Will “Rich” Nations Shy Away From a New Climate Treaty?
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has pushed an ideological agenda since 1992. The UNFCCC will begin this year’s meeting in Durban, South Africa, on November 28, but organizational insiders appear to be despairing before the conference even begins.

A November 22 article for the Sydney Morning Herald captures some of the petulant, even demagogic, tone now coming from those who have staked their plan for restructuring the world on fear-mongering regarding the imaginary threat of manmade global warming:

The eight-year delay is the worst contemplated by governments during 20 years of negotiations, and comes despite intensifying warnings from scientists and economists about the dangers of delaying action.…

Postponing an operational agreement until 2020 would be fatal to hopes of avoiding catastrophic climate change, scientists and economists say.…

Developing countries — particularly island states most at risk — are furious and the delay will be fiercely debated in Durban.

Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said: ”If we do not have an international agreement whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door to [preventing a global mean temperature rise of 2 degrees] will be closed forever.”

The increasingly shrill rhetoric coming from those who are aligned with the UNFCCC agenda is hardly surprising; a few years ago, the organization had strong hopes of writing a treaty that would have committed the industrialized nations to a program for wealth redistribution that would have impoverished the First World countries for the benefit of the Third World. The buildup to the 2009 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, gave the appearance of inevitability to the UN’s agenda — until a stunningly cold winter, the boisterous greed of the Third World, and the developing economic crisis in the United State and Europe combined to make any such treaty politically untenable. Even lacking adoption of such a treaty at Copenhagen, the United Nations organizations linked to the climate-change swindle — including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — have demanded that trillions of dollars begin being confiscated from the economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan. Thus, for example, the UN Economics and Social Affairs body demanded a transfer of $76 trillion over the next 40 years.

Noted in a story for The New American, a recent book has cataloged the shoddy science that is being used to support the dubious theory of manmade climate change. Donna Laframboise’s book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, offers a systematic survey of “regrettable errors” that seem to be standard operating procedure at the IPCC. A Laframboise observes in her book, the head of the IPCC — Rajendra Pachauri — admits that the organization’s first loyalty is not scientific, but political. In Pachauri’s words, “The UNFCCC is our main customer, if I could label them as such, and our interaction with them enriches the relevance of our work.” In Laframboise’s words, “The UN didn’t wait around for climate science to mature. Rather, 19 years ago [in 1992], bigwigs at the UN had already accused, tried, and convicted greenhouse gases. They’d already decided that human-generated emissions were dangerous.”

The blanket appeals to the assessment of "scientists" and "economists" presented in the Sydney Morning Herald should immediately raise questions, since climate science and economics are riddled with irresolvable and continuous disagreements over the most fundamental aspects of the entire discussion at hand. Unless one is prepared to dismiss everything that disagrees with the diktats of the IPCC as being “unscientific,” there is simply no credible way to engage in a blank invocation of “scientists and economists” to declare that the imminent destruction of the world will take place unless the developed nations of the world surrender their checkbooks and their sovereignty to UN bureaucrats.

As reported for The New American in October, Australia recently adopted a system of carbon taxes in an effort to implement the UNFCCC agenda. Given the sweeping character of legislation which covered 60 percent of Australia’s carbon emissions, it was noted at that time that “the ability of the government to extract vast sums of tax revenue while reshaping the lives of nearly 22 million Australians is staggering.” As it appears likely that the upcoming Durban conference will not advance the immediate implementation of the UNFCCC’s plans to "rewire" the global economy to suit its agenda, voices are now being raised in the Australian government that question the wisdom of Australia immolating its economy through carbon taxation while the rest of the developed world shies away from similarly suicidal actions. In the words of the Sydney Morning Herald: “Opposition spokesman Greg Hunt said the government should revisit its carbon tax modelling. ‘The assumption of a global scheme among all of the major trading economies has now evaporated.’”

However, if President Obama has his way, the Australians will not be the only nation laboring under the burden of this new form of taxation. As JunkScience.com recently reported, Obama recently praised the “bold strategy” that the Australians were implementing, and praised the carbon tax:

“I think that’s good for the world,” Obama said. “I actually think, over the long term, it’s good for our economies, as well, because it’s my strong belief that industries, utilities, individual consumers — we’re all going to have to adapt how we use energy and how we think about carbon.”

Given the massive “carbon footprints” that have been generated by prior UNFCCC conferences — and by President Obama  — such "thinking" about carbon clearly will not cut into the extravagant lifestyles that the political elites enjoy at the expense of the people whom they tax. The absurd expenditures involved with such global conferences are already unjustifiable when the global economy is already experiences such grave difficulties. At best, the Durban conference will limit its economic damage to the costs associated with its political theater; at worst, the attendees will accomplish some aspect of their agenda, and advance toward the further economic devastation of the Western World.