It’s time to give all mankind a real chance to enjoy genuine development

Kelvin Kemm

The Rio+20 World Environmental Conference has come and gone. The “Plus 20” comes from the fact that it took place twenty years after the first such conference, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. Between these dates, I was a delegate at the 2002 world environment conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. Ever since 1992 I have watched the eco-evolution taking place.

There is a good side and a bad side. The good side is that general world environmental awareness has been enhanced. That is definitely good. But there is still so much to be done, especially in poor countries where many people are always on the edge of survival, people must eke out a living off the land, and many will do whatever it takes to earn a little cash, to just survive another day.

Here in South Africa we see the daily international poaching attacks on our elephants and rhinos. It’s disgraceful. For us in the south, on midwinter’s day in June (our winters are the opposite of those in the Northern Hemisphere), the total rhinos shot this year stands at 251, just to get their horns, which are still viewed as aphrodisiacs and medicine in many Asian countries. Last year’s total was 448, more than one a day – so it’s getting worse. Poachers are now using helicopters and machine guns, and often taking chainsaws to still living rhinos.

There is much to do to sustain and protect the world’s natural environment. That should be done – but done well, and honestly. The bad side of Rio+20 is the degree of scientific dishonesty and economic manipulation that has crept into the international debate. That is shocking.

In recent years we have heard a great deal about “climate change.” I am on record as saying I do not believe human activities that produce carbon dioxide (CO2) are making any significant contribution to climate change – certainly not anything dangerous or catastrophic.

Observed climate change appears to be in line with past historic meteorological cycles – and likely linked to natural cosmic rays interacting with the magnetic fields of the earth and the sun’s interactive magnetic screening system.

But there are organisations in the world that want mankind to be at fault, so that there is someone to blame and attack, someone to tax and control, and someone to encourage to be “traditional” and “sustainable” – and consequently in a state of perpetual primitive poverty and disease … on the edge of survival.

It was noticeable that Rio+20 moved away from the theme of “climate change.” It would appear that the disastrous climate change, which green extremists predicted with such great relish, has not been occurring. So climate change is dying as a “marketable concept.” They can’t use it to scare enough people anymore.

Thus the Rio+20 summit focused on the concepts of “biodiversity” and “sustainable development,” as the main themes, and therefore the main “worries.” If people can be made to worry, they can be made to fear, and then they can be controlled.

Rio+20 was all about international control. Certain green organisations clearly want to exert direct control over world governments, and want to impose their brand of world government on our planet, communities, businesses and families. The concepts of biodiversity and sustainable development give them the leverage.

The greens claim that our plant and animal species, our natural resources, our air and water, and our planet are in such desperate trouble that the extreme greens must take control. They will then defend “biodiversity,” and to do this they will decide what “sustainable development” actually means and how it must be implemented.

They will decide how, when and where any community will be permitted to “develop.” It is interesting to take another look at the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development, which came out of the 2002 world environment conference in Johannesburg. It included language asking that the world pay attention to “the worldwide conditions that pose severe threats to the sustainable development of our people, which include: chronic hunger; malnutrition … and endemic, communicable and chronic diseases, in particular HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.”

What happened to all these human issues at Rio+20? They were gone. For some reason, the Rio version of “biodiversity” and “sustainability” did not include humans.

In Rio the head of the WWF stated that the WWF wanted “transparent annual reporting and review on subsidy reforms, leading to the elimination by 2020 of all environmentally harmful subsidies, in particular fossil fuel subsidies.” Who do these people think they are? And why have they said nothing at all about the nearly $1 trillion that Bloomberg New Energy Finance reports has been spent worldwide just since 2004 on wind, solar, biofuel and other “renewable” energy schemes that any objective observer would understand are simply not “sustainable” on economic, environmental or any other grounds.

Moreover, this WWF statement is intended to give authenticity to some “world government,” to tell sovereign nations how to care for their own citizens.

In many African countries building a coal-fired power station will reduce CO2 emissions. How? Because there are millions of families who have no electricity, and so cook on wood or dung fires.  These fires burn inefficiently and produce not just carbon dioxide, but many airborne pollutants that harm or even kill people. If thousands of these fires are replaced by a modern coal-fired power plant, the net effect would be to lead to improved air quality and less CO2 per unit of energy.

Such an action would be a significant advance, even if the CO2 actually were a problem, though much scientific evidence shows that it is not. This evidence of course is shouted down by those with vested interests in perpetuating “dangerous manmade climate change” as a thesis, and as a professional sinecure. Such an approach is not honest, and it is not science.

Meanwhile, however, European countries have introduced a carbon emissions tax on passenger aircraft flying over their airspace. The tax, per passenger, is calculated on total miles flown, so passengers flying to Europe from faraway places like South Africa and Australia pay much higher emissions taxes to the Europeans to clean up Euro air than do the EU’s own citizens, who collectively fly far more cumulative miles around Europe. Despite appeals from South Africa to spare us the tax, we were turned down. We are getting sick and tired of this high handed First World attitude.

Now from Rio+20 we are told that a goal for development is to move away from “outdated” concepts like measuring national growth using Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – and to rather use more “modern” and “equitable” measures like the “Happy Planet Index” (HPI), under which some world authority or bureaucrat is going to place an “environmental value” on keeping our environment “pristine” and “traditional.” Those values will be built into the HPI.  Meantime, many people in Africa will continue to cut down habitats to burn wood and dung, and we will fight elephant and rhino poachers all by ourselves.

In Rio, eight of the world’s largest development banks announced the largest monetary commitment to come out of Rio+20, a “socially responsible” US$175 billion initiative to shift investment away from roads to public transport. They want to use the money to promote buses, trains and bicycles, instead of cars and aeroplanes.

In many parts of Africa they don’t even have a road yet. No electricity either, nor school nor clinic.

It is time for UN, EU, US and other green do-gooders to get off their anti-development high horse. It’s time to give all of mankind a real chance to enjoy genuine development. It’s time to stop using a “preserving biodiversity” ruse to keep the world’s most impoverished people forever in poverty.

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Dr. Kelvin Kemm

Dr Kelvin Kemm is a nuclear physicist and business strategy consultant in Pretoria, South Africa. He is a member of the International Board of Advisors of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), based in Washington, DC (www.CFACT.org). Dr. Kemm received the prestigious Lifetime Achievers Award of the National Science and Technology Forum of South Africa.

Are our children really a disease?

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Yoga for “Mother Earth?”

Sustaining the planet through downward facing dog

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“Born in trash”

This is just all kinds of disturbing

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20 years ago Greenpeace scaled the Cristo Redentor 

and hung a banner in defiance of law

Today the Greens have the power to simply order Christ green

–Then–

–Now–

Progress?

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Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes

and Crimes of Aggression…. Ecocide?

Ready for war crimes trials for business executives

and free world heads of state?

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Can’t argue –  Let’s decide on a constructive tomorrow

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“Think of the Children!”

Which system would you bet on to provide a clean neighborhood for these kids?

We’ll take free enterprise and we’ll give you odds.

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Would these folk really  be better off without abundant, affordable energy and the prosperity that comes with it?

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Liberty to pollute?

Is liberty really something we have too much of?

We’re old fashioned and still yearning to breath free

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Replace high yield agriculture

With “holistic” “gender-sensitive” subsistence farming?

Sustainable serfdom?

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“For Decent Work”

“Quality Public Services”

“Act Now!”

Much better than that ‘indecent’ making and growing stuff

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“The Future Belongs to the Children”

Another victim of nuclear technology?

Does this child look to you like he’s suffering the effects

of plentiful, clean affordable energy,

or UN approved energy poverty?

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Subsidized jobs for trade unions to change world’s temperature!

News at 11

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“Women..Unions..Rights..Power”

Special interest sustainability

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“Quality Public Services” again

Who knew we didn’t have anywhere near enough government workers?

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Ready to hop aboard the UN’s big green bus?

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We couldn’t read the Japanese lettering accompanying the “Merry Smile Project,”

but if the message was as charming as its imagery, this one’s a winner.

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Someone had to speak up for freedom

All too endangered

Paul Driessen and Duggan Flanakin

The Future We Want outlined a “common vision” for planetary “sustainable development,” as proclaimed by the “Organizing Partners of the Major Group of NGOs,” to guide the taxpayer-funded Rio+20 summit that ended last week in disarray and acrimony.

The activist organizations that cobbled the document together filled it with hundreds of platitudes and pseudo-solutions to global warming cataclysms, newly reconstituted as threats to resource depletion and biodiversity – and presented as standards and mandates for countries, communities and corporations.

The terms “sustainable development,” “sustainable” and “sustainability” appeared in the original text an astounding 390 times. Like “abracadabra,” these nebulous concepts were supposed to transform the world into a Garden of Eden global community, under United Nations auspices, that will use less, pollute less, and save species and planet from their worst enemy: humans.

To glean the document essence, however, readers only needed to understand two concepts: control and money – to impose the future the activists wanted.

The NGOs and UN called for “donations” from formerly rich European Union and Annex II (Kyoto Protocol) countries, at 0.7% of their gross national product per year. With the combined GNP of the contributing nations totaling about $45 trillion in 2010, the transfers would total $315 billion per year, or $3.2 trillion per decade.

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton had previously committed the United States to provide up to $105 billion annually, based on our $15 trillion GNP (and stressed-out line of credit). With US per capita GNP pegged at $47,340 – each American family of four would pay $1,325 a year. That may seem like chump change compared to TARP, Obamacare or the Obama Stimulus. But over a decade US citizens would involuntarily shell out well over a trillion dollars to UN sustainability schemes.

The UN claims it has already received more than $500 billion in pledges from governments and companies, to reduce fossil fuel use, increase renewable energy generation in poor countries, promote bicycle use in Holland, teach sustainability in universities, conserve water – and in passing reduce global poverty. Time will tell how many pledges are worth the paper they were printed on

To oversee this unprecedented wealth transfer to UN bureaucrats and NGO activists, The Future We Want architects sought to establish “an intergovernmental process” to assess financial needs, consider the effectiveness, consistency and “synergies” of existing instruments and frameworks, evaluate additional initiatives, and prepare reports on financing strategies. This grand scheme would be implemented by an intergovernmental committee of 30 “experts,” who will be accountable to – no one, actually, except perhaps the Secretary General of the esteemed United Nations.

