At Fox News, COMMENTARY contributor George Russell has a fantastic report on a confidential gathering of UN officials that took place last October. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and others met in a Long Island mansion and brainstormed on how “to consolidate a radical new global green economy, promote a spectrum of sweeping new social policies and build an even more important role for UN institutions ‘to manage the process of globalization better.’”
The discussion centered on plans for June’s Rio + 20 Summit on Sustainable Development, and was something like Occupy Wall Street rally meets Avatar. Participants both noted that “inequity” is the “single greatest challenge and threat” to the world and “the UN in Rio should be the voice of the planet and its people.” They’ll have to fight Barack Obama for that gig, no?
Russell’s report is valuable because it exposes the scale of the green movement’s ambitions, the full integration of environmentalism into every other leftist cause du jour, and the extent of the UN’s radicalism. Environmentalism is a legitimized mainstream vehicle for everything from anti-capitalist legislation to trans-hemispheric reparations to global governance. You start with a couple of balmy summers and end up with what the meeting’s minutes described as “a means to ‘reorient public and private decision-making’ to make the world’s poorest people the new economy’s ‘main beneficiaries.’”
In some sense, the climate debate has already become irrelevant. By the time Climategate episode 4986 elicits an “oops” from Al Gore, the UN’s global redistributionist machine will have long dispensed with its initial green premise and be onto justifying global socialism on its own terms.
Just imagine the greenback dollars we could save if we kicked this Marxist lair out of Manhattan and pulled the plug on American participation in the UN. I have always believed that their organizational bureaucracy makes them effective only in promoting little dictators into rich little dictators using a whole bunch of our taxpayer dollars.
whether or not what the UN is aiming for ought to be called "socialism" or "world government" or a return to the Dark Ages, this winter is concretely refuting the whole "global warming" notion. Rome has had several snowfalls this year leading to closing the schools. Places farther south in Italy have been snowbound, at least temporarily. Corsica is snowy and looks like a Minnesota winter, while Istanbul has suffered heavy snow. I won't go into detail about Serbia, Ukraine, Bosnia and Rumania, etc.
Interesting, but in view of actual world conditions this UN ambition to make itself "the voice of the planet and its people" seems little more than an adolescent power fantasy. Come to think of it, though, adolescent power fantasies can do plenty of damage. Just look at all that our very own president has achieved in his quest to save the planet and its people…
Eliyahu, your remark on a return to the dark ages is an apropos one. As Republicans, it is our prerogative to remind such socialist fora as the U.N. and the latest American administration that the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stone (or because the kings of the world decided it was a failed enterprise). Stone was displaced due to the free market, on the basis of the greater efficiency, and practicability of melding bronze. n nUnfortunately, the Obama' administration's ambitious plans for vitalizing the green energy sector have not learned from this template. The world estimate of our fuel, whether in the form of oil or any of the number of mythic alternatives that have thus far failed to resemble viability, has a decidedly Malthusian fallacy in its basis. A blinding concern for the future supply, that we have no way of projecting, causes socialists to abandon reason. They would have us abscond the plow for the spoon, and point out that creates more jobs (which it does, and a whimpering economy besides). What Obama doesn't know is the exact expiration date of oil. What is known, is that petroleum at present gives economic prosperity to the countries that monopolize its supply. Furthermore, this natural resource has a marked impact on foreign policy interests. The more we drill, the more America can subvert fascist Russia and China, and foresee its objectives in the middle east. n nAmerica must remain adamant in clarifying the benighted, politically embroiled efforts to indoctrinate global warming as scientific dogma. It must never concede to socialism, whether on green terms or its own terms. But the green terms especially are a matter of science, not policy. Even if all of Europe agrees to replace the plow with the spoon, China and India and Russia will not (and the world would not get much cleaner), and America must not, lest it luxuriate in assuming such a reversal in the axis of global power would be a good thing.
People are looking to the UN? Seems more like the UN, looking in the mirror.