UN’s Ideal – Global Government

Occasionally there is a comment left which deserves as much notice as possible.   Unfortunately Bart get’s picked again but you could replace his name with Gavin or Mike Mann or really with Ben Santer just as easily.  There were a couple of items which looked like links from the comment but weren’t.  I’ve removed them.

This is the link to the leaked Copenhagen document.

And never forget the standing ovations received at Copenhagen by Hugo Chavez’s Marxist rant against Capitailism and freedom ,  the most dramatic parts of the video have been deleted from youTube maybe someone else can find it but the words still exist.  When crowds containing global politicians and climatologists stand and applaud for Marx quotes, and evil capitalism quotes, it’s pretty clear what you’re dealing with.

News flash geniuses, Marxism and socialism didn’t work as intended.
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galileonardo said

August 26, 2010 at 9:27 pm e

Jeff, I was leaving for vacation when you ran your “Id’s Crazy” post but unfortunately did not have the time to respond (though I desperately wanted to). I am thus glad to see you are on the subject again and I now welcome the opportunity to chime in and hopefully dispel the false Bartish feel-good notions about helping the poor nations (Bart, if you care to see how the proposed CO2 mitigation will be “very disruptive to the global economy” just keep reading – I even use the UN’s own projections).

I can’t claim to be the friendliest of debaters when going up against what I have at various times called AGW cultists, zealots, control freaks, Luddites, sheep, totalitarians, fraud deniers, etc., but I am a father as well (of a 4-year-old boy) and I’ll be damned if I don’t fight their vision of my son’s future.

Bottom line Jeff: Global wealth will essentially be cut in half under the Copenhagen plan.


If we go the CO2-mitigation UNFCCC/IPCC B1 Sustainable Development (SD) path, your great-grandson will retire in the year 2100 with just a $60k per capita income (and have a lot less personal freedom). Contrast that with the A1 Golden Economic Age (GEA) path, the path we coincidentally are already naturally taking, where he would retire with a $100k per capita income in a world of unprecedented prosperity. Under B1 SD he’ll be rewarded with a shorter life expectancy too. Splendid.

And I can back that up using their data. I have been commenting about this in other venues for some time now, and I apologize for the length of this post (especially since a lot of it is rehash), but my hope is that the message spreads. I am also new to the hand-coding scene so hopefully I didn’t hack it up here – sorry if I did. In your “crazy” post, some commenters touched upon a lot of what I have said (and a few posters are clearly in denial of the “conspiracy” that is “hidden in plain sight”), but I think I can add a few numbers and sources to the mix, and hopefully some perspective.

Regarding your previous post, there is nothing crazy about exposing the global governance angle and in that post you made some key points that, rather than crazy, are absolutely validated by open evidence. IMO you have done a fine job of helping to expose the Neo-Inquisitors and their political science, but I think it would be excellent for you to comment more frequently about the larger picture UN agenda and their puppet masters. This malicious and inhumane movement absolutely needs to be stopped and they have had quite the head start. You are one of the few that isn’t afraid to speak to the politics of all this, but ironically that is the 10,000-pound elephant in the room, so before going forward I wanted to say that I for one welcome further discussion of this topic by you in future posts.

There are many documents spanning over four decades that transparently promote global governance. I’d say the 1995 report by the UN-sponsored Commission on Global Governance (that might be a tipoff) titled Our Global Neighborhood is pretty transparent. But the best examples for me at least are the negotiating text for Copenhagen, the not-mentioned-enough UEA email that presented the draft document of the IPCC special report Emissions Scenarios, and the final report itself. Here’s a gem for starters from that final report describing the B1 Sustainable Development scenario:

Massive income redistribution and presumably high taxation levels may adversely affect the economic efficiency and functioning of world markets.