The document reassured readers that “aid architecture has significantly changed in the current decade,” and “fighting corruption and illicit financial flows [has become] a priority.” Diogenes would search in vain for evidence of this.

Indeed, the very idea of still more aid must be questioned. “Has more than US$1 trillion in development assistance over the last several decades made African people better off?” Zambia-born economist Dambisa Moyo asks in her book, Dead Aid. “No,” she answers emphatically. What’s needed are investment, development, less regulatory red tape, and an unleashing of entrepreneurial instincts.

Nevertheless, the UN is determined to plow ahead, claiming that somehow, this time, they will get it right. Surely, the prospect of promoting sustainability and saving the planet and its species will convert scurrilous dictators, Western politicians and their cronies into honest leaders who would never divert eco-funding to political friends, Swiss bank accounts or crony-capitalist wind and solar projects.

With Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue bathed in green light (to symbolize ecology – or was it money?) and the National Religious Partnership for the Environment proselytizing throughout the event, surely miscreants would sin no more.

Meanwhile, Statement 61 (of 283!) helpfully pronounced that “urgent action on unsustainable patterns of production and consumption … remains fundamental in addressing environmental sustainability” … and each country should “consider the implementation of green economy policies in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication.”

In essence, the Rio+20 message was, “You got a problem? The UN team has an app for that!”

From poverty eradication to food security, nutrition and “sustainable agriculture,” to water and sanitation, to energy, sustainable tourism and transport, and sustainable cities and “human settlements,” the Future We Want “framework for action and follow-up” had it covered! Of course, there were caveats.

Everyone has a right to safe, sufficient, nutritious food – but biotechnology, chemical fertilizers, insecticides and modern mechanized farming are unsustainable. Electricity is vital, but the 1.4 billion now without lights or refrigeration must be content with “green energy.” Health “is a precondition for, an outcome of, and an indicator of, all three dimensions of sustainable development,” but no DDT allowed.

The authors also promised “full and productive employment, decent work for all, and social protections” for workers, to clean up the oceans, stop illegal mining and fishing, and ensure that only “sustainable forest management” prevails (the cut-no-trees kind that produces uncontrollable wildfires).

The Future We Want also lauded women, the scientific and technological community, indigenous peoples, young people, workers, trade unions, small-scale farmers, NGOs and “civil society” – while placing new burdens on the corporations that will be expected to generate trillions to prop up these efforts.

The document also included multiple proposals for technology transfers – but deleted all references to protecting patents and intellectual property rights. It also excised language “respecting the right to freedom of association and assembly, in accordance with our obligations under international law.”

Thankfully – despite attendance by 45,000 delegates from 180 nations – the Rio+20 summit became just another gabfest, the mandates became even more ill-defined “goals” and “recommendations,” and the world dodged another Kyoto-style bullet.

The activists and bureaucrats will doubtless be back, in a couple more years, in an exotic new locale, with new plans for saving the planet from scary new catastrophes.

However, poor countries are slowly catching on that these UN events are little more than neo-colonialist, eco-imperialist schemes to control and restrict economic development – and poor families are beginning to realize they won’t get a dime from these sustainability pledges or derive any tangible benefits from the green schemes.

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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org and www.CFACT.tv) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death. Duggan Flanakin is director of research and international programs for CFACT.

$1,325 per American family for U.N. bureaucrats

By Paul Driessen and Duggan Flanakin

The NGO Major Group Organizing Partners have finalized their key document for the Rio+20 Summit. “The Future We Want” outlines the common vision for “sustainable development” throughout the planet sought by those nongovernmental organizations – mostly social and environmental activist groups. There are many noble sentiments in its 283 statements. There also is much that raises serious concerns. “Sustainable,” “sustainability” and “sustainable development” appear in the text an astounding 390 times. Like “abracadabra,” these amorphous words are supposed to transform even corrupt societies into Gardens of Eden under United Nations auspices. They will use less, pollute less, be sustainable, get along and save species and the entire planet from their worst enemy: human beings.

Rio+20 Pre-conference final draft – The Future We Want  The affirmations, resolutions and guidelines are fascinating, but the funding mechanism is even more eye-opening. Results of the U.N. conference in Rio de Janeiro, which concluded Friday, calls for annual “donations” from the European Union and Annex II (Kyoto Protocol) countries amounting to 0.7 percent of their gross national product (GNP). With the combined GNP of contributing nations totaling about $45 trillion in 2010, the transfers would add up to $315 billion per year, or $3.2 trillion per decade.

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had previously committed the United States to provide $105 billion annually, based on our $15 trillion GNP. World Bank data for 2010 put U.S. per capita GNP at $47,340 – meaning each American family of four would pay $1,325 a year. That may seem like chump change compared to Obamacare or the Obama stimulus. But over a decade, U.S. citizens would be required to contribute well over $1 trillion to U.N. sustainability schemes.

To oversee this unprecedented wealth transfer to U.N. bureaucrats and NGO activists, architects of “The FutureWeWant” would establish “an intergovernmental process” to assess financial needs; consider the effectiveness, consistency and synergies of existing instruments and frameworks; evaluate additional initiatives; and prepare reports on financing strategies. Implementation of this grand scheme would be handled by an intergovernmental committee of 30 “experts” who would be accountable to no one, except perhaps the U.N. secretary-general.

The document reassuringly suggests that “aid architecture has significantly changed in the current decade,” and “fighting corruption and illicit financial flows [has become] a priority.” Diogenes would search in vain for evidence of this.

Indeed, the very idea of still more aid must be questioned. “Has more than $1 trillion in development assistance over the last several decades made African people better off?” economist Dambisa Moyo asks in her book, “Dead Aid.” Her answer is an emphatic no.

Nevertheless, the U.N. is determined to move forward, claiming that somehow, this time the nations will get it right. Surely, the prospect of promoting sustainability and saving the planet and its species will convert scurrilous dictators and their cronies into honest leaders who would never divert eco-funding to political friends, Swiss bank accounts or crony-capitalist wind and solar projects.

Following Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue bathed in green light for the U.N. confab and the National Religious Partnership for the Environment proselytizing at Rio+20, surely these sinners will sin no more.

Meanwhile, Statement 61 helpfully pronounces that “urgent action on unsustainable patterns of production and consumption … remains fundamental in addressing environmental sustainability” and each country should “consider the implementation of green economy policies in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication.”

In essence, the Rio+20 message is, “You got a problem? Team U.N. has an app for that.” From poverty eradication to food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture, from water, sanitation and energy to tourism, sustainable cities and “human settlements,” “The FutureWeWant” has it covered. Of course, there are caveats.

Everyone should have access to safe, sufficient, nutritious food , but biotechnology, chemical fertilizers and modern mechanized farming are unsustainable. Electricity is vital, but the 1.4 billion people now without lights or refrigeration must be content with “green energy.” Health is an indicator of sustainable development, but no DDT, please.

The authors promise “full and productive employment, decent work for all and social protections” for workers. They pledge to clean up the oceans, stop illegal mining and fishing, and ensure that only “sustainable forest management” prevails (the kind that produces uncontrollable wildfires).

“TheFutureWeWant” also lauds women, the scientific and technological community, indigenous peoples, young people, workers, trade unions, small-scale farmers, NGOs and “civil society.” However, it places additional burdens on corporations that will be expected to generate trillions for U.N. sustainability programs.

The document also includes multiple proposals for technology transfers – absent any references to protections for patents and intellectual property rights. Not included in the final text was language “respecting the right to freedom of association and assembly, in accordance with our obligations under international law.”

This is just a sampling. Recall that there are 283 statements, mostly offering pious and well-intended but naive sentiments – earnest but contradictory and self-defeating solutions.

Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT.org) and author of “Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death” (Merril Press, 2010). Duggan Flanakin is director of research and international programs for CFACT.

Paul Driessen and Duggan Flanakin

Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised that his Administration would “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”  He gave a clue to exactly what he had in mind when he told now-congressional candidate Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher: “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Not necessarily – especially when activists, regulators, politicians and ruling elites do all they can to ensure there is less and less wealth to spread around.

Just this week, the Civil Society Reflection Group on Global Development Perspectives released a new report to the United Nations Rio+20 Earth Summit on Sustainable Development. The executive summary of No Future Without Justice begins with the heading, “The World Is in Need of Fundamental Change.” The document then offers “solutions,” which include “universal fiscal equalization” and a “massive and absolute decoupling of well-being from resource extraction and consumption.”

The 18-member Group includes no Americans – but condemns the US and other governments for their dedication to economic growth, rather than wealth redistribution, and demands that governments play a key role in promoting “sustainability” and welfare. They insist that all governments provide universal access to public health care, guaranteed state allowances for every child, guaranteed state support for the unemployed and underemployed, and basic universal pensions and universal social security.

It is, in short, the total nanny state – but with little or no resource extraction or economic growth to support it. In other words, it guarantees sustained injustice and redistribution of increasing scarcity.

The Group admits that human civilization “will still need some form of growth in large parts of the world, to expand the frontiers of maximum available resources for poor countries.” However, the massive investments needed to shift to a totally renewable energy and resource-based economy will require “massive de-growth (shrinkage) of products, sectors and activities that do not pass the sustainability test” – as devised by them, affiliated organizations and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Key financial support for the push toward “sustainability” includes a “greener” and “more progressive” tax system featuring a financial transaction tax, abolition of subsidies for all but renewable energy, cutting military spending while dramatically increasing “stimulus” spending, a compensation scheme to pay off “climate debts” to poor countries supposedly impacted by hydrocarbon-driven climate change, a new regulatory framework for financial markets, a financial product safety commission, and still more regulations for hedge funds and private equity funds. The Group also demands public control of financial rating agencies and a government takeover of international accounting standards.

To ensure that “sustainable development” permeates every aspect of society, the Group proposes a new “Sherpa” for Sustainability (with cabinet rank), a parliamentary committee on policy coherence for sustainability, a UN Sustainability Council, a Universal Periodic Review on Sustainability, and an Ombudsman for Intergenerational Justice and Future Generations. It also proposes an International Panel on Sustainability that builds on the “success” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Of course, guiding all this would be the world’s premiere political body and bastion of freedom, fairness, democracy and human rights – the UN General Assembly.

