The Road to Copenhagen

You don’t need to attend the United Nations climate change conference to know what’s really going on.

Ignoring the fallacies behind the “science” of man-made global warming, a new U.N. report on “climate justice” says the U.S. and other countries owe $24 trillion in “climate debt” to the rest of the world. The report, “Climate Justice for a Changing Planet,” argues that the United States is “historically the largest global emitter” of greenhouse gas emissions and therefore has the biggest “debt” to pay.

But another U.N. report puts the figure at $45 trillion.

President Obama seems prepared to accept this bogus claim by attending the United Nations conference on December 18.

The U.S. failure to pay, argues leftist Canadian writer Naomi Klein, has already produced “climate rage” and a “global movement for climate justice” led by Bolivia’s socialist President Evo Morales. The implication is that if the U.S. doesn’t pay up, protests and even violence could break out.

In a statement, the Morales regime declared that “What we call for is full payment of the debt owed to us by developed countries for threatening the integrity of the Earth’s climate system, for over-consuming a shared resource that belongs fairly and equally to all people, and for maintaining lifestyles that continue to threaten the lives and livelihoods of the poor majority of the planet’s population.”

In other words, Americans are supposed to feel guilty over having a successful industrial economy. It is a system that has produced more wealth for more people than any in human history.

A detailed proposal from Bolivia says “a wealthy minority,” presumably in the U.S. and other “rich” nations, “has already over‐consumed a considerable amount of environmental space,” thus “denying it to the poorer majority who needs it in the course of their development.”

Naomi Klein describes the proposed payments as “reparations.”

But as startling as the figure of $24 trillion sounds, a separate report from the U.N. Environmental Program says the cost could be as high as $45 trillion. It is estimated that “a package to address climate change and energy development needs at the global level may require US $45 trillion up to 2025,” it says.

The March 2009 “Global Green New Deal” report says that the global financial crisis is an opportunity to usher in a new international socialist order. “The rules of financial architecture and of global environmental governance are being simultaneously re-written in 2009,” the report explains. “We believe that there is a unique historical opportunity now to create the basis of a new Green Economy that is able to allocate natural capital and financial capital in a far more effective and efficient manner into the foreseeable future. We must not miss this chance to fundamentally shift the trajectory of human civilization.”

The author of this report was Professor Edward B. Barbier of the University of Wyoming. His “Global Green New Deal” report was prepared in consultation with the U.S. Presidential Climate Action Project, a little-known entity launched by the University of Colorado whose advisory board includes ousted White House communist “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones. World Net Daily highlighted Jones’ role in the group in a November 30 story by Aaron Klein.

Co-authored by Barbara Adams and Gretchen Luchsinger, the most recent United Nations report on “climate justice” says “because the world’s richest countries have contributed most to the problem, they have a greater obligation to take action and to do so more quickly.” Paying a “climate debt” is the way to make sure that “extreme imbalances in development are evened out.”

“China now produces the largest amount of overall national emissions, topping the United States,” the report says. “But this figure must be qualified by the fact that China’s population is four times as large as that of the United States, making its per capita emissions rate roughly 75 percent less.”

Hence, the U.S. is still the chief culprit and should pay the most.

The report was launched in conjunction with the U.N. climate change conference now taking place in Copenhagen and is designed for the consideration of policy makers and non-governmental organizations. It is being distributed by the United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service.

“Given the escalating pace of global warming,” the report argues, the world “now has to act with far greater urgency…” But change is possible only with “major economic and political rearrangements around the core principles of equity and sustainable development.”

These are euphemisms for destroying private property rights and the free enterprise system and creating a global socialist superstate.

Under a heading about the need to “transform the systems and institutions that have created climate change,” the authors say that “tinkering around the edges” will not suffice and that “Governance and development models should be built around notions of justice and equity, with the objective of working for the planet and people as a whole, and evening out imbalances that are not sustainable. It is not enough to talk about low-carbon pathways through technology, for example, without also rethinking current models of production, global trade and consumption patterns.”

Proposals for “climate change financing” include a Comprehensive World Climate Change Fund, into which payments could be made, and a global carbon tax.

The ATTAC movement says, “Change the system, not the climate!” ATTAC, which stands for the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens, favors global taxes on currency transactions.

A more detailed article on “climate justice” explains that “It isn’t simply a matter of asking the rich world to pay for the devastation climate change is causing in the developing world. As a report recently launched by World Development Movement and Jubilee Debt Campaign points out, ‘climate debt’ questions a global free market system which has pushed many developing countries into high carbon pathways that they now need to find a way out of.”

This is about as clear as it gets–free markets will give way to a worldwide socialist state, created under the guise of solving a climate crisis that does not really exist.

The authors, Nick Dearden and Tim Jones, attempt to throw cold water on Lord Christopher Monckton’s contention that this amounts to a blueprint for “world communist government.” However, they acknowledge that the proposal does imply “fundamental changes in the global economy” and the “radical redistribution of the world’s resources.”

Do you think we can count on the major media attending the conference to report on the real agenda behind the event?

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. This is an excerpt of one of his columns, which can be read in its entirety here.