Read that again Bart (and since you comment on population trends, please note that in both the A1 GEA and B1 SD scenarios population is expected to peak at 9 billion by 2050 and drop to 7 billion by 2100). There is no arguing that Sustainable Development is the UN’s Golden Child. It appears in the IPCC’s AR4 297 times (no mention BTW of the Golden Economic Age – the term was predictably purged from the draft). When combining the figures used in that draft email and the final report, the economic damage wrought by SD is devastating. Here is how it breaks down for the world:

A1 Golden Economic Age (GEA) global GDP by 2100 = $550 trillion
B1 Sustainable Development (SD) global GDP by 2100 = $350 trillion

Conclusion: using the UN’s numbers, by 2100 the global economy will be less wealthy to the tune of $200 trillion per year going the SD route. Does that qualify as “very disruptive to the global economy” Bart?

Here’s how the numbers break down for individuals in both Annex 1 countries (the 20% of the world with relative wealth) and Annex 2 countries (the 80% of the world that are relatively poor):

2100 A1 Golden Economic Age (GEA)
Annex 1 per capita income = $100,000
Annex 2 per capita income = $70,000
Average global per capita income = $76,000

2100 B1 Sustainable Development (SD)
Annex 1 per capita income = $60,000
Annex 2 per capita income = $35,000
Average global per capita income = $40,000

So for all the Barts out there thinking they are trying to help the world’s poor and saying things like “it is not a workable strategy to tell the have-nots that they can’t have any more” and that it’s “morally wrong to not allow others what we allow ourselves,” you do just that with your supposedly good intentions by getting on board the economy-punishing, poverty-prolonging, global-taxation CO2 mitigation bandwagon. You would think with all of that redistribution planned the poor would fare better but they do not. Look at those figures again. The world’s poor will have a 2100 PCI of $35,000 under B1 vs. $70,000 under A1. So I ask you again Bart, does that qualify as “very disruptive to the global economy?”

I wonder if halving wealth will have any negative effects on poverty. Duh! Let’s get real. Prolonged poverty is an absolute death sentence for millions. Poverty currently kills about 18 million people per year in mostly the poor nations, and a majority of them are children. So for every year that economic growth is slowed you can be ensured that the poverty rate will be unforgivably elevated.

Put it in perspective. About one-quarter of the world’s population still has no electricity at all; 1 billion people still have inadequate access to water; 2.6 billion still lack basic sanitation; and 2.5 billion still use biomass to cook. And about nine million children under the age of five die each year from largely preventable causes, and the overarching cause of most of those deaths is poverty. Six million children die annually of hunger alone. That sounds compassionate. Let’s build some wind farms and call it a job well done.

The fastest way to true environmental stewardship is wealth and that makes this “save the world” notion all the more abominable. I consider myself a long-time environmentalist and these folks have hijacked movements that are important to me all in the name of AGW and false prophets. The resources diverted to their wholly political cause is the true “travesty” here. Meanwhile, combatting true environmental degradation has become all the more difficult since funding has been shifted to fighting the phantom menace of climate change. It truly angers me.

For those of you who might claim that that IPCC report was just a brainstorming session or no longer relevant, bring the conversation up to last December in Copenhagen. If you didn’t read the negotiating text for Copenhagen, have at it. There are over 60 references to the AGW dream scenario Sustainable Development, and you do not have to look far to find it. It rears its ugly head twice in the preambular paragraphs on page 6, and not just in passing. Here’s the first:

PP.8 [Recognizing that] sustainable development is the first priority for developing countries. Therefore, [that] our commitment to a low carbon society would have to be linked to our development priorities, in accordance with the provisions of the Convention.

It just can’t be argued. B1 SD is the path they are trying to shepherd us toward. It leads to the slaughterhouse. It is their first priority. There is nothing conspiratorial in nature about their plans because they put them right out there for all to read. Here are some of my favorite terms/phrases from the negotiating draft you should familiarize yourself with: historical climate debt; transparent system of governance; compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity; environmental justice; green fund; levies on CO2 emissions; taxes on carbon-intensive products and services; levies on international and maritime transport; levies on international transactions; penalties or fines for non-compliance; ODA additional to ODA targets; adaptation debt; 2 per cent of gross national product; and uniform global levy.