To guide this “fundamental” shift toward the sustainability paradigm, the Group laid down eight principles – the key being the “precautionary principle,” which forbids any activity that might involve risk or “do harm.” Its own sustainability prescriptions are, of course, exempted from any reviews under the precautionary principle.

The objective, they state, is to build economies that drastically limit carbon emissions, energy consumption, primary resource extraction, waste generation, and air and water pollution. Society must also stop the asserted and computer-modeled loss of species and ruination of ecosystems.

All this naturally will require mandatory changes in consumption patterns and lifestyles (at least for the common folk), and the recognition that work (unlike capital) is not a production factor. Indeed, says the Group, work is not even a commodity. Moreover, only “decent” work qualifies under the sustainability paradigm. (While “decent work” is never defined, it presumably includes backbreaking sunup-to-sundown labor at subsistence farming, which under the Group’s agenda would be called “traditional” or “organic” farming and would not be replaced by modern mechanized agriculture.)

What is the source of all of this gobbledygook? Agenda 21, the centerpiece of the original Rio Earth Summit – which is being perpetuated, refined and redefined at parallel proceedings in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, while the main sustainability discussions are ongoing in Rio de Janeiro.

Agenda 21 states, for example, that “achieving the goals of environmental quality and sustainable development will require … changes in consumption patterns.” This too would be achieved under UN auspices because, as Earth Summit creator Maurice Strong has explained, the days of national sovereignty are over, and the world needs to embrace a system of wealth transfer to ensure environmental security.

In short, “sustainable development” is a system that requires a redefinition of business activity, away from the pursuit of personal profit – and of government activity, away from the pursuit of individual happiness and justice – and toward the pursuit of societal good, as defined by activists and the UN.

Simply put, as Brian Sussman points out in his new book, Eco-Tyranny, the ultimate goal of those who endorse the sustainability paradigm is to expunge “the most precious” rights expressed in the American Declaration of Independence: “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – that to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”

The Agenda 21 and sustainability paradigm also rejects and undermines Adam Smith’s belief that mankind’s natural tendency toward self-interest, profit and self-improvement results in greater prosperity, opportunity, health, welfare and justice for all.

Most of all, the UN/Maurice Strong/ Civil Society Reflection Group vision is merely the latest embodiment of Plato’s Republic. Under Plato’s thesis, an educated, elite, but benevolent and mythical, ruling class acts on the belief that its self-appointed philosopher kings have all the right answers, and do not require the Consent of the Governed. The rest of humanity must fall into lockstep or face the consequences; however the results will be exemplary.

Unfortunately, as Alexander Hamilton observed, men are not angels. Moreover, it defies experience and common sense to suppose that the elitist UN, UNEP and environmental activist community will ever display wisdom detached from ardent ideology – or benevolence toward the humans they seek to govern.

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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org and www.CFACT.tv) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death. Duggan Flanakin is director of research and international programs for CFACT.

The Rio+20 version of “sustainable development” would devastate the world’s poor. CFACT rebuked the UN, environmental groups, and Rio+20 delegates for attempting to force their dreadful version of the future on the world.

Highlights include Senator James Inhofe addressing the Earth Summit via video; Lord Christopher Monckton explaining that sustainable development is about the radical left’s wishlist not the environment; Climate Depot’s Marc Morano arguing that sustainable development should be redefined as coal, oil and natural gas; journalist Magnus Gudmundsson’s presentation about Greenpeace propaganda; and CFACT President David Rothbard defending political and economic freedom as the only true path towards all that’s best for people and the planet too.

Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  Thursday June 21, 2012

CONTACT:Rus  sell Cook, 602-753-9141, RCookMedia@cox.net

CFACT unveils Rio+20 sand art

Planet weeps behind bars as it contemplates

“The future we dread”

(Rio de Janeiro, Copacabana) CFACT commissioned a team of local sand artists to erect a large work on Copacabana Beach at Posto 3.

The works features a large blue earth, weeping behind bars as it contemplates Rio+20 creating not “the future we want,” but “the future we dread.”

CFACT’s artwork has become an attraction, with tourists and local people pausing for photos. A band of musicians stopped to play, prompting dancing and fun.

“CFACT always tries to have a creative touch,” said CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker, “we feel it’s important not only to carry our message into the heart of the negotiations, but also to real people.”

“Rio+20′s ‘Future We Want’ document is chock full of troubling policy proposals,” said CFACT President David Rothbard, “redistributing 0.7% of GNP, bloating UNEP into a new super eco-bureaucracy, trampling on the sovereignty of nations and grabbing control of the oceans are but a few. There are many more ill-conceived proposals in the current draft and there are still worse things being pushed behind closed doors by bureaucrats and pressure groups.”

“The UN should rescue Rio+20, but they’re almost out of time” Rucker said, “The UN should strip all of the taxes, invasions of sovereignty and bureaucratic empire building out of the Rio text and return to the UN’s core values. Individual freedom, free enterprise, prosperity, respect for private property and the rule of law are the proven paths to accomplish all that is the best for people and the planet too.”

Media ready photos are available to download for use at CFACT.tv. The sand art is easily found along the Copacabana beach walk, just past the sign for Posto 3. It is an attractive photo opportunity.

CFACT, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, is a U.S. based NGO that addresses issues of environment and development around the globe. It is the preeminent organization at Rio+20 questioning the orthodoxies surrounding sustainable development and climate change.

CFACT is your best source for Rio+20 news and analysis that challenges the status quo. More information – including bios, video, pictures, news and commentary – at CFACT.tv, CFACT.org and ClimateDepot.com. CFACT’s experts are available to all media.

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Images available for use by all media

Click image for full size view

Words flew as CFACT’s Craig Rucker and Sir Richard Branson squared off at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Brazil. Surrounded by Greenpeace activists, Branson was leaving the Greenpeace press conference just as Rucker was entering for CFACT’s press event.

Rucker seized the opportunity to confront the globe-trotting, fossil fuel-burning Branson about his unlikely position on global warming. “Sir, do you support the European carbon tax on your own planes going from the United States to Europe?” Rucker asked. Clearly surprised, Branson responded that he would prefer it be an “international tax, rather than just one area of the world.”

Such an idea is not unheard of. In fact, one of the items on the negotiating table here at Rio+20 is a tax on international financial transactions ranging of  2%. It is unusual for the head of multi-national corporations to support such radical policies.

Rucker asked whether it would be wise for Branson to tax his clients considering that “the support for global warming science is eroding worldwide.” Over one thousand scientists dispute the man-made global warming hypothesis. Nonetheless, Branson refused to concede the point and insisted, “even if we are mistaken about that [global warming], I think it is good – we’re running out of oil so we need to move into clean fuels as soon as possible.”

He’s wrong about the world running out of oil too, but Rucker will have to take that up with him next time they cross paths, as Branson was quickly ushered away by his entourage.

ADVISORY

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  Thursday June 21, 2012

CONTACT:   Russell Cook,  602-753-9141,  RCookMedia@cox.net

 Rio+20: ‘Sustainable development’ = the new ‘climate change’

CFACT exposes the UN’s latest ruse de guerre

Shows a constructive path to rescue Rio+20

CFACT Press Conference — Thursday, June 21, 10:30 AM, Pavilion 3, Room 8 (P3-8)

(Rio de Janeiro) Having failed to secure a binding climate treaty and with the public increasingly skeptical about climate pronouncements of doom, the UN and its allied Green pressure groups hope to rebrand their multi-billion dollar eco-enterprise in Rio.

“Follow the money,” said CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker, “the UN and the Greens are spoiled and want more. The operators currently running the show at the UN will not surrender their hold on taxpayer money without a fight.”

Following numerous setbacks such as Climategates One and Two, the eco-ideologues and profiteers are moving away from climate and into issues such as “biodiversity” and “sustainable development.” They hope to move the public through emotional appeals having failed to do so with science and logic.

CFACT will conduct a press briefing entitled, “Rescuing Rio+20: the constructive path to sustainability” on Thursday, June 21 at 10:30 AM in Pavilion 3, Room 8.

The briefing will be moderated by Craig Rucker and feature Marc Morano, editor in chief of CFACT’s award-winning ClimateDepot.com news and information service, renowned climate skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton, and David Spady of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

“It is not too late to rescue Rio+20,” Rucker said, “The UN should strip all of the taxes, invasions of sovereignty and bureaucratic empire building out of the Rio text and return to the UN’s core values. Individual freedom, free enterprise, prosperity, respect for private property and the rule of law are the proven paths to accomplish all that is the best for people and the planet too.”

CFACT, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, is a U.S. based NGO that addresses issues of environment and development around the globe. It is the preeminent organization at Rio+20 questioning the orthodoxies surrounding sustainable development and climate change.

CFACT is your best source for Rio+20 news and analysis that challenges the status quo. More information – including bios, video, pictures, news and commentary – at CFACT.tv, CFACT.org and ClimateDepot.com. CFACT’s experts are available to all media.

- # # # -

Planet Gore

LIZ KLIMAS

‘Totally Weird’: Sustainability Org. Mocks Beck at Conference But Wants to Adopt His Tactics

Newsflash: Glenn Beck is “totally weird,” or so one organization of local governments focused on sustainability says. But that criticism only goes so far: consider that the same group mocking beck, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, actually thinks Beck is a good example for how to gain a following.

The founder of ICLEI, Jeb Brugmann, was speaking to members over the weekend in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, at its World Congress 2012 meeting ahead of the United Nations sustainability summit — Rio+20 — that begins on Wednesday. In his speech to enliven his audience with the “spirit of audacity that started our movement,” Brugmann looks to Beck as a method for effecting change.

ICLEI Founder Jeb Brugmann (Image: YouTube screenshot)

He begins asking the audience to repeat this phrase: “I am a species that re-engineers the environment to establish the ecosystem that is required to sustain my growing urban region. Just like a beaver.”

Asking a member in the audience who is a mayor in Arkansas, Brugmann wonders if this phrase could be used to get re-elected. The consensus is probably not and that it could be too “weird.” But here’s where Beck comes into play.

“We often think we have to be safe. We often think we can’t say the bold thing,” Brugmann says. Cue image of Glenn Beck in a Fox News screenshot and Brugmann identifying him as “one of the leading media pundits.”

