Just in case your survey of the world scene has left you with a residue of cheerfulness, below is a video of a talk given by Lord Christopher Monckton at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota, last week that should complete your gloom.
The ostensible subject was the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Treaty, scheduled to take place in December. Anyone who doubts that environmentalism has become one of the most potent weapons in the quiver of the international Left should take a look at some of the treaty’s proposed provisions. Basically, it is a wealth transfer scheme in which rich countries send money to poor countries because they, the rich ones, have (so the story goes) done more to insult the environment. (Isn’t the real story that they have enriched the entire world beyond imagining? Yes–but that contravenes the left-wing narrative.) Take a look at what the U.N. has in store for you: It has to be read to be believed. These items from Article 7 will give you a flavor of the thing:
1. A massive scaling up of financial resources, from both the public and private sectors, is required in order to adequately, sufficiently and swiftly reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions, adapt to climate change and achieve the ultimate objective of the Convention and the shared vision. Developing country Parties will require significant, stable and predictable financial support from industrialized country Parties in order to fulfill their commitments under this Protocol.
2. Parties included in Annex B shall, as a group, provide at least [n.b, at least!] 160 billion USD per year for the 2013-2017 commitment period as financial support to developing country Parties for their low carbon development, technology, adaptation and reducing emissions from deforestation efforts in line with Articles 4, 5, 8 and 9. Additional financing is required and shall be made available for the reporting requirements and capacity building efforts under this Protocol. The scale of resources required shall be reviewed for each subsequent commitment period.
What does it all mean? Lord Monckton gives an appropriately scary summary in his talk. Chief items:
> Creation of a world government.
> Massive transfer of wealth form the countries of the West to the Third World countries to satisfy “climate debt.”
> Enforcement.
Regarding the last, Lord Monckton has this to say:
How many of you think that the word election or democracy . . . or ballot occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of the treaty? Quite right it doesn’t appear once. So at last, the Communists to piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left. . . . Now the apotheosis is at hand. 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.
Will Obama go to Copenhagen? Will he sign the treaty? We still do not know. If I were a betting man, I would say yes. Lord Monckton believes that becoming a party to the treaty would bind America irrevocably to its terms. I am not so sure about that. [UPDATE: And, as several commentators have pointed out, treaties must be ratified to be enforced: I ought to have noted that. Still, although Lord Monckton may have been hyperbolic at times,] I found much to ponder in his melancholy peroration:
So thank you America: you were the beacon of freedom for the world It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still freed. But in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your prosperity away forever. . . . But it is here that perhaps at this eleventh hour of the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty, for there is no problem with the climate. . . . So I end by saying the words that Winston Churchill addressed o your President in the darkest hour before the dawn of freedom in the Second World War. He quoted from your great poet Longfellow:
O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
Watch the whole thing here:
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