Copenhagen has been a disaster for the free world and hardly anyone seems to have noticed.
We have been distracted by the sweet schadenfreude as the event was overshadowed by the Climategate scandal at the beginning, and the Russian bombshell at the end.
And by our delight in seeing the many business interests of the IPCC ’s jet-setting chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri cruelly exposed.
And by the told-you-so satisfaction of seeing it proved beyond all reasonable doubt that the “scientific” process informing the IPCC’s increasingly hysterical reports is corrupt, fraudulent and politically motivated.
And by the irony of the snow beginning to fall on a conference whose ostensible purpose was to prevent global warming.
And by the sheer messy incompetence of the whole affair, with its riots, shambolic organisation and brutality whose victims including Lord Monckton.
But if we think the events of the last fortnight marked a triumph for commonsense over hair shirt green lunacy, we are sadly deluding ourselves. Copenhagen was never about winning or losing a scientific argument. And it wasn’t, as even green campaigners have begun belatedly to realise, about “saving” the environment either.
Here is that Obergruppenfuhrer among eco-freaks Bill McKibben at Mother Jones:
This afternoon at Copenhagen a document mysteriously leaked from the UN Secretariat. It was first reported from the Guardian, and by the time it was posted online it oddly had my name scrawled all across the top—I don’t know why, because I didn’t leak it.
My suspicion, though, is because it confirms something I’ve been writing for weeks. The cuts in emissions that countries are proposing here are nowhere near good enough to meet even their remarkably weak target of limiting temperature rise to two degrees Celsius. In fact, says the UN in this leaked report, the cuts on offer now produce a rise of at least three degrees, and a CO2 concentration of at least 550 ppm, not the 350 scientists say we need, or even the weak 450 that the US supposedly supports.
In other words, this entire conference is an elaborate sham, where the organizers have known all along that they’re heading for a very different world than the one they’re supposedly creating. It’s intellectual dishonesty of a very high order, and with very high consequences. And it’s probably come too late to derail the stage management—tomorrow Barack Obama will piously intone that he’s committed to a two degree temperature target. But he isn’t—and now he can’t even say it with a straight face.
Let’s ignore McKibben’s barmy notion that man has it in his power to control global climate by tinkering with CO2 output, and concentrate on that part of his tearful outburst that does make sense. Copenhagen never really had anything to do with “Climate Change”. Rather it was a trough-fest at which all the world’s greediest pigs gathered to gobble up as much of your money and my money as they possibly could, under the righteous-sounding pretence that they were saving the planet.
This nauseating piggery took two forms. First were the Third World kleptocracies – led by the likes of Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe – using “Global Warming” as an excuse to extort guilt-money from the Western nations.
Second, and much more dangerous, were the First World Corporatists who stand to make trillions of dollars using the Enron economics of carbon trading. Never mind all the talk of President Obama’s trifling $100 billion pledge. This is very small beer compared with the truly eye-watering sums that will be ransacked from our economies and our wallets over the next decades in the name of “carbon emissions reduction.”
Richard North has spotted this, even if virtually nobody else has. The key point, he notes, is the Copenhagen negotiators’ little-publicised decision to save the Kyoto Protocol. This matters because it was at Kyoto that the mechanisms for establishing a global carbon market were established. Carbon trading could not possibly exist without some form of agreement between all the world’s governments on emissions: the market would simply collapse. By keeping Kyoto alive, the sinister troughers of global corporatism have also kept their cash cow alive.
This is nothing to do with the headline billions and all the rest. Nope, the deal is that the Kyoto Protocol is saved – which is what all the fuss was really about. That safeguards the carbon market and opens the way for it to expand to the $2-trillion level by the year 2020. Against that, even €100 billion is chump-change – you can buy countries with that sort of money.
Their deal in place, the kleptocrats and the Corporatocracy can go away happy and plan how to spend all their ill-gotten gains, leaving the leaders to grandstand, make their deals, shake hands and strut through their photo-sessions before jetting off in olumes of “carbon” to be greeted as saviours by their underwhelmed peoples.
Related posts:
- Climategate: Green Agony Uncle ‘Dear James’ answers your Copenhagen questions
- Copenhagen: an utter waste of everyone’s time, energy and money with a carbon footprint the size of Texas
- Climategate: the Conservative backlash begins
- Climategate: how the Copenhagen Grinches stole Christmas
