From Rio to Copenhagen: The Earth Summit’s Legacy
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

In May-June 1992, this correspondent was jammed cheek to jowl with 30,000 greenies in a global mosh pit known as the United Nations Earth Summit.  From that initial event in Rio de Janeiro — and its successors — has flowed a deluge of treaties, conventions, and proposed regimes to regulate (i.e., to control) all human life and activity on our planet.

Mikhail Gorbachev was there, celebrated as a rock star. The New York Times had praised his call for a “global code of environmental conduct” because it “would have an aspect of world government” and lead to “global policing” and “international law,” which, according to the Times’ perspective, is obviously a good thing. Fidel Castro was there, perhaps the only celebrity to receive a wilder, more enthusiastic reception than Gorbachev. A wooden, young Senator from Tennessee was also there. Al Gore, basking in the glow of media acclaim for his new book, Earth in the Balance, a Malthusian end-of-the-world lamentation, led a U.S. Senate delegation that pushed for greater UN controls over all things and a “Global Marshall Plan” for the environment — to be paid for largely by U.S. taxpayers.

No remembrance of Rio should leave unmentioned one of its prime movers and shakers, Maurice Strong, the Canadian billionaire “environmentalist” who served as Secretary-General of the Rio Earth Summit. The jet-setting Strong harshly condemned Americans as “clearly the greatest risk” to planet Earth, and declared “the United States is committing environmental aggression against the rest of the world.” “It is clear,” Strong wrote, “that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle-class … are not sustainable.”

Now, all these years later, following nearly two decades of intense media fright-peddling and an endless stream of UN conferences and propaganda, comes Copenhagen. The UN Climate Change Conference to be held there December 7-18 could change your world — permanently. The treaty to be presented there will have no effect whatsoever on the Earth’s weather or climate cycles, but it will represent an attempt to foist one of the most far-reaching and revolutionary political, social, and economic arrangements on the entire planet. Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, made these scathing comments about the upcoming UN confab in an October 14 speech:

At Copenhagen this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your President will sign it. Most of the Third World countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” — because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

Monckton says the communists “piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement.” “They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a President who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.”

However, the U.S. Senate is going to be hard pressed, especially in our current economic decline, to justify ratification of this scheme. They are already well aware that they face huge opposition from voters to the House (Waxman-Markey H.R. 2454) and the Senate (Kerry-Boxer, S.1733) cap-and-trade climate bills. Even the die-hard supporters of Copenhagen in the Senate know that the fake “scientific consensus” on global warming has been melting faster than the proverbial snowball in Hades. The BBC has been notorious for retailing climate-alarmist drivel masquerading as science. Nevertheless, BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson, in an October 9 report entitled “What happened to global warming?” reported that many people would be surprised to learn “the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.”

More than 31,000 U.S. scientists have signed a petition challenging the climate alarmists’ claims(www.petitionproject.org) and more than 700 distinguished international scientists from dozens of countries (http://epw.senate.gov) have issued statements contesting major theses of the climate alarmists. Now your Senators need to hear from you.