What a wonderful world the AGW control freaks have in store for us. This movement in its current form is less concerned with environmental issues than it is with power and control. Not me. Not my son. Free will is a damned thing, isn’t it? Why is it so difficult for these folks to admit that this is far less a scientific endeavor than a political one? Why do they find it so hard to admit that this is more about control of humanity than it is about saving the world? It’s a simple equation: AGW = political movement. AGW fraud deniers can lobby for superficial groupthink and cry heretic and big oil and conspiracy all they want, but the evidence speaks for itself.

I guess that’s why they screech so loudly against the prominent skeptics and even the ordinary skeptics like me. CO2 mitigation was their pot of gold, their path to Utopia, and the rainbow is disappearing. Scientist vs. activist can be a tough proposition, but it is awesome to see that the worm has turned. The agenda is so apparent to anyone not tainted by the AGW scripture so I for one will keep at it. Simply put, global wealth is expedited with A1. The only things sustained under B1 are misery and poverty. We need to continue to go A1 and allow the world to get wealthy at the faster rate. The rest will naturally follow. We have been going that direction for a century so to all of the ideologically-driven AGW zealots, get out of our way, or be prepared to be bowled over. Your approach is economic suicide. No thanks. I have lifted this often, but I have not yet begun to fight.

I’ll part with some more relevant quotes from the IPCC Emissions Scenarios report. Jeff, keep up the great work. Bart, dig a little deeper into what is driving you.

Discussing correlation of wealth to environmental stewardship:

Pollution abatement efforts appear to increase with income, growing willingness to pay for a clean environment, and progress in the development of clean technology. Thus, as incomes rise, pollution should increase initially and later decline, a relationship often referred to as the “environmental Kuznets curve.”

Discussing A1 Golden Economic Age:

The global economy expands at an average annual rate of about 3% to 2100, reaching around US$550 trillion (all dollar amounts herein are expressed in 1990 dollars, unless stated otherwise). This is approximately the same as average global growth since 1850, although the conditions that lead to this global growth in productivity and per capita incomes in the scenario are unparalleled in history.

Discussing B1 Sustainable Development:

A higher proportion of this income is spent on services rather than on material goods, and on quality rather than quantity, because the emphasis on material goods is less and also resource prices are increased by environmental taxation.

Cities are compact and designed for public and non-motorized transport, with suburban developments tightly controlled. Strong incentives for low-input, low-impact agriculture, along with maintenance of large areas of wilderness, contribute to high food prices with much lower levels of meat consumption than those in A1.

Discussing impact of wealth on fertility rates, life expectancy and infant and child (and mother) mortality:

[There is a] long-established negative correlation between fertility rates and per capita income. Clearly, richer countries uniformly have a relatively low fertility rate. Poorer countries, on average, have a higher fertility rate.

Barro (1997) reports a statistically significant correlation between per capita GDP growth and the variables life expectancy and fertility in his analysis of post-1960 growth performance of 100 countries. Other things being equal, growth rates correlate positively (higher) with increasing life expectancy and negatively (lower) with high fertility, which confirms the view that the affluent live longer and have fewer children.

From a demographic point of view, the primary effect seen in [the figure showing the ‘negative correlation’] is interpreted as infant and child mortality decline with increasing affluence.

And a few from the Copenhagen negotiating text.

