‘Biodiversity’: the new Big Lie | James Delingpole

Climate Change is dead. Long live the new Eco Lie

And so it begins. With all the shamelessness of a Goldman Sachser trading in his middle-aged wife for a hot, pouting twentysomething called Ivanka, the green movement is ditching “Climate Change”. The newer, younger, sexier model’s name? Biodiversity. (Mega hat tips to: Hilary Ostrov and Ozboy at Libertygibbet)

When I say shameless, I’m talking so amoral it makes the Whore of Babylon look like Mother Theresa; so flagrant it makes Al Gore’s, ahem, alleged drunken “Love poodle” assault on the Portland Masseuse look like an especially delicate passage from Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love.

Consider this summary of the UN’s two-week Convention On Biodiversity, launched on Monday:

Delegates from nearly 200 countries are being asked to agree to new 2020 targets after governments largely failed to meet a 2010 target of achieving a significant reduction in biological diversity losses, a goal set at the last biodiversity conference in 2002. And one of the same issues that led to failure the first time around could jeopardize this meeting: money.

Developing nations say more funding is needed from developed countries to share the effort in saving nature. Much of the world’s remaining biological diversity is in developing nations such as Brazil, Indonesia and in central Africa.

Do you see what’s going on here?

OK. Here’s an even bigger clue. Here’s something, unbeknownst to the world’s taxpayers and free citizens, which the UN technocrats stitched together in June.

Busan/Nairobi, 11 June 2010 – History was made, Friday, in the South Korean port city of Busan, when governments gave the green light to an Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

The independent platform will in many ways mirror the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which has assisted in catalyzing world-wide understanding and governmental action on global warming.

The new body will bridge the gulf between the wealth of scientific knowledge -documenting accelerating declines and degradation of the natural world – and the decisive government action required to reverse these damaging trends.

Its various roles will include carrying out high quality peer reviews of the wealth of science on biodiversity and ecosystem services emerging from research institutes across the globe in order to provide gold standard reports to governments.

“Gold standard”, eh? Now where have I heard that phrase before?

Suddenly it becomes clear why they kept Pachauri on at the IPCC. Because the IPCC simply doesn’t matter any more. Sure it will go on, churning out Assessment Report after Assessment Report, bringing pots of money to the usual gang of bent scientists prepared to act as lead authors. But the world’s mainstream media – especially all those environment correspondents who so lovingly transcribe the press releases of Greenpeace and the WWF as if they were holy writ – will have moved on, according to the dictates of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) fashionable crise du jour.

“Never mind ‘Climate Change’,” they’ll say to themselves. “Our readers and viewers aren’t really so into that now all the winters seem to have got so very cold. Biodiversity, that’s the thing.”

And guess what? Not only does the great big new Biodiversity scam already have its own IPCC but it even has its own pseudoeconomic, panic-generating Stern Report. This one is produced by a member of Deutsche Bank which – as Hilary Ostrov tells us in an excellent post well worth reading in full – has form when it comes to promoting half-witted, ill-documented, patently political climate change ****ocks.

Hmmm … Deutsche Bank … Oh, yes I’ve heard of that one. Ross McKitrick recently responded to some misinformation they had included in “a report that aims to rebut major skeptic arguments on global warming”. But I digress …

Just read how it’s billed and weep:

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB)
Nagoya, Japan, 20 October 2010– The economic importance of the world’s natural assets is now firmly on the political radar as a result of an international assessment showcasing the enormous economic value of forests, freshwater, soils and coral reefs, as well as the social and economic costs of their loss, was the conclusion of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) report launched today by TEEB study leader, Pavan Sukhdev.

“TEEB has documented not only the multi-trillion dollar importance to the global economy of the natural world, but the kinds of policy-shifts and smart market mechanisms that can embed fresh thinking in a world beset by a rising raft of multiple challenges. The good news is that many communities and countries are already seeing the potential of incorporating the value of nature into decision-making,” said Mr. Sukhdev, a banker who heads up the Green Economy Initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

He was speaking at the launch of the two-year study, which has involved hundreds of experts from around the world, at the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 10th Conference of Parties meeting (CBD COP10) in Nagoya.

The TEEB study calls for wider recognition of nature’s contribution to human livelihoods, health, security, and culture by decision-makers at all levels (local to national and business to citizens). It promotes the demonstration, and where appropriate, the capture of the economic values of nature’s services through an array of policy instruments and mechanisms.

Here’s the UN’s Achim Steiner – you’ll have seen him recently on a BBC news report where David Shuckman, was it? got to go on a nice freebie to Kenya in the guise of bigging up, you guessed it, biodiversity – telling us just how SERIAL this business is.

This year’s Global Biodiversity Outlook-3, prepared in close collaboration with UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, points to ‘tipping points’ fast emerging – changes for example in freshwater systems that soon may be irreversible.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005 concluded that 60 per cent of the services provided by the world’s ecosystems that support human well being are now either degraded or heading that way.

Changes in biodiversity as a result of human activities were more rapid in the past 50 years that at any time in human history, it concludes.

The report, the output of more than 1,300 scientists from more than 90 countries supported by UNEP, the Global Environment Facility and many other partners, underlined that rather than exercising the brake the world continues to choose the accelerator.

What? Only 1300 scientists this time, was it? I’m sure the figure which used to be bandied about with global warming was more like 2,500.

Ah well, what the hell. It’s not like the “little people” are going to be able to do anything about it. That’s the beauty of the United Nations. The European Union too, come to that. Democratically unaccountable, lavishly funded, and with over a half a century’s expertise at spreading big lies round the world before the truth has got his boots on.