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

“This guy is totally weird,” Brugmann said, explaining that even in light of that he makes millions per year and mobilized a national political movement. “Weirdness isn’t all bad is it?”

Brugmann goes on to cite how Beck’s “weirdness” has “convinced a large part of the population that ICLEI — “you” — are part of a global conspiracy to take away the freedom of the American people.”

(Image: YouTube screenshot)

Cue audience laughter.

Not wanting “these” people to lead the debate on global sustainability or the environment, Brugmann uses Beck’s success to suggest his audience “get more audacious and weird.”

Watch the video taken from CFACT:

At this very same conference, CFACT reported, ICLEI members were using new terminology to reference climate science:

Huxley Lawler, Executive Coordinator of Environment and Climate Change of the Gold Coast City Council in Australia (an ICLEI member), told CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker bluntly that “we don’t use the term climate change anymore. It’s sustainable development.” [emphasis CAJ]  Rucker and CFACT staffer Abdul Kamara confirmed this in conversations with other delegates, including Paul Chambers, a Sustainability Manager for the Auckland Council in New Zealand. Chambers said it is important to use inexact environment protection terminology when dealing with conservative governments, like the one he says currently heads his nation.

This wouldn’t be the first time of late that language changes were being made to appeal to a conservative audience. The Blaze reported last week in order to help pass legislation in Virginia for a study on sea level rise, linguistic modifications were made to a more “politically neutral” tone.

Planet Gore

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  Wednesday June 20, 2012

U.S. Senator Inhofe to level strong criticism of Rio+20 – Will Ask ‘Where is President Obama?’

ABIDES Event — Wednesday, June 20, 2 PM, Major Groups – Pavilion T

(Rio de Janeiro)  U.S. Senator James Inhofe will deliver an important message to the Rio+20 summit that will both answer and raise important questions.

Where does the U.S. Senate stand on Rio+20?

What will American policy be?

What will America spend?

Where is President Obama?

The United States has always been a principal funder of the UN and understanding America’s policy response is crucial to interpreting the outcome of Rio+20.  Senator Inhofe is the leading voice in the U.S. Senate critical of UN attempts to restrict energy development and subject sovereign nations to intrusive green mandates that provide little meaningful benefit to the environment.

The press conference, entitled “sustainable development – decision making process, what is the truth?” is scheduled for Wednesday, June 20 at 2 PM in Major Groups – Pavilion T.  The event is sponsored by ABIDES, the Brazilian Association for Integration and Sustainable Development and will feature Senator Inhofe, ABIDES President Everton Carvalho, CFACT President David Rothbard, Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, Lord Christopher Monckton and journalist Magnus Gudmundsson.

CFACT, the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow, is a U.S. based NGO that addresses issues of environment and development around the globe.  It is the preeminent organization at Rio+20 questioning the orthodoxies surrounding sustainable development and climate change.

CFACT is your best source for Rio+20 news and analysis that challenges the status quo. More information –  including bios, video, pictures, news and commentary – at CFACT.tv, CFACT.org and ClimateDepot.com. CFACT’s experts are available to all media.

- # # # -

Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised that his Administration would “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” One clue to what he meant was his comment to now-congressional candidate Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher: “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Not necessarily – especially when activists, regulators, politicians and ruling elites do all they can to ensure there is less and less wealth to spread around.

Just this week, the Civil Society Reflection Group on Global Development Perspectives released a new report to the United Nations Rio+20 Earth Summit on Sustainable Development. The executive summary of No Future Without Justice begins with the heading, “The World in Need of Fundamental Change.” Major components of its “solution” include a “universal fiscal equalization scheme” and a “massive and absolute decoupling of well-being from resource extraction and consumption.”

The 18-member Group includes no Americans – but condemns the US and other governments for their dedication to economic growth, rather than spreading wealth, and demands that governments play a key role in promoting “sustainability” and welfare. They insist that all governments provide universal access to public health care, guaranteed state allowances for every child, a basic universal pension, guaranteed state support for the unemployed and underemployed, and of course universal social security.

It is, in short, the total nanny state – but with little or no resource extraction or economic growth to support it.

The Group admits that human civilization “will still need some form of growth in large parts of the world, to expand the frontiers of maximum available resources for poor countries.” However, the massive investments needed to shift to a totally renewable energy and resource-based economy will require “massive de-growth (shrinkage) of products, sectors and activities that do not pass the sustainability test” – as devised by them, affiliated organizations and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

As the first full day of the 2012 ICLEI “World Congress” kicked off, my goal was to listen and learn. In any war, intel on the enemy’s strategies is crucial to success. So with dozens of workshops filled with panels of the world’s foremost “sustainable living” experts there was no better way to truly get the inside scoop on the who, what, when, where, and why of this “crisis.” After all, ICLEI is the organization that literally started the sustainability movement and has implemented sustainability measures in over 1,200 cities in the world.

I am here to tell you that the only thing you need to know about the “Sustainability” movement is that every leftist cause ranging from social equality, green energy, wealth redistribution, gender equality, global warming, growing the welfare state, etc., can be part of the movement. Now I am not just giving you some generic interpretation—these were the words uttered by numerous panel members. The greatest part of the experience is the covert operation of letting these leftists think I am a fellow leftist so they speak candidly on these issues.

However, the best part of the day was where I simply walked up to other attendees and asked them if they could help me define “sustainable living.” I was told it meant: reducing the amount of food we eat per day; reducing the amount of water we drink; wearing absolutely no deodorant (no one actually said that but smells speak louder than words!); reducing the number of children you have; reducing the amount of money you make; increasing how often you ride a bicycle instead of a car (or even better, just get rid of your car altogether). More resounding, though, was the lack of anything to do with property rights, economic freedom, individual rights, or free markets.

-A.K. Kamara

Collegiate Coordinator

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday June 18, 2012

CONTACT:  Russell Cook  1-602-753-9141  RCookMedia@cox.net

 Rio+20: ICLEI Members Admit “Bait and Switch”

to Boost Climate Agenda

Belo Horizonte, Brazil. To advance public action on global warming, participants attending the ICLEI World Congress admitted today that they are deliberately employing new terminology to misdirect opponents and gain acceptance of their efforts to reduce energy use and greenhouse gases. By utilizing terms like “sustainability” and “sustainable development,” the group wants to mask its objectives and disarm would-be critics who might otherwise oppose their agenda, ICLEI attendees confided with CFACT representatives at the conference.

Huxley Lawler, Executive Coordinator of Environment and Climate Change of the Gold Coast City Council in Australia (an ICLEI member), told CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker bluntly that “we don’t use the term climate change anymore. It’s sustainable development.” Rucker and CFACT staffer Abdul Kamara confirmed this in conversations with other delegates, including Paul Chambers, a Sustainability Manager for the Auckland Council in New Zealand. Chambers said it is important to use inexact environment protection terminology when dealing with conservative governments, like the one he says currently heads his nation.

This revelation by ICLEI World Congress attendees comes at a time when public support for global warming is weakening. It reflects a profound change in strategy by proponents of climate action and world governance, and an admission that skeptics of manmade global warming continue to gain ground in shaping public opinion.

ICLEI stands for the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. It was founded in 1990 to advance “sustainable development,” as enshrined in a document called “Agenda 21,” by persuading local governments around the globe to support restrictions on energy use and economic development. ICLEI claims to represent over 1,200 cities internationally. According to one of its founders, Hans Monninghoff of Germany, cities become part of the organization by paying annual membership fees, which vary according to their population. It formally changed its name in 2003 to “ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability” to promote an even broader energy, economic and political agenda.

Another speaker at the ICLEI World Congress admitted today that creating carbon neutral cities, an important ICLEI goal, will likely kill jobs and displace businesses that are unable to adapt to restrictive policies that raise energy prices or reduce energy reliability. Addressing a question about the impact of carbon neutral policies on the economy during a session on “Accounting and Reporting of Low Carbon Cities,” Hans Karsten said, “There is no guarantee that companies doing business today will be doing business in 20 years.” The head of Technical and Environmental Administration for Copenhagen, Denmark, Karsten later revealed that it was his city’s intent to have zero carbon emissions by 2025, with half the residents riding to work by bicycle.

“Thinking they can speak candidly on their home turf, ICLEI speakers reveal an unworkable economic agenda,” said CFACT President David Rothbard. “ICLEI’s bait and switch – substituting ‘sustainable development’ for ‘climate change’ – is shameless and deceptive. People need to understand ICLEI’s real agenda, before it cons other local governments into joining. ICLEI is weaving a crafty spider’s web that will entangle communities before they realize how its restrictive rules will kill jobs and reduce freedoms and living standards.”

CFACT is your source for Rio+20 news and analysis. Contact CFACT to schedule interviews with Lord Christopher Monckton, Marc Morano & other CFACT experts. More details at CFACT.tv, CFACT.org and ClimateDepot.com.

- # # # -

‘Green’ agenda is not healthy for children and other living things

DAVID ROTHBARD & PAUL DRIESSEN

Thousands of politicians, bureaucrats and environmental activists have gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which runs through Friday. This time, 20 years after the original 1992 Rio Earth Summit, delegates are minimizing references to “dangerous man-made climate change” to avoid repeating the acrimony and failures that came from the United Nations‘ recent climate conferences in Copenhagen; Cancun, Mexico; and Durban, South Africa.

Instead, Rio+20 seeks to shift international focus to “biodiversity” and supposed threats to plant and animal species as the new “greatest threat” facing planet Earth. This rebranding is “by design,” according to conference organizers, who have been uncharacteristically candid in describing sustainable development and biodiversity as an “easier sell” than climate change. It’s a simpler path to advance the same radical goals.

Those goals include expanded powers and budgets for the United Nations, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies and their allied “green” pressure groups; new taxes on international financial transactions (to ensure perpetual independent funding for the U.N.) and more mandates and money for “clean, green, renewable” energy.

The long wish list also includes myriad opportunities to delay, prevent and control energy and economic development; hydrocarbon use; logging; farming; family size; and the right of individual countries, states, communities and families to make and regulate their own development and economic decisions.

Aside from not giving increased power to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats and activists, there are two major reasons for stopping this attempted biodiversity-based power grab.