Page 43: 41. [Providing financial support shall be additional to developed countries’ ODA targets.] [Mandatory contributions from developed country Parties and other developed Parties included in Annex II should form the core revenue stream for meeting the cost of adaptation in conjunction with additional sources including share of proceeds from flexible mechanisms.] [This finance should come from the payment of the adaptation debt by developed country Parties and be based principally on public-sector funding, while other alternative sources could be considered.] [[Sources of new and additional financial support for adaptation] [Financial resources of the “Convention Adaptation Fund”] [may] [shall] include:
(a) [Assessed contributions [of at least 0.7% of the annual GDP of developed country Parties] [from developed country Parties and other developed Parties included in Annex II to the Convention] [taking into account historical contribution to concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere];]
(b) [Auctioning of assigned amounts and/or emission allowances [from developed country Parties];]
(c) [Levies on CO2 emissions [from Annex-I Parties [in a position to do so]];]
(d) [Taxes on carbon-intensive products and services from Annex I Parties;]
(e) [[Levies on] [Shares of proceeds from measures to limit or reduce emissions from] international [aviation] and maritime transport;]
(f) Shares of proceeds on the clean development mechanism (CDM), [extension of shares of proceeds to] joint implementation and emissions trading;
(g) [Levies on international transactions [among Annex I Parties];]
(h) [Fines for non-compliance [of Annex I Parties and] with commitments of Annex I Parties and Parties with commitments inscribed in Annex B to the Kyoto Protocol (Annex B Parties);]
(i) [[Additional ODA] [ODA additional to ODA targets] provided through bilateral, regional and other multilateral channels (in accordance with Article 11.5 of the Convention).]]

Pages 18-19: 38. The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:
(a) The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.
(b) The Convention’s financial mechanism will include a multilateral climate change fund including five windows: (a) an Adaptation window, (b) a Compensation window, to address loss and damage from climate change impacts, including insurance, rehabilitation and compensatory components, (c) a Technology window; (d) a Mitigation window; and (e) a REDD window, to support a multi-phases process for positive forest incentives relating to REDD actions.
(c) The Convention’s facilitative mechanism will include: (a) work programmes for adaptation and mitigation; (b) a long-term REDD process; (c) a short-term technology action plan; (d) an expert group on adaptation established by the subsidiary body on adaptation, and expert groups on mitigation, technologies and on monitoring, reporting and verification; and (e) an international registry for the monitoring, reporting and verification of compliance of emission reduction commitments, and the transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries. The secretariat will provide technical and administrative support, including a new centre for information exchange.

Page 122: 17. [[Developed [and developing] countries] [Developed and developing country Parties] [All Parties] [shall] [should]:] (a) Compensate for damage to the LDCs economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees; (b) Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures.

26 thoughts on “UN’s Ideal – Global Government

  1. Jeff ID (and galileonardo), I don’t think you (or I) are crazy, far from it.

    In fact it’s way past time that most people woke up to what’s going on in regards to the whole UN global governance agenda.

    At the risk of being labelled a conspiracy theorist I paste the following link.

    http://www.green-agenda.com/globalrevolution.html

    Some of the quotes it lists are quite breathtaking.

    For those who may have any doubts as to the correlation between GDP per capita and fertility rate and life expectancy and the fact that A1 GEA is by far and a way the better way to go than B1 SD please have a look at some of the presentations given by Hans Rosling and GapMinder.

    http://dotsub.com/view/3b345061-c5da-4604-b59c-404527f0bd68

    http://www.gapminder.org/videos/population-growth-explained-with-ikea-boxes/

    http://www.gapminder.org/

    http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=30;stl=t;st=t;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=5.59290322580644;ti=2009$zpv;v=0$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj1jiMAkmq1iMg;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj2tPLxKvvnNPA;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=8.21;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0XOoBL%5Fn5tAQ;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID0;by=grp$map_x;scale=log;dataMin=295;dataMax=79210$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=19;dataMax=86$map_s;sma=49;smi=2.65$cd;bd=0$inds=;example=75

    Hans Rosling is sadly a ‘true believer’ but at least he knows how to present data and most importantly knows the value of it and wants it to be made available for all of us to see.

  2. The release of AR5 isn’t scheduled until near the end of 2013… hard to tell how many more crazy claims of doom can be published 3+ years, but for sure a lot. OTOH, if the 2010 and 2012 elections in the USA change the political landscape, whatever nutty claims are included in the AR5 report won’t make a bit of difference.

    I was in Colombia earlier this week, and the Colombians pretty much all think Chavez is a lunatic, and dangerous to boot. There has been a flood of Venezuelan professionals into Colombia, or to whatever other country will have them. Chavez is destroying the economic fabric of Venezuela. Sad to see, but not surprising.

