Stealth cap & trade: Obama aiding UN take over the world?

Lord Christopher Monckton has been making the rounds, warning against the December Copenhagen climate change conference and their proposed legislation to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Treaty. Monckton – not only known as Margaret Thatcher’s advisor, but as a clarion skeptic on the global warming propaganda machine – appeared on Fox News Happy Hour a couple of days ago. It ended with co-host, Rebecca Diamond, subtly expressing her disbelief at the end of the interview that Obama and the world leaders could possibly be involved in such nefarious doin’s.

On the same tangent today is Jeffrey T. Kuhner of the Washington Times, with his column today, Obama’s New World Order: Redistributionist revolution vs. sovereignty.

President Obama is on a path toward establishing a one-world government. This is the warning of Christopher Monckton, a former major policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

In December, world leaders will descend upon Copenhagen to sign a United Nations climate change treaty that will succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which is aimed at reducing greenhouse gases and set to expire in 2012. An agreement has been drafted.

The goal of the Copenhagen treaty is to erect an international cap-and-trade regime to curb carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, said to be responsible for man-made global warming. Recently, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned of a “climate catastrophe” – a rising wave of floods, droughts and shrinking food crops – unless the treaty is signed. Mr. Brown even said global warming would inflict more damage than both world wars and the Great Depression combined; the world has only several weeks to save itself from impending doom.

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The Copenhagen treaty must still be negotiated. Final agreement is far from certain, especially from emerging industrial powers like China, India and Brazil. Yet the draft version is clear about the treaty’s essential elements.

It calls for a massive transfer of wealth from the developed world to the developing world. The United States would be forced to spend billions of dollars a year in foreign aid to pay for a so-called “climate debt” – a provision to punish wealthy countries for having historically emitted large amounts of CO2, while compensating poor ones for not contributing to greenhouse gases.

Lord Monckton, who has read the treaty preliminary draft language, states emphatically that a “world government”, with power to enforce and control the global economy via emissions, would be created.

After the March 2009 summit meeting, six key objectives as “the message” were defined.

Key Message 1: Climatic Trends
Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised. For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.

Key Message 2: Social disruption
The research community is providing much more information to support discussions on “dangerous climate change”. Recent observations show that societies are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change, with poor nations and communities particularly at risk. Temperature rises above 2 degrees C (*) will be very difficult for contemporary societies to cope with, and will increase the level of climate disruption through the rest of the century. [*This is 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above the globe’s average temperature around 1850, the organizers say. Translated, that would be about 61.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Today’s global average temperature is estimated at around 59 degrees. (This was updated after a couple of comment posters noted my funky conversion effort. Europe set its 2-degree limit from pre-industrial temperatures, making this a complicated calculation, and a source of much ongoing confusion.]

Key Message 3: Long-Term Strategy
Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid “dangerous climate change” regardless of how it is defined. Weaker targets for 2020 increase the risk of crossing tipping points and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult. Delay in initiating effective mitigation actions increases significantly the long-term social and economic costs of both adaptation and mitigation.

Key Message 4: Equity Dimensions
Climate change is having, and will have, strongly differential effects on people within and between countries and regions, on this generation and future generations, and on human societies and the natural world. An effective, well-funded adaptation safety net is required for those people least capable of coping with climate change impacts, and a common but differentiated mitigation strategy is needed to protect the poor and most vulnerable.

Key Message 5: Inaction is Inexcusable
There is no excuse for inaction. We already have many tools and approaches – economic, technological, behavioural, management – to deal effectively with the climate change challenge. But they must be vigorously and widely implemented to achieve the societal transformation required to decarbonise economies. A wide range of benefits will flow from a concerted effort to alter our energy economy now, including sustainable energy job growth, reductions in the health and economic costs of climate change, and the restoration of ecosystems and revitalisation of ecosystem services.

Key Message 6: Meeting the Challenge
To achieve the societal transformation required to meet the climate change challenge, we must overcome a number of significant constraints and seize critical opportunities. These include reducing inertia in social and economic systems; building on a growing public desire for governments to act on climate change; removing implicit and explicit subsidies; reducing the influence of vested interests that increase emissions and reduce resilience; enabling the shifts from ineffective governance and weak institutions to innovative leadership in government, the private sector and civil society; and engaging society in the transition to norms and practices that foster sustainability.

So where does Obama fit in, you may ask? Expectations… Expectations from the Copenhagen Climate Council that started within hours (Nov 5th, 2008) after the election of “the won”.

The election of Senator Barack Obama as president of the United States on November 4 will change the strategic situation for the international climate negotiations leading up to COP15. It will also give the U.S. a leading international role in the negotiations, and it can change the way it historically has addressed – or so far largely not addressed – the climate crisis.