First, there is no scientific basis for claims that hundreds or even thousands of species are at risk. Up to half of all species could go extinct by 2100, insists global-warming alarmist James Hansen, because of climate change, “unsustainable” hydrocarbon use, human population growth and economic development. Fortunately, there is no factual basis for such hysterical claims.

Of 191 bird and mammal species recorded as having gone extinct since 1500, 95 percent were on islands, where humans and human-introduced predators and diseases wrought the destruction, notes ecology consultant Craig Loehle. On continents, just six bird and three mammal species were driven to extinction, and no bird or mammal species in recorded history is known to have gone extinct because of climate change.

The massive species losses claimed by Mr. Hansen, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund and others are based on extrapolations from the island extinction rates – fed into virtual-reality computer models that assume rising carbon-dioxide levels will raise planetary temperatures so high that plants and animals will be exterminated. That is nonsense.

Second, the greatest threats to species are the very policies and programs being advocated in Rio. Those policies would ban fossil fuels; greatly increase renewable energy use; reduce jobs and living standards in rich nations; and perpetuate poverty, disease, death and desperation in poor countries.

Today, more than 1.5 billion people still do not have electricity, or have it just a few hours each day or week. Almost 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Millions die every year from diseases that largely would be eradicated by access to reliable, affordable electricity for refrigerators, clinics and hospitals, clean water, sanitation, and industries that generate jobs, prosperity and health.

Opposition to conventional electricity generation forces people to rely on open fires for cooking and heating – perpetuating lung diseases and premature death from breathing smoke and pollutants. It also destroys the habitats for gorillas and other wildlife as people cut trees and brush for fires and charcoal.

Wind turbines slice up birds and collapse bat lungs. Turbine and solar arrays cover millions of acres of farmland and wildlife habitat to provide expensive, intermittent power for urban areas. They require backup generators and long transmission lines, and they consume millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass, polymers and rare earth minerals – extracted from the earth, mostly in countries that lack modern pollution-control regulations and technologies.

Corn-based ethanol requires tens of millions of acres, billions of gallons of water, millions of tons of fertilizer and insecticides, and enormous quantities of hydrocarbon fuels.

Yet President Obama has said poor, electricity-deprived, malnourished Africans should rely on biofuel, wind and solar power – and not build gas-fired power plants.

Hunting, subsistence living and poverty are among the greatest risks to human beings and other species. Denying poor families access to reliable, affordable electricity is a crime against humanity.

The Rio+20 biodiversity and sustainability agenda means artificially reduced energy and economic development. It means rationed resources; sustained poverty and disease; and unsustainable inequality, resentment, conflict and pressure on wildlife and its habitats.

Our Creator has endowed us with a world rich in resources and even richer in intelligent, hardworking, creative people who yearn to improve their lives and be better stewards of our lands, resources and wildlife. The primary obstacles to achieving those dreams are the false ideologies, anti-development agendas and suffocating regulations being promoted at the Rio+20 Summit.

If we can eliminate those obstacles, the world can enjoy a rebirth of freedom and opportunity; stable populations; and vastly improved health, welfare and justice for billions of people. We also will bring far greater security to Earth’s wondrous multitudes of wild and scenic areas and its bounty of plant and animal species.

That would be a huge gain for our planet and people.

David Rothbard is president of the Washington-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT.org) and Paul Driessen serves as CFACT’s senior policy adviser.

It is truly shocking when you learn just how many internationally, well-funded, groups exist out there whose expressed purpose is to implement environmental rules and regulations about the environment.  The scariest part is that ICLEI is not just some little organization who tries to influence a handful of people with crazy ideas.  ICLEI is an organization that is actually shaping laws, rules, and regulations for a “green and sustainable” economy.  Disgusting is the fact that they have already been millions upon millions of dollars on the backs of taxpayers worldwide.

Over this weekend, Executive Director Craig Rucker and I will be there in the trenches sitting in on meetings and workshops about the strategy and focus that ICLEI plans to create or shape legislation with.  My goal is to learn as much as possible and keep all of you informed on what is or may be coming your way.  This way you can be prepared to stop the economy stifling, job killing measures in your local communities.  Wish me luck and patience, especially the latter.

-A.K.

Collegiate Program Coordinator

“We should flesh out the idea of Mother Earth’s rights,” “We should aspire to be less economically successful” and “We must change our lifestyles to save the planet” are just a small portion of the things that came out of the mouths of these socially evolved, Marxist bootlickers.  Now some of you might say, “well duh, what did you expect being at a U.N. conference, A.K.”  But hearing person after person after person openly and unabashedly trash free-markets, capitalism, prosperity, success, and individual freedom makes you see that Socialism has not gone away and it doesn’t plan to anytime soon.

For me, it was a true wake up call.  Of course I already have the convictions I do in free-markets, capitalism, etc., but getting punched in the face with socialism gives you a “renewing your commitment to the fight” motivation.  I hope those of you who are following CFACT’s (and my own) day by day updates will feel a renewed sense of fight too, because the left is standing with both hands up, ready to throw down, at anytime.

If Europe is not sufficiently progressive and needs to shift further left, what are they planning for the United States?

We’re still at the planning conference for major groups. This weekend, 45,000 more people are traveling to this UN summit. It is hard to imagine what we are seeing and hearing multiplied by that kind of magnitude, but that is what’s coming.

Take a look at our video blog from day two and sample the tone of this conference. It’s just the tip of the (not melting!) iceberg.

Yesterday was our first day attending the Rio+20 pre-conference, and boy did we have an interesting time!

The radical Greens are out in force, calling for rights for “Mother Earth” and for billing individuals, governments and corporations for their eco-debt. Watch the video to see what CFACT has been up to at this conference.

CFACT is back at the conference today as well, documenting the radical policies they want to impose on you through their “The Future We Want” document. Be on the lookout for our next video blog, or subscribe to our YouTube channel for instant notification.

Team Rio – Day 2

Welcome to the Rio+20 pre-convention, convention. That statement could probably sum up the day but I will give you a complete picture.  After a long (almost 2 hour shuttle ride complete with leftist college grad who I stumped and awed in a debate about capitalism and free markets) we finally arrived and entered the pearly gates of sustainability. We found ourselves as lambs among a pack of wolves.  The theme of sustainability existed from the poorly designed wood and cardboard pens to even a restaurant that claimed sustainability by serving only vegetables and non-alcoholic beer.

The highlight of the day included the many panel discussions that took place all across the huge site.  My favorite of the day was about the topic of overpopulation.  Every panelist tip-toed around the solution we all know they wanted, abortion and just living with less.  I stood up and asked the panel to clarify a few points about how to quote “use the same but with just less resources.”

The short answer to me was that (for some reason) they believe private companies just like to waste resources – and that is why the government needs to intervene and force companies to do the same with less.  To put this concept into words lets say Ford could make 3, F-150’s (I’m from rural ND) with the same resources it takes to make 1, F-150, the commies on the panel believe that apparently Ford would not…which is a ridiculous notion if you understand the basic notion of capitalism or business in general.

I was extremely looking forward to the “indigenous” people of Rio protest rally but apparently they decided to do whatever it is the do instead, sell beads or something.  We spoke with delegates from countries like Burundi, Germany, China, and Monaco about what they thought about the sustainability debate.  Lastly, we tried to get our hands on the illusive “Zero draft” document that is the new document to “change the world”.  Unfortunately, due to their policy of transparency the made it transparent that no one could see the most recent draft.  But do not worry; CFACT will be here in the trenches, to make it known to the world when it does come out.

A.K. Kamara

Collegians Midwest Coordinator

BY KELVIN KEMM

If you want to learn what farmers think (and need), talk to African farmers – not to bureaucrats, environmental activists or politicos at the Rio+20 United Nations summit in Rio de Janeiro. You’ll get very different, far more honest and thoughtful perspectives.

The recent (May 24) Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network conference in Pretoria, South Africa brought together delegates from agricultural communities in many African countries. FANRPAN’s primary objective is to improve food security in Africa, by ensuring that small-scale farmers can become more productive. Their obvious enthusiasm and commonsense views were heartening.

FANRPAN chair Sindiso Ngwenya of Zambia gave an incisive presentation, pointing out that agriculture is the key to reducing poverty and ensuring food security in Africa. “We call upon the world to assist us,” he said, “not by treating us as beggars, but by treating us as equals.”

Ngwenya criticised many First World attempts to use climate change, biodiversity and sustainable development arguments to prevent African agriculture from advancing. “If you are using implements that were there before Christ, how much chance do you have?” he wanted to know.

And why would anyone think these UN-EU-US issues are important to African farmers and families who are trying to feed their families and neighbors, and improve their living standards by exporting their products?

Africa does not need foreign aid in the form of handouts, Ngwenya emphasized. African farmers need modern technology and reliable, affordable electricity. They need the world to buy African produce. Instead, far too often, European and other First World countries impose rules or block African exports, using a multitude of excuses that can no longer be tolerated.

FANRPAN has decided to go “Africa-wide,” Ngwenya announced. Africa is huge –larger than the United States, China, India and Europe combined. And yet 60% of its arable land is not used at all. On the arable land that is used in most African countries, crop yields are typically a quarter of the norm in South Africa. What’s needed, he said, are modern farming methods, seeds, fertilizers and equipment –at the level of every individual farmer.

Referring to the 2011 COP-17 world environment congress in Durban, South Africa, Ngwenya pointed out that the FANRPAN slogan is “No agriculture, no deal.” However, agriculture, and particularly the advancement of rural African agriculture, was not included in past COP objectives. Many delegates criticised this, saying it reflected the First World’s hope that Africa and African agriculture will remain primitive and underdeveloped, so that rich countries can praise Africans for being “sustainable” and protecting the planet.

Africans are being told by First World activists, politicians and pressure groups to “stay in tune with nature,” delegates noted – when this attitude really reflects a well-fed First World’s maneuver to retard African agricultural improvements.

When it came to the eternal climate change saga, FRANRPAN delegates emphasized “climate-smart agriculture” and noted that Africa has always experienced dramatic weather and climate variations. What’s needed now, they stresse, is sensible, fact-based science, to predict and adapt to local and regional climate cycles and variations.

Equally impressive was learning that a group of small-scale farmers from Burkino Faso had paid their own way to attend a meeting in Windhoek, Namibia, nearly 3,000 miles (4,500 kilometers) away, to present a petition calling for the development of evidence-based policies, to replace what to now have been emotional, harmful and oppressive policies, rules and treaties.

