Former MP Lee Morrison of Calgary finds little of merit in the results of the recent climate conference in Cancun, Mexico.
It’s over.
The 15,000 delegates from 193 countries plus 10,000 hangers-on have packed their bags and left the Cancun luxury hotels where they were saving the Earth.
The purveyors of bad tequila (for technophobic young demonstrators) and fine wines (for delegates) are counting their money, and hotel employees cleaned up the mess.
In the spirit of Copenhagen, civilization has again dodged the bullet of mass hysteria. A new dark age of deindustrialization has been evaded, and another nail has been driven into the coffin of the Kyoto Accord.
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There was never any real possibility that major developing nations such as China and Brazil would line up to commit economic suicide and agree to hobble their burgeoning industries by firmly limiting carbon dioxide emissions, while less developed countries would be free to do whatever they wish.
To justify the two-week waste of time and money, agreement was reached to establish a Green Climate Fund, which is projected to rise to $100 billion annually by 2020, for countries threatened by altered weather patterns.
It’s unclear who will contribute to the fund, how it will be administered or who, other than Third World tyrants, would be the beneficiaries.
It looks like a classic shell game in which affluent countries will pledge funds but actually make no significant contributions.
If money really does end up in the pot, what a carnival of graft, corruption and international conflict over the spoils that will be.
The Cancun meetings, from their inception, had less to do with saving the Earth than with the redistribution of wealth from industrialized countries to the Third World on a much larger scale than has ever been accomplished through conventional foreign aid.
Third World delegates were exemplified by Bolivian president Eva Morales who, for years, has been campaigning for international compensation for poor countries that agree to protect their own forests.
The final declaration from Cancun indicates that this campaign was successful but, again, honeyed words don’t necessarily produce hard cash.
Ironically, Bolivia refused to sign the final agreement because it didn’t contain mandatory and crippling emission caps for wealthy countries.
Delegates, living large in one of the world’s most luxurious and ecologically unfriendly venues, seriously considered weakening the industrialized world with an international system of energy rationing.
Two weeks before the conference opened, Ottmar Edenhoffer, a senior official in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said openly, “But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.
“Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
Morales went a step further by stating flatly that the principal objective of the conference would be to “save the planet from capitalism.”
Mother Nature clearly has a sense of humour. With Great Britain and all of northern Europe staggering under the earliest, coldest and snowiest winter weather since the 18th century, the delegates were probably looking forward to warming their bones.
Oh, the irony. Daily low temperatures in Cancun were 10 to 12 C during the conference and included six consecutive days with all-time record lows.
Of course, true climate catastrophists will be quick to point out that sustained record cold over half the planet is only “weather.”
Conversely, if you’ve been paying attention for the past 15 years, you know that, to warmists, a two day heat wave anywhere on earth is “climate” and proof positive that the atmosphere is warming and evil humanity is to blame.
The delegates seem to have agreed that any future increase in global temperature should be not more than 2 C. How the earth’s thermostat will be adjusted is unclear.
Meanwhile, back in Sydney, N.S., prime minister Stephen Harper pledged that Canada will uphold any binding international agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, a safe assurance given the prudent intransigence of China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
I don’t believe for a moment that Harper loses sleep fretting about a coming climate catastrophe. Just as medieval princes secured their power by pledging fealty to Rome, modern heads of state, of whatever political stripe, sometimes find it convenient to bow to the apostles of human induced climate change.
Harper agreed to respect a deal that obviously wasn’t going to happen, and Canada is off the hook.
Next year, there will be another giant gathering producing another useless communiqué. Hopefully, with opposition to computer assisted astrology growing ever stronger, that will end the global warming mania.