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Kammen’s optimism is founded in the energy plan put forward during the election campaign by then-Senator Obama. Under the plan, Obama aims to create a clean energy sector which will create 5 million new “cleantech” jobs, 1 million hybrid cars, and an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050.

Implementation of the Obama’s plan should help the U.S. play a more central role in the international climate negotiations, argues Kammen. “A new president has to push for the U.S. entering in a new and more leading international role when it comes to the climate negotiations.”

Domestic policy will lead the way

A change in the U.S. administration should pave the way for a sharp change in its domestic climate policies. Interest in climate change issues has clearly evolved and deepened over the last couple of years. Members of the U. S. House of Representatives and Senate, for instance, are now much more engaged with issues of energy security and climate than just a few years before.

Indeed, while the nation is focusing on family battles over health care, the media and nation seem to have little time to devote to cap and trade that has already passed the House in June to cut U.S. carbon emissions from utilities, manufacturers and others 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

Reporter Kuhner says the US Senate stands as the barrier to this world government creation. Geeez… feel better already. (sarcasm button off…) So the burning question becomes… will they?

The little noticed article excerpted above cited two top Obama officials, emphasizing the need that the US needed some climate legislation to become law *prior* to December and the Copenhagen conference. Conveniently, and quietly, John Kerry’s sister bill S1733 to Henry Waxman’s to HR 2454 is scheduled for hearings Tuesday, Oct 27th, in front the Senate Environment and Public Works committee. This coming down while the nation battles over the WH and Fox, frets about Afghanistan, and is distracted by a multitude of media and WH generated beefs.

A quiet, unheralded passage of Kerry’s bill thru the Senate, the needed reconciliation, and that “US climate law” is in place… just in time for Copenhagen.

What has been eagerly anticipated out of the December conference was a legally enforceable, concrete treaty. But there is a light ray of hope on the horizon as Danish PM, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, hints at the prospect that he’ll even be happy with a “political declaration” out of the conference.

Downgrading from a treaty to a political declaration would be a bitterly disappointing result for those pinning their hopes on Copenhagen, despite all the warning signs that a meaningful deal looks perilously close to impossible.

Yet, a political declaration may still be worth having, if the detail is right.

If it includes a line committing countries to agreeing emissions cuts say by the middle of next year, then it may still be effective.

If not, then the politicians risk going home thinking they have achieved a deal, but one that proves empty and undermines the carbon price.

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President Barack Obama is struggling with his climate bill at home. This is in second place to getting healthcare reforms passed. And even if health goes well, and earns Obama political capital from unexpected success, hopes of formulating a meaningful US offer in time for Copenhagen – with real figures on emissions cuts – will remain on a knife-edge.

The problem is that all this “high-level” political activity has a downside as well as an upside.

If prime ministers and presidents get involved, then they can at least negotiate with real authority – without having to constantly “phone home”. But they also bring their own staff, with the risk that they edge to one side the climate negotiators with knowledge of the detail that is needed for a deal to have an impact in the real world.

No need to “phone home”? That’s smacks of that of which Lord Monckton speaks.

All the above may shed a bit more light on Obama’s remarks prior to meeting with the Danish PM Oct 2nd during his round robin Euro visit (yes, the same where he devoted about 25 minutes to McChrystal aboard AF One after public criticism of his single meeting since appointing him as the US-NATO commander). Needless to say, what can we draw from the fact that Obama spends more time chatting up climate change with the Danish PM… willing to potentially accept a lesser mandate from the COP15 in December… than his NATO top commander in the battlefield?

All that said, let’s go back to Lord Monckton… perhaps one of the lone voices crying in the dark, sounding the alarm.

The Copenhagen treaty seeks to implement a bureaucratic redistributionist agenda; it is a way for Third World kleptocracies to extort enormous sums of money from America and other rich nations.

Moreover, Mr. Monckton points out that, in paragraph 38, Annex 1, the Copenhagen draft calls for a U.N.-created “government” responsible for taxation, enforcement and redistribution. In other words, the draft treaty explicitly demands that the world body erect an international mechanism with the power to impose emission-reduction targets for each country, determine acceptable levels of CO2 and levy global taxes.

The United States would lose control over its environmental policy. Also, it would sign its death warrant as a functioning democracy, enabling the United Nations to administer a fledgling world government possessing the authority to regulate and tax the American economy. The treaty is a sword aimed at the heart of our national sovereignty.

If Mr. Obama signs the Copenhagen treaty, he “will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your prosperity away forever,” Mr. Monckton recently told an audience in Minnesota. “I read that treaty and what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created.”

If it does create a government that wields the power to control the world’s economy, it will again be done without full transparency of the US citizens, and in the dark of night. While we tilt at windmills over health care and other sundry issues, the Senate will pass the climate change legislation, and lay the groundword for the US “leading” the way to int’l government… just as Lord Monckton states.