The delegates said they were tired of the First World telling them what to do, based on First World interests and perceptions. They understand all too well that calls for “sustainable development,” “biodiversity” and climate change “prevention” really mean demands for policies and practices that ensure sustained poverty and malnutrition.

FRANRPAN CEO Dr. Lindiwe Sibanda emphasized that the real work is done on the ground, at the level of individual countries – and “policy comes from people.” Individual countries must come to their own conclusions about what works for them, and countries must align their policies to ensure food security for their people, she said. Modern methods and technologies are also required, to enhance intra-Africa food trade and enable countries to export what they are good at producing.

Her enthusiasm was praised by a farmer who spoke from the floor, with a strong French accent. “There’s a lack of resources for small farmers to come here,” he said, even for important meetings like this, but he was glad he had spent the time and money to be there. Certainly, those that did attend exhibited enough excitement and enthusiasm for the millions who could not join them.

Chairman Ngwenya wrapped up the proceedings by criticising the apparently intentional side-stepping of agricultural issues during COP-17. The First World must stop impeding African farmers and end “the paralysis by analysis,” he said. Absolutely right.

There is far too much First World smoke and mirrors, telling Africans they are saving the planet – when the real intention is to stop them from acquiring modern technology and electricity that would allow them to surge to middle class or even rich country status.

This FANRPAN conference serves notice to the United Nations Environment Programme, Rio+20 Sustainable Development Summit, Europe, United States and other obstructionists that Africa has caught on to what they are doing – and is no longer willing to play their game.

That’s good news for every African, Asian, Latin American and other poor family that wants to eat better, live better and have the freedom to pursue their dreams.

_____

Dr. Kelvin Kemm

Dr Kelvin Kemm is a nuclear physicist and business strategy consultant in Pretoria, South Africa. He is a member of the International Board of Advisors of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), based in Washington, DC (www.CFACT.org). Dr. Kemm received the prestigious Lifetime Achievers Award of the National Science and Technology Forum of South Africa.

Team Rio – Day 1

Our arrival in Rio after a red-eye flight from the U.S. found us all tired but eager to get going with CFACT’s important work at the UN Rio+20 conference.  We knew while delegates were coming here to alarm the world about the doom and gloom facing humanity from alarmist “crisis” such as overpopulation, global warming, resource depletion (blah, blah, blah), we were showing up ready to challenge these assumptions by offering our  positive message of hope and prosperity through individual liberty, free markets and sound science.  A hard task indeed … which became apparent the moment we stepped off the plane as we were greeted with UN Rio+20 slogans everywhere you looked.

From the ten foot banners at every turn to the giant sand castles scattered along the beach shaped into Rio+20 logos, the left’s propaganda machine was in full swing.  I have to admit I was a little upset at the lack of beautiful Brazilian babes in “I have a crush on sustainability” t-shirts –  but hey it’s only day one.

To the Brazilian people this conference is probably the exact opposite of the annual “Carnival” celebration that takes place each year.  During “Carnival” people from all over the world show up, get drunk, and without a care party the night away.  Instead during Rio+20, people from all over the world show up drunk on power and make plans through the night to spend all of the western countries’ wealth away.

Team Rio will be here on point and ready to report any and all activity that aims to limit our freedom and punish us for our economic prosperity.  We will be the eyes and ears for those of you at home who are concerned about the next power grab that will inevitably come from this bureaucratic group.  On that note, I bid you ado.

Hmmmm, we just got word that 50,000 “indigenous peoples” plan to rally tomorrow … definitely better get some sleep.  I’ll update you tomorrow.

-A.K. Kamara

Collegians Midwest Coordinator

Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  Tuesday, June 12, 2012

CONTACT:  Russell Cook, 1-602-753-9141, RCookMedia@cox.net

The future we dread

Marked-up draft of UN Rio+20 agenda reveals shocking “sustainability” wish list.

An American family of four could owe the UN $1,325 per year.

The United Nations plans to make its Rio+20 Sustainable Development Conference “the most significant environmental conference in history.” A draft planning and agenda document, “The Future We Want,” marked-up by myriad ultra-liberal NGOs, provides an unvarnished look at what lurks behind Rio+20.

“Americans, their free world partners and people in developing nations who hope to lift themselves out of poverty should be on their guard. Otherwise Rio+20 could easily trap them in a future we dread,” said Craig Rucker, CEO of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, a Washington, DC-based organization that advances the needs of people, while also protecting wildlife and environmental values.

The UN’s international NGO allies want to expand previous calls for a “green economy,” by including new demands for “resource justice” and new mechanisms to ensure “contraction and convergence for over- and under-consumers of natural resources.” People do not need advanced degrees to figure out whose economies and lifestyles the activists intend to “contract,” Rucker commented.

Another agenda item would have the world end “speculation” in energy, raw material and economic markets. However, history has taught that it is extremely difficult even to define “speculation,” and that attempts to control investment, development and resource allocation frequently end in disaster.

The international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also advocate making national environmental policies subject to “international legal frameworks and regulations,” and “strengthening international environmental governance … within the institutional framework of sustainable development.” That would make national sovereignty “the most endangered species in Rio,” CFACT president David Rothbard stated.

The NGOs would place both nature and man in jeopardy, since they call for curbs on “any technologies that might imply a serious risk for the environment or human society, including in particular synthetic biology, geo-engineering, genetic modification, nuclear energy and nanotechnology,” Rothbard observed.

They would curtail the very technologies that allow us to provide for people’s needs in the most efficient, least intrusive manner. Few policies are more counterproductive than forcing people to grow low yield crops that are susceptible to insects and drought, or to rely on inefficient energy technologies, he said.

The document also seeks to impose staggering financial burdens on people in developed nations. It would give the UN 0.7% of a nation’s gross domestic product – some $1,325 per year for an American family of four. A Canadian family would pay $1,211, while their counterparts would be taxed $1,206 in Germany and $1,171 in Japan. Norwegian families would take dubious first place honors, paying a whopping $2,445 every year. Other countries’ obligations, based on World Bank 2010 data, can be found on CFACT.tv.

The NGOs most popular agenda item appears to be increased funding and powers for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which they want to turn into an international version of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “People concerned about the impacts that EPA has had on American energy prices and jobs – for minimal health or environmental benefits – should be especially wary of giving vast new powers and funding to the UNEP, which is completely unelected and unaccountable,” Rucker commented.

On climate and energy, activists claiming to be acting for “indigenous peoples” said the UN should insist that developed countries shift rapidly to low-carbon energy use. Not to be outdone, environmental NGOs are demanding that developed countries cut carbon dioxide emissions by 95% by 2050. That would take the United States back to what it emitted around the time of the Civil War, while accomplishing nothing for the climate.

To pay for this expansive eco-wish list, the United Nations and NGOs also want to give the UN authority to tax every currency conversion and financial transaction, fuel sales and air travel tickets – and seize all funds that currently provide subsidies and tax deductions for fossil fuel and nuclear power. These funds would be in addition to the extensive foreign aid already provided by taxpayers and treasuries of developed nations.

CFACT invites people to examine this remarkable document at CFACT.tv – and determine for themselves how much it actually represents “the future we want.”

The Committee is taking a delegation to Brazil to expose these potentially devastating policy proposals. “We also intend to inject some much needed common sense into the deliberations, and ensure that at least some consideration is given to the needs of real people, especially the world’s poor – and not just to the unreasonable and often outrageous demands of Deep Ecology, anti-development activists,” Rucker said.

CFACT is your best source for Rio+20 news and analysis that challenges the status quo. More information will be available soon – including video, photographs, news and commentary – at CFACT.tv, CFACT.org and ClimateDepot.com. CFACT’s experts are available to all media.

- # # # -

Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

 ADVISORY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Friday, June 8, 2012

CONTACT:

Russell Cook
602-753-9141
RCookMedia@cox.net

What’s not to like about sustainable development?

For starters, UN Rio+20 Conference threatens people, prosperity, and nature too.

CFACT will be there: exposing, debunking and offering constructive solutions.

Rio+20 is the next, huge, misguided, harmful Green push.

Radical environmentalists hope the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development can carry on where climate change left off (after the public saw through the propaganda). It is the same agenda, the same exaggerated crises and cataclysms, the same anti-hydrocarbon, anti-development solutions – but with “sustainable development” and “threats to biodiversity and species” replacing “global warming.”

The activists are heading to Brazil with an extensive wish list that attacks liberal democracy and free markets. They want to “transform” world society – regulating and rolling back developed world prosperity … restricting progress and making poverty and disease permanent fixtures in the developing world … and, ironically, harming nature in the process. They also want a tax on financial transactions worldwide, to provide permanent funding and power for the unelected, unaccountable United Nations.

CFACT is headed to Brazil to expose these dreadful, potentially devastating policy proposals – and inject some much needed common sense and attention to people’s needs into the deliberations.

CFACT’s team arrives in Rio June 12. Our delegation will cover the UN organizing meeting in Rio, June 13-15, send part of its delegation to the ICLEI/Agenda 21 World Congress in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, June 14-17 – and regroup for the Rio+20 summit, June 20-22.

CFACT’s team will feature Marc Morano, creator of CFACT’s award-winning ClimateDepot.com, Lord Christopher Monckton, and CFACT president David Rothbard, executive director Craig Rucker, senior policy advisor Paul Driessen and our hard-working staff.  Bios and photos are available at CFACT.tv.

“We are going to shout a wake-up call,” said Rucker, “loud and clear. People need to know just how radical and destructive the agenda that’s being promoted for Rio+20 would actually be.”

Reporters seeking first-hand insight into the Rio+20 negotiations or looking to balance their reporting with solid facts to counter radical Rio pronouncements should look to CFACT. Our featured commentators are well known for cogent, insightful, informative and witty analysis that will add solid value to any account of Rio+20. CFACT’s delegation is available to all media.

“There is danger brewing in Rio that has not been adequately covered,” Rothbard said. “There is also a tragic likelihood that an historic opportunity will go to waste – a chance to wake up and change direction.  Freedom, prosperity, science and technology – what we like to call ‘constructive sustainability’ – is the only genuine path to achieve all that is best for our planet and people too.”