  3. It is interrsting that the leaked document has a specific section on bunker fuels. Shipping is of course the key transport mechanism for global trade in goods. This would be a good target if you were anti-globalisation, nothing like cutting the legs off global trade!

  4. There’s a lot more to this argument, and I wish I had time today to really go after it.

    Broadly speaking your commenter (and you) are correct. There are lots of confounding details that need to be addressed.

    The important thing to realize is that it won’t be Bart’s son who is immiserated by these choices, if they are made. It will be some poor kid born in Borneo or Bogota who could have easily lived like Bart’s son except for decisions we are about to screw up now. Bart’s kid, and yours too, Jeff, will be all right–as I hope to have time to show later.

    It’s the poor that have to be kept down for their shabby little plans to work.

  5. I guess that’s why they screech so loudly against the prominent skeptics and even the ordinary skeptics like me. CO2 mitigation was their pot of gold, their path to Utopia, and the rainbow is disappearing.

    Exactly.

    I vote this the best comment of the year.

  6. Great piece! The only thing I would point out is that for every use of the word “poverty,” you could substitute “bad government” and it would be just as true. An instructive example might be oil and mineral rich African countries, which have received massive amounts of western wealth for their natural resources over the past few decades. The result has been little but corruption and oppression. Will further massive transfers of western wealth create different results? The west might as well just send guns and Mercedes-Benz’s and save messing about.

  7. #4: Tom Fuller: Very, very interesting response. You have repeatedly written that we need to do SOMETHING to slow CO2 release and thus slow economic development. Yet, you agree with what galileonardo writes and note that the poor WILL absolutely be negatively affected if the AGW crowd has their way. I look forward to reading what you mean about “confounding details” and how apparently you still believe that it’s important to do doing “something” to reduce CO2 production and reduce development.

    Bruce

  8. BDAABAT:

    It’s not an easy problem since we don’t know the sensitivity of the climate to CO2. Do we imperil the poor of this earth with anthropogenic climate change, or do we imperil them with restrictions on the availability of energy? Choices, choices.
    ===============

  9. The missing element is competition. If you ever wonder if something is real or not, first ask if it is competetive. And if not, what will make it so. 99% of ideas will fail by this simple dictate. Copenhagen was no exception. By locking the denialists out, Copenhagen ended up with a vacuum chamber that only the most Marxist could swallow. It doomed the effort. But the seeds were sown by limiting competing ideas. Just look at what the Golden assumption income versus the UN controlled sustained economy mean income. Is there any real competition, if it was put for a vote? One of the glaring errors persons make in failing to allow competition is model violation. Think, the whole world is supposed to buy this proposal, and what is the first thing done? Exclude dissenters. Almost guarenteed to backfire in any but the most despotic of regimes. It is the competitive part of the “free” economy that makes things work. Which is why so many businesses once they make it, hire lobbyists to try to maintain though legalisms what was obtained by competition. It is easier if lobbying works. No need to worry about those pesky customers or competition in a company (government) owned store.

    Some liberals have forgotten just what the sequence that led to the anti-trust laws actually was.

  10. #10: Not really a tradeoff. This is not about “climate change”, it is about control. Thatcher said it well in “The Downing Street Years,” that the Conservatives set themselves againt the notion that “The gentlemen in Whitehall know more how the people should live than the people themselves.” (they seem to have forgotten that of late) History is full of do-gooders trying to control the lives of the “little people”. CAGW is more of the same.

    We do know the sensitivity to CO2. It ain’t much. Temperatures don’t track. When the alarmists resort to cooking the books, adjusting the data, refusing to release raw data or the the code used to adjust it (or at least explain the rational) then we should be doubly suspicious. Their solutions all involve massive doses of Socialism. Which has never worked. It can’t. Destroys initiative. The only countries where it seems to work have large exports of natural resources, or sponge off of other countries. Take those out and it face plants.

