Sunday, October 11, 2009

Copenhagen climate treaty a vast global boondoggle

The United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen December 7-18 is aimed at reaching an agreement to replace the failed Kyoto Accord.

Kevin Libin’s excellent column examines the draft agreement and its potential impact on Canada. It makes for very scary reading but it’s a must read!

The whole mess is premised on a collection of assumptions that range from dubious to faulty to outright false. The driving assumption is of course the increasingly dubious hypothesis that AGW is a critical threat to the health of the planet. And the involvement of global statists and of environmentalists (of Maurice Strong’s and David Suzuki’s ilk) pushing agendas which are operative even in the absence of any supposed climate threat should give pause to any sane Minister of Environment.

Here are some excerpts from Kevin Libin’s piece[emphasis mine]:

The Kyoto Protocol ..... was in some corners accused of being a covert wealth transfer plot, ... "a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations," was Stephen Harper’s assessment, long before he became Prime Minister.

With Copenhagen, however, there is no hidden agenda: its authors say that transferring wealth is exactly what they aim to do. ....It proposes in plain language an arrangement that will see nations like Canada guarantee to send billions of dollars every year for decades to the developing world as payment of a "climate debt"

... the Copenhagen treaty calls for the payment by rich countries of what can probably best described as climate reparations.

.... industrialized countries are to commit "at least 0.7%" of their annual GDP, above and beyond existing foreign aid commitments, to compensate the developing world for lost dignity and other distress (in Canada’s case, roughly $10-billion a year, ... on top of the $4-billion already spent on foreign aid)...

If Canada does sign the treaty, [an expert] warns, we "will lose all control over our sovereignty and resource base in a matter of years."

... [Unlike the Kyoto Accord] Copenhagen ... entrust[s] these billions to the management of the United Nations, whose administration of the severely corrupted oil-for-food program in Iraq bred widespread skepticism of the world body’s transparency and accountability....

... if the UN doesn’t like a certain country’s plan to cut greenhouse gases (GHGs), it has the power to deny assigned emission allowances until it sees a plan it does — potentially ... leaving countries without full control of their own environmental policy....

... "Any elected leader who signed the climate treaty would be signing the death-warrant of his nation’s democracy," says Lord Monckton ....

Meanwhile back on the home front:

... Environment Minister Jim Prentice’s office would not say whether he or his staff was alert to the apparent and special risks to Canada in the current version of the Copenhagen treaty. "We won’t be commenting on drafts," said a ministry spokesman ...
Copenhagen is a bureaucratic boondoggle of vast, global proportions as one might expect of a UN sponsored project. Governments and NGOs worldwide have been expending enormous resources over decades trying to figure out how to wreck the global economy. If the first world signs on to an agreement in Copenhagen that looks anything like the draft they’ll have succeeded.

Damn, now I have to write another letter to my MP and to Jim Prentice!

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