More available soon, including usable video, photography, news and commentary at CFACT.tv, CFACT.org and ClimateDepot.com. Local Brazil contact information is forthcoming.

- # # # -

The Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 6 December, 2011

Media Advisory

CFACT press conference to feature U.S. Senator Inhofe

Wednesday, 7 December, 15:30 Room Kosi Palm (ICC Level 2)

DURBAN, South Africa, Dec. 6, 2011 — On Wednesday, 7 December at 15:30 CFACT will cosponsor a press conference with U.S. Senator James Inhofe in Room Kosi Palm (ICC level 2).

On Tuesday, CFACT conducted a highly publicized parachute drop which called attention to Climategate 2.0 (details including usable video of the drop and Lord Monckton jumping from the plane at www.CFACT.tv).

The Wednesday press conference will feature an analysis from Senator Inhofe of the prospects of a new climate treaty in the U.S. Senate.  The conference will also feature the release of Marc Morano’s (editor in chief of ClimateDepot.com) new report “From A-Z” which details troubles and failings in what has been falsely proclaimed by global warming advocates to be a “settled scientific consensus.”

“Climate Depot’s new A-Z report reveals that the great man-made global warming catastrophe that was predicted – has been cancelled.” Morano said.  “The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim — from A-Z — the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing and in many instances going in the opposite direction. The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts. This Climate Depot special report categorizes and indexes the full range of climate developments in a handy A-Z reference guide from the Antarctic to Polar Bears to Mount Kilimanjaro to Sea Levels to Global temperatures to hurricanes and tornados.”

Nobel Prize nominee, Leon Louw, Executive Director of South Africa’s Free Market Institute, will discuss the devastating impact climate policy has had on the economies of both the developed and developing world and the crippling hindrance it poses to the poor.

South African nuclear physicist Dr. Kelvin Kemm will discuss global warming policy providing a unique South African analysis.

Lord Christopher Monckton, freshly rested from his parachute jump to call attention to Climategate 2.0, will explain exactly why it would be a mistake to adopt a new treaty in Durban along the lines of the failed Kyoto Protocol.

“Secretary Figueres is telling the COP that she can obtain a new commitment period in Durban.”  Said CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker.  “After she hears what Senator Inhofe has to say, she may want to reevaluate her wishful thinking.”

Go to www.CLIMATEDEPOT.com for details on Climategate 2.0.  More information on CFACT’s mission to Durban at www.CFACT.tv. Also at www.CFACT.org, & www.CFACT.eu.

 - # # # -

Earlier today, CFACT’s skydiving team parachuted past COP17 onto Amanzimtoti beach. The divers trailed smoke and banners proclaiming “Climategate 2.0, Science Not Settled” and “No New Treaty.” Multiple media outlets showed up to record the event, including the AP, BBC, and South Africa’s national news network. It was a huge success! Climategate 2.0 can not be ignored!

The second batch of emails from scientists working on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contain shocking revelations which show an insular cadre of climate scientists coordinating efforts to place advocacy ahead of science, stifle dissent, and conceal information which detracts from a preconceived, ideologically driven, global warming narrative.

“Media covering COP17 are kidding themselves if they think they can ignore and wish away Climategate 2.0,” said CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker. “Lord Monckton, the folks from Climate Depot and I will carry our message by parachute if that’s what it takes to wake up this conference and place the Climategate evidence of corrupted science where the world must see it.”

CFACT skydivers trailing banners over Durban, South Africa

The Climategate emails provide a shockingly candid look at the machinations of the high priests of global warming. They have given rise to renewed demands that the IPCC, EU and the EPA cancel existing plans and programs to cap and tax carbon emissions. These misguided policies already have created economic havoc in Europe, cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. and pose a major threat to the world economy.

Marc Morano, publisher of CFACT’s ClimateDepot.com, said that the emails reveal the scientists at the heart of the manmade global warming industry have been “caught red-handed exaggerating the extent of manmade global warming while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as strong as they were claiming.”

The new emails led Morano to conclude that they “… further expose the upper echelon of the UN IPCC as being more interested in crafting a careful narrative than following the evidence.” He notes, for example, that Penn State professor Michael Mann stated in one email that, “The important thing is to make sure they’re [climate skeptics] losing the PR battle.” The University of East Anglia’s Keith Briffa (a colleague of the already discredited EAU Climate Research Center head Phil Jones) also chimed in, “I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!”

Rucker further noted that “The release of these emails is yet another major setback for alarmists who are hyping fears over climate change in order to exercise influence over ever-increasing segments of the U.S. and world economy.”

CFACT skydiver trailing banner reading "Climategate 2.0, Science Not Settled"

CFACT, which has been a fully accredited non-governmental organization at these UN events for two decades, will be closely monitoring and offering daily reports on the developments in Durban. Rucker says the new emails provide even stronger reasons to oppose such radical Green initiatives as the World Wildlife Fund-Oxfam proposal for a new $25 per ton global tax on shipping with the goal of curtailing carbon emissions; the call by Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela for a new climate tax on worldwide financial transactions; and a proposed new “sustainability treaty.”

As Rucker notes, “The real agenda of the climate alarmists is to promote massively expanded government regulation worldwide, at the expense of jobs creation and economic growth. The policies they advocate will do the greatest harm to the world’s poorest people and ensure that citizens of developing nations have no chance at true freedom and prosperity.”

Gandhi told us, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” CFACT’s parachute drop will force the media to cease ignoring the evidence. CFACT looks forward to winning.

Go to www.CLIMATEDEPOT.com for details on Climategate 2.0. More information on CFACT’s mission to Durban at www.CFACT.tv. Also at www.CFACT.org, & www.CFACT.eu.

The Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 5, 2011

Climategate 2.0 parachutes into COP17

CFACT skydivers to tow banners into UN Durban conference
Lord Monckton, Craig Rucker, Climate Depot to parachute
Emails exposing  biased science cannot be ignored

On Tuesday, December 6 at 11:00 AM, CFACT skydivers will parachute past COP17 trailing banners demanding attention to the Climategate 2.0 emails.  The skydiving team will land at Toti beach.  Media and all interested persons are invited to the beach to observe the landing.

The second batch of emails from scientists working on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contain shocking revelations which show an insular cadre of climate scientists coordinating efforts to place advocacy ahead of science, stifle dissent,  and conceal information which detracts from a preconceived, ideologically driven, global warming narrative.

“Media covering COP17 are kidding themselves if they think they can ignore and wish away Climategate 2.0,” said CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker.  “Lord Monckton, the folks from Climate Depot and I will carry our message by parachute if that’s what it takes to wake up this conference and place the Climategate evidence of corrupted science where the world must see it.”

The Climategate emails provide a shockingly candid look at the machinations of the high priests of global warming.  They have given rise to renewed demands that the IPCC, EU and the EPA cancel existing plans and programs to cap and tax carbon emissions.  These misguided policies already have created economic havoc in Europe, cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. and pose a major threat to the world economy.

Marc Morano, publisher of CFACT’s ClimateDepot.com, said that the emails reveal the scientists at the heart of the manmade global warming industry have been “caught red-handed exaggerating the extent of man-made global warming while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as strong as they were claiming.”

The new emails led Morano to conclude that they “… further expose the upper echelon of the UN IPCC as being more interested in crafting a careful narrative than following the evidence.”  He notes, for example, that Penn State professor Michael Mann stated in one email that, “The important thing is to make sure they’re [climate skeptics] losing the PR battle.”  The University of East Anglia’s Keith Briffa (a colleague of the already discredited EAU Climate Research Center head Phil Jones) also chimed in, “I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!”

Rucker further noted that “The release of these emails is yet another major setback for alarmists who are hyping fears over climate change in order to exercise influence over ever-increasing segments of the U.S. and world economy.”

CFACT, which has been a fully accredited non-governmental organization at these UN events for two decades, will be closely monitoring and offering daily reports on the developments in Durban.  Rucker says the new emails provide even stronger reasons to oppose such radical Green initiatives as the World Wildlife Fund-Oxfam proposal for a new $25 per ton global tax on shipping with the goal of curtailing carbon emissions; the call by Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela for a new climate tax on worldwide financial transactions; and a proposed new “sustainability treaty.”

As Rucker notes, “The real agenda of the climate alarmists is to promote massively expanded government regulation  worldwide, at the expense of jobs creation and economic growth.  The policies they advocate will do the greatest harm to the world’s poorest people and ensure that citizens of developing nations have no chance at true freedom and prosperity.”

Gandhi told us, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”  CFACT’s parachute drop will force the media to cease ignoring the evidence.  CFACT looks forward to winning.

Go to www.CLIMATEDEPOT.com for details on Climategate 2.0.  More information on CFACT’s mission to Durban at www.CFACT.tv. Also at www.CFACT.org, & www.CFACT.eu.

 - # # # -

The usual sideshow has been assembled. You can find rows of displays making their standard pleas for your tax dollars. Wind farms, solar, mass redistribution in the name of “climate justice,” and all the usual scare tactics have assembled.

Oxfam actually sat at a conference table they had carried into the waves of the Indian Ocean. But the sea level had not risen – not in any meaningful way. They carried their table to the same place on the beach where the waves would have found them years ago, or had humankind never engaged in commerce, industry, or had the temerity to harness fire in the first place.

Carbon profiteers and the global warming left sense that the annual climate party isn’t quite the same shindig it once was. They are pulling out their usual tricks, but the public has seen through them.

For the massive global warming industry, all hope vests now in the technocrats. Behind closed doors, out of site of the huge plenary session and the NGO freak show, a very small cadre of bureaucrats are meeting. They dream of treaties, but these skilled inside operators won’t let that stop them. They are putting together side agreements which permit them a way to work around such inconvenient obstacles as the U.S. Senate and whichever protections have been created to protect the sovereignty of other nations. Do not underestimate, the potency and cost of these side agreements.

Global warming is about money. Billions. They want to make it trillions. Those cashing in on this fortune will not go gentle into that dark night. The Green Climate Fund alone is now set at $100 billion and they are pushing in Durban to make it $400 billion. $400 billion may sound like a lot of money, but it is only a very small slice of the global warming pie. Consider the subsidies, set asides, guarantees, handouts, grants, shakedowns, etc. The money is vast and the special interests protecting it are legion.

