No Time for Talk of German Reunification,” Washington Post, November 12, 1989.
20. Mikhail Gorbachev addressing the 1990 Global Forum conference of spiritual and parliamentary leaders in Moscow in late January 1990, quoted in “We must ‘ecolo’ our society before it’s too late,” Birmingham [Alabama] News, April 22, 1990.
21. Ibid.
22. Flora Lewis, “Gorbachev Turns Green,” New York Times, August 14, 1991.
23. John Lawrence Hargrove, quoted in “The United Nations: Back to the Future,” The Ford Foundation Letter, February 1989, p. 3.
24. Richard N. Gardner, quoted in “The United Nations: Back to the Future,” The Ford Foundation Letter, February 1989, p. 3.
25. See, for example: Ford Foundation Letter, February 1989, p. 3; or Thomas G. Weiss and Meyrl A. Kessler, “Moscow’s U.N. Policy,” Foreign Policy, Summer 1990, p. 100: “By reading recent Soviet literature and speeches on the United Nations, one could easily come away with the impression that Soviet leaders and their senior advisers have been converted to world federalism. For example … Gorbachev adviser Georgi Shakhnazarov wrote a striking article optimistically appraising the possibility of ‘world government.’ Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze themselves liberally pepper their speeches with references to ‘interdependence’….”
26. CFR membership lists and summaries appear in the Annual Reports of the Council on Foreign Relations (58 East 68th Street, New York, NY 10021). As examples, the August 31, 1972 edition reports 121 members in the journalism and communications professions out of a total of 1,476, whereas the 1992 edition claims 327 members in this category out of a total of 2,905.
27. See: Gary Allen, “Making Plans,” American Opinion, April 1971; Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace (New York: Dial Press, 1967), pp. viii, x-xi, xix, 14.
28. Report From Iron Mountain, op cit.
29. John Kenneth Galbraith, quoted in London Times per Associated Press dispatch, January 5, 1968. See also: Gary Allen, “Making Plans,” American Opinion, April 1971, p. 19.
30. Report From Iron Mountain, pp. 66-67.
31. Ibid., pp. 70-71.
32. Ibid., p. 71.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., pp. 66-67.
35. Ibid., p. 67.
36. Ibid., p. 58.
37. UNCED booklet, In Our Hands: Earth Summit ’92, p. 23.
38. William K. Stevens, “Lessons of Rio: A New Prominence and an Effective Blandness,” New York Times, June 14, 1992.
39. “Earth Summit: Press Summary of Agenda 21” prepared by Communications and Project Management Division, Department of Public Information, as part of the United Nations information programme for the UN Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 3-14, 1992.
40. “Parties to Earth Summit in Accord on Increasing Aid to Third World,” New York Times, June 14, 1992, p. 6. See also, Daniel R. Abbasi, “‘Development’ commission almost up,” Earth Summit Times, June 7, 1992, p. 1.
41. Ibid. (New York Times and Abbasi)
42. Jack Freeman, “Gorbachev: Red head for the Green Cross,” Earth Summit Times, June 8, 1992.
43. President George Bush, address to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 12, 1992. Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 22, 1992, Volume 28 — Number 25, pp. 1043-44.
44. President George Bush quoted by Michael Wines, “Bush Leaves Rio With Shots at Critics, U.S. and Foreign,” New York Times, June 14, 1992.
45. Lester R. Brown (interview of), “A transition to a new era?” Terraviva, June 3, 1992, p. 10.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Hilary F. French, After the Earth Summit: The Future of Environmental Governance, Worldwatch Institute Paper 107, March 1992, p. 6.
50. Ibid., p. 23.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Stevens.
54. French, p. 38.
55. Dr. Fred L. Smith, quoted by author’s on the scene report “Solution’s from Rio,” The New American, July 27, 1992, p. 16.
56. Ibid.