    Restricting availability of energy? One-way ticket to poverty. With nothing to show for it. Of course, the people in power won’t suffer, because they are important, and need access to the best. As for the rest of us? “{snip} you.”

  11. RE, yes, of course, it is becoming slowly but increasingly clear that climate probably has a low sensitivity to CO2. I set up Bruce with my ‘choices, choices’, but now repent from setting the trap. Our choice should be to not restrict energy for the poor, because to do so would surely hurt them in the long run. Any climate change due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases only possibly, an increasingly less likely ‘possibly’, harms the poor in the long term and the prudent thing to do would be to go with the sure thing, leaving access to energy as cheap as possible.

    Bruce, Tom is trying to be all things; to cover the certainty of harm to the poor if we restrict energy, and also cover the base if CO2 does catch the climate leaning to far toward second. Tom’s a Big Man, so more power to him in the effort.

    After reading an article in a Houston energy journal over two years ago, I was able to predict the collapse of Copenhagen as a failed shakedown by the BRICs of the developed West predicated on the carbon guilt of the Industrialized West. I’ve called this a ‘precious conceit of the Western elite’, but am generally misunderstood because both ‘precious’ and ‘conceit’ are archaic formulations. What I wasn’t able to predict was that the Chinese would be able to conceal their chagrin over the failure of the shakedown by a show of outrage over the insider deal arranged by a purported leader of that same deluded West.
    ================

  12. Dang, ‘too far toward second’. I might add that Tom’s reach with his glove is superior, and he’s got the bunt and the long ball, too.
    =================

  13. Jeff, thank you very much for this. It was quite unexpected but I do appreciate you highlighting it. It is crucially important to me and I feel it is a topic that will feature prominently in our future, hopefully more on the short than long term. Sorry about the link debacle in my original post. I was worried I would massacre my attempts at hand-coding them, and so I did. I added them unaltered in a response at the original post and do so again below.

    As for AR5, I predict that it will be somewhat tempered. The genie is out of the bottle and there’s no getting him back in. I know they will still try to push the boundaries, especially since they are probably once again getting a bit comfortable post-whitewashes, but like all political animals the IPCC will likely proceed with a steady eye on self-preservation. As Steve #2 alluded, the political landscape in the U.S. will likely be changing before AR5. I suppose time will tell.

    In the meantime, I’m firmly mounted on a common sense soapbox. No time like the present. I’m not holding my breath but I do look forward to the day that one of the AGW faithful admits to the political science driving this entire thing so we can move this debate to the political arena where it belongs rather than the scientific arena where it festers as a bastardization of the scientific method. Keep up the great work and thank you again.

    Our Global Neighborhood:
    http://www.sovereignty.net/p/gov/gganalysis.htm

    UEA email of IPCC draft report:
    http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=54&filename=889554019.txt

    Final IPCC report description of A1 Golden Economic Age:
    http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.php?idp=93#1

    Final IPCC report description of B1 Sustainable Development:
    http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.php?idp=94#1

    UNFCCC negotiating text for COP15:

    Click to access inf02.pdf

  14. #4 Tom, I look forward to your reply. I am especially interested in you elaborating on your final statement about keeping down the poor. I personally see no way of drawing any other conclusion than that. To me it is clearly and publicly spelled out in their own words. The initiative reminds me of the quote attributed to IPCC author and Oprah guest Michael Oppenheimer (though I admittedly have not been able to track down the source of it and thus cannot vouch for its accuracy): “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.” If that is accurate, I’d say “control freak” is an appropriate label for this lot.

    #5 and #6 Sam, great article. I think (and hope) that as the release of AR5 approaches, the more overt presumptions made by the authors will be somewhat neutered. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but as Steve and I mentioned above, by 2013 the IPCC will face a much different political landscape than it enjoyed for AR4. So I for one would expect some changes to those presentation slides (and I’ll go out on a limb and say that Comic Sans will not their font of choice). No matter what is presented publicly though I imagine the underlying agenda will remain largely unaltered. Hence the importance of raising this issue loudly and often. As for your vote, thank you. I am glad you enjoyed that.

    #7 Ross, Agreed. Bad government is the leading cause of poverty which makes it all the more perplexing as to why we are being forced to continue to prop up oppressive regimes that dare call themselves democracies. And then to make matters worse we reward them with equal voice at the bargaining table. Without relative basic freedoms what do you have really? Until such travesties as the African example you provided are resolved, no amount of ODA will heal the poor’s wounds.

    #11 John, your points are excellent and I hope you are right about this being almost guaranteed to backfire upon them. I eagerly await that day.

    #12 RE, you also make some excellent points and I love the Thatcher quote. More true today than ever I’m afraid.

    I’m off to put the boy to bed shortly. Thanks to all for moving the conversation forward as I hope this ball never stops rolling.

  15. I think I’ll get in ahead of Tom here and go out on a limb.

    Has anyone watched the Hans Rosling links I posted above in #2 in particular the ‘IKEA boxes’ talk.

    One of the points he makes is that the gap between the richest and the poorest is getting wider and wider but the proportion of the world’s population in the middle section of the distibution that sits between the poorest and the richest is getting significantly larger. Now watch the chart as it passes from the past into present. The 1 billion or so that he says hasn’t changed that much i.e. who despite all improvements in life expectancy and reductions in fertility rate seen over the last 50 years in many parts of the developing world in particular Asia, still remain poor come predominently from one continent and one particular part of that continent namely the Sub-Saharan part. It also happens to be the part of the world that suffers most from the AIDs epidemic and also the part of the world with the highest infant mortality due to the ban on DDT. I’ll leave people here for now to ponder on the facts I’ve just presented and to reach their own conclusions as to what could be the primary purpose of the so called ‘sustainable development’ agenda (Agenda 21).

  16. RE: Kim… no, no trap was set. This isn’t a game (although many treat it as such). It really is about life and death, about choices, about freedom, and about the ability of people to think for themselves and control their own destiny. It really is about the ability of entire populations to be successful and to develop.

    The path that the CAGW crowd want is clear. The consequences of that path are also quite clear. The path that Tom seems to want is unclear (at least, to me). He seems to want both to allow others to control the world’s future through decarbonization of the economy and to provide freedom from that control. I really do look forward to his thoughts because nothing he’s said so far seems consistent or logical. I’m assuming that it’s my lack of reading comprehension skills that’s to blame for not understanding the logic of his position.

    Bruce

  17. One thing is relatively certain, we will de-carbonize as a percent of energy consumption. At some point, even wind, solar, and thermal become attractive. The time is balanced by improvements in efficiency. Humans tend to progress and get more efficient. So it is a race. So to me it is more than just freedom and choice. It is the assumption that we can now choose the winners. I think this assumption is fraught with peril. An example of a chosen winner are the electric utilities. In the other thread, efficiency in profit is defined as a state run monopoly that gets to choose the winners and the losers while maximizing profits. That defies the assumptions of a competitive free market. The electric companies were given the monopoly in order to be required by law to provide electricity according to formula. Does anyone see where by going to smart meters, that they will be forced to compete? The last I read was that due to regulation difficulty to bring generation on line, several are requesting further protection (read profit guarantees) to NOT build new generators. This was in the northeast and California. Is this true? Is it still true? I do wonder of any citizen who would want a monopoly they pay to maximize profits by refusing service.

  18. 22 and others:
    It strikes me that as regulation of the telecommunications industry vanished, the cost to consumers dropped. While I acknowledge that technological changes of the same magnitude may not be available to energy generation in a short time-frame, there would seem to be no question that competition drove technology in telecomm. Somehow, I doubt that wind, tide and sunlight will compete with nuclear and hydro, so I’d put my money on nukes. If the “Western” world doesn’t take the lead in this and other (like stem-cell) technologies, we’ll all be net importers and be totally at the mercy of the giant economies in Asia and even South America. So, let’s quit dicking around with mega-subsidies of bridk-wall-constrained technologies, and get on with the real problem. Maybe neutrons will play a part.

  19. #19 Verity, great links. Despite the Dan Brown-ish moniker, the Club of Rome has played a large role in the attempt to herd us toward B1 SD, and CO2 mitigation was their vehicle. I especially like this quote from them:

    Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.

    Isn’t that swell? For those of you turned off by the name of the organization, take a look at the membership roll: Gore, Ehrlich, Gorbachev, Annan, Soros, Strong, Rockefeller, Schneider, Clinton, Carter, Kissinger, Gates, Turner. That’s some concentration of power, resources and leftist power-hungry enthusiasm and is far from conspiracy.

    On that note, the conspiracy word seems to emerge frequently in this debate, but I see no need for it. All of this material is openly published and the agenda is not only public, but thrown in our faces, as though the decision has been made and we have no say, or “democracy is no longer well suited.” It’s disgusting and Jeff sums it up beautifully in #21: “It is about freedom and choice and those who would take it away – for our betterment.”

    Absolutely. So the question becomes do we roll over or stand firm? I know I’m not rolling and my prescription is to fight fire with fire, don’t allow the attempted shout downs and marginalization to go unchallenged and get right back in their faces and let them know that they are ignorant sheep who have uncritically rolled over. They are the Neo-inquisitors, the zealots, the extremists, and theirs is an agenda of total control over nearly every facet of our lives so {snip} you. I just want to be left alone to live my life so get the hell out of my business and get the hell out of my way. But really, I have no strong feelings about this.

    The Rosling clips are great as well. This passage from the IKEA boxes presentation is excellent, and telling:

    And if, but only if, we invest in the right green technology so that we can avoid severe climate change and energy can still be relatively cheap, then [these 3 billion in lower middle income countries] will move all the way up here [with the 2 billion in the industrialized world] and buy electric cars….So what about the poorest 2 billion? Will they move on? Well here population comes in, because there [in the higher tiers] we already have 2.5 children per woman, family planning is widely used and population growth is coming to an end. Here population is growing, so these 2 billions in the next decades increase to 3 billions and they will thereafter increase to 4 billions. There is nothing but the nuclear war of the kind we’ve never seen that can stop this from happening, because we already have this in process. But if, and only if, they get out of poverty, they get education, they get improved child survival, they can buy a bicycle and a cell phone, and come here [with the higher tiers], then population growth will stop up there in 2050. We cannot have people on this level looking for food and shoes, because then we get continued population growth.

    Hans does not realize it, but he inadvertently supports A1 GEA with his presentation. Set aside his stance on “severe climate change” and you are left with a rallying cry to expedite the enrichment of the world’s poor. And how does one do that? The answer is painfully obvious to me but somehow escapes Rosling et al. B1 SD will undeniably and unforgivingly draw out the poverty timeline. A1 GEA will dramatically shorten it.

    Rosling is off as well on his presumption about exponential population growth, if one adopts the UN’s numbers. With either A1 or B1 world population peaks in 2050 at 9 billion. This isn’t about any potential “population bomb.” Rather, it is absolutely about control and we are left to assume that he and other SD proponents are unaware or are comfortable with the collateral damage their agenda will inflict upon the poorest and the deterioration of the industrialized world by the handcuffing of the free market system.

    It really is odd to me. Here you have a man who is genuinely concerned with the impoverished, who spent over 20 years in Africa, siding with an agenda that will prolong the misery of those he purports to help. It doesn’t add up…at first. Then I realize that its the same old story.

    People like Hans really believe they are doing the right thing. They are under the AGW spell and the remedies proposed to right our wrongs of Gaia seem reasonable to them. They are unaware of the repercussions of their glorified answers and we skeptics are simply sinister to them. Whatever. I still have plenty left in me and the back of my hand can use some seasoning. See you in the arena.

  20. Look at the UN’s issues – just some, historical climate debt; transparent system of governance; compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity; environmental justice; green fund; levies on CO2 emissions; taxes on carbon-intensive products and services; levies on international and maritime transport

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