The global warming cause may not be what it was, but make no mistake – the danger in Durban is real. The climatecrats will leave Africa with their money intact and with fresh plans to renew their assault upon the economy of the free world next year.

Mainstream science, politics, bureaucracy, academe, banking, business, media – all were of one mind. The West, so the playbook ran, must be shut down at once to Save The Planet from “global warming”, er, “climate change”, um, “climate disruption”, no, “extreme-weather events”, ah, that is, “energy-security challenges”. Shale gas? That would solve everything. Hundreds of years’ global supply. No more peak oil. Low carbon footprint. Ban it quick.

I find myself with CFACT in Durban among the creatures of “consensus” for the annual UN climate gabfest. Yet the party line was wrong. At a recent dinner for the inconvenient economist Bjorn Lomborg in London, I first uttered the three fateful words that now fill the hearts of the world’s governing climate racketeers with dread.

“It. Isn’t. Happening.”

When I plopped these three plump pebbles into the conversation, there was a ripple of aghast silence. It was as though I’d perpetrated what the Professor of Greek at Cambridge used to call a “gaseous halation” in front of the Queen.

Most of the diners were climate skeptics. But they were making a bundle out of it. The skeptics had almost as much of a direct, cash vested interest in flogging the long-dead horse of climatic apocalypse as the prophets and profiteers of climate doom.

It just wasn’t the done thing to poop on the party by pointing out that every dire prediction that the usual suspects had made with such sneering arrogance has failed.

Just look. Professor “Phil” Jones of the “University” of East Anglia had to admit, when the BBC’s chief environmental campaigner – er, “correspondent” – put to him a question I’d drafted – that there had been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. Oops! The UN’s models had not predicted that.

Arctic sea ice was supposed to be gone by 2013. Then it rebounded. Then it was going to reach a new low on 15 September this year, when Al Gore launched his Titanic “Climate Unreality” project. The ice did not oblige. Gore hit a berg that somehow hadn’t melted. His project sank. Even his fellow fortune-hunters in the Green[back] movement now disown his bleating attribution of every recent natural disaster to “global warming”.

Antarctic sea ice has been on the up throughout the satellite era. Global sea ice shows little trend in 30 years.

Polar bears were supposed to be headed for extinction. The fossils on the Supreme Court said so (but they’ve been extinct for years). Today there are five times as many polar bears as 70 years ago.

Kilimanjaro has been losing ice since 1880. Most of the summit glacier had gone by 1936, when Hemingway wrote The Snows. “Global warming” could not have caused the recent ice loss: NASA says the region has been cooling for 30 years. The summit temperature, monitored by satellites, has not changed. Now the glacier is growing again.

Sea level is the big one. James Hansen of NASA, who made more than $1 million out of the climate scare last year alone, had predicted it would rise imminently by 246 feet. Was he right? No. The increase over the past eight years, according to the Envisat satellite, was at a rate equivalent to 2 inches per century. Not meters, not even feet. Inches. Two of them. Per century. Gee wow golly gosh! Take to the boats!

Malaria was going to spread because of “global warming”. Yet the terrible leap in mortality from 50,000 to 1 million child deaths a year occurred a generation ago, when the Environmental Defense Fund – which, with Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund, spent $1 billion of taxpayers’ and donors’ cash on anti-Western pseudo-enviro propaganda last year alone – successfully campaigned for a worldwide ban on DDT, the only effective agent against the mosquitoes that carry malaria.

When the Board of the EDF met to plan the DDT ban, its then legal advisor, Victor John Yannacone Jr., begged it to ban only outdoor use: DDT sprayed inside houses would harm only the mosquitoes and spare the children.

The then chairman, furious, fired Yannacone on the spot. As he left the room, someone said: “That’s the last time we employ anyone who knows any science.” That ban has killed 40 million children.

Extreme-weather deaths are down sharply. Global tropical-cyclone and hurricane activity is almost at its least in 30 years. Severe tornadoes have declined. Patterns of drought and flood remain as unpredictable and as devastating as ever. Bangladesh and nearly all of the Pacific atolls are gaining land mass, not losing it.

Net primary productivity of trees and plants worldwide is up. If you want a greener planet, add as much CO2 to the air as you can. Your emissions are also helping to stave off the next Ice Age. It’s already 6000 years overdue.

Yet the dreary, wasteful, pointless congresses of the greedy feeble-minded continue. The Bali Road-Map to Nowhere. The Copenhagen World-Government Treaty that collapsed as soon as it saw the light of day. The Cancun Concordats to establish 1000 – yes, 1000 – new bureaucracies: the structure of the unelected world government that every ex-politician from Gore and Chirac to Attali is demanding.

Everyone says nothing will happen at Durban. That worries me. It suggests the process of building a totalitarian global junta by what one UN official at Cancun called “transparent impenetrability” – publishing documents of such prolix length and complex obscurantism that no one can understand a word and yet no one can later deny the information was available – will invisibly gather pace.

Lord Reith, the BBC’s first chairman, laying the foundation-stone of what is now the abomination of desolation called Harlow New Town, was heard to mutter, “You’re not going to like it, but you’re going to have it!”

So it will be with the Marxists’ wet dream that is global totalitarian dictatorship. You’re not going to like it. But the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and I are in Durban to stop them. So perhaps you’re not going to have it after all.

From my vantage point here in South Africa, I could hardly miss the major build-up to the COP-17 United Nations world environment and climate conference, which is being held November 28 to December 9 in Durban, where I went to school and university.

For weeks international news broadcasts spoke of “the road to Durban,” and people of all ranks made daily comments concerning issues to be addressed at COP-17. Conference organisers announced that bottled water would be limited, or even prohibited, because making, shipping and disposing of plastic bottles was not environmentally sound – and in any event Durban tap water is so good that anyone can safely drink water out of any tap, whether in a hotel room, restaurant or back yard garden hose. I agree with both points; Durban municipal water is excellent everywhere.

Other images also drifted through my mind, such as those of legendary scientist and philosopher Galileo, who dared to announce that it was not the sun that orbited the earth, but the planets, including the earth, which orbited the sun. The ruling establishment of the day jumped on Galileo, threatening him with dire consequences if he did not toe the politically correct line and recant his claims. He did so to avoid burning at the stake but was placed under house arrest anyway, to ensure that he did not spread his views, and his book was banned.

Many years later, during the French Revolution, baying mobs in Paris streets were ready to chop the heads off anyone perceived not to be part of the New World Order. Even scientist Antoine Lavoisier, the discoverer of oxygen and hydrogen, was one of many unfortunate people who lost their heads to French guillotines.

Today, I fear we are experiencing similar, though less lethal, sentiments on topics of so-called global warming, global climate change, global climate disruption and weather “weirding.” In far too many instances, any person who dares to challenge official dogma is branded a “denier” and treated as an enemy of society. This is not merely sad; it is dangerous to all mankind.

Chanting climate change advocacy groups want non-compliant businesses and industries found guilty of crimes against the planet, so that condemned industrialists can be hunted down and punished. This is destructive of reasoned scientific debate, affordable energy and modern civilization.

The asserted evidence that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is totally to blame for any observed climate changes is at best scientifically very shaky. There are far too many holes in the theory for it to pass the conventional rigour that should be applied to any scientific debate.

The evidence shows serious deviations between CO₂ claims, computer models and computer-generated forecasts and scenarios, on the one hand – and actual observations and measurements of temperature and weather, on the other hand. Historical and archaeological evidence (of major climate and weather changes and extremes) likewise do not support claims that allegedly stable climate conditions have suddenly been thrown into disarray by human greenhouse gas emissions.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and observed temperature changes over the past century simply do not correlate nearly as well as necessary for proper scientific analysis. Similarly, historical evidence clearly demonstrates that there was a Medieval Warm Period (MWP) of great health, wealth and prosperity, during which temperatures were warmer than today’s, but with no anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the equation.

Archaeology and history also show that successful Viking settlements died out in Greenland after the MWP, as a significant 500-year-long period of global cooling set in. The coldest point of this Little Ice Age was the well-documented Maunder Minimum, when ice fairs were held on London’s frozen Thames River. Contemporary paintings of these frozen festivals still exist today.

Similar long-term periods, such as the Roman Warming, have likewise been documented, as have lengthy periods of droughts and floods in various ancient societies – to say nothing of major ice ages and interglacial periods that affected much of Europe and North and South America. Previous significant climatic changes are hardly rare events. However, for obvious reasons, the global warming advocacy faction does not want to discuss these historical periods.

Moreover, over the past decade, significant new scientific evidence has suggested that observed global warming can probably be explained largely or entirely by changes in solar activity and thus cosmic ray incidence on earth, consequent changes in cloud cover and atmospheric water vapour levels, periodic shifts in oceanic temperatures and currents, and other natural phenomena.

Why, then, do we witness repeated attempts to demonize and bury any hint that solar activity is a principal cause of observed global warming? Why do climate change alarmists seek to suppress evidence that the Earth has not warmed and may even have cooled slightly since 1998? Why do so many Climategate 1.0 and 2.0 emails reflect much more private uncertainty among alarmist climate scientists than they have been willing to admit publicly?

These actions are much too close to the Galileo and French Revolution affairs for comfort.

Even worse, misguided government and corporate policies and actions worldwide – in response to the false science and high pressure tactics – will be highly detrimental to mankind, especially poor families that will be trapped in perpetual poverty, disease, malnutrition and premature death.

We can only hope that future generations will not group the Galileo, French Revolution and climate change eras as similar Dark Ages, when “establishment” zealots and easily inflamed crowds suppressed science and analytical truth.

Let us hope, instead, that at least some world leaders will have the courage to stand up at COP-17 and demand the kind of scientific rigour that brought so much enlightenment and progress over the centuries. Proper due diligence in Durban requires nothing less.

Only then will poverty be eradicated, and health and environmental conditions improve, for billions of people all over our planet.

Dr. Kelvin Kemm is a CFACT scientific advisor. He holds a PhD in nuclear physics, is currently CEO of Stratek and lives in Pretoria, South Africa.

The Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 23, 2011

Climategate 2.0 exposes climate science hypocrisy on eve of UN’s Durban Conference

A second batch of leaked emails from scientists working on board and alongside the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have come to light. They contain shocking revelations which show an insular cadre of climate scientists coordinating efforts to place advocacy ahead of science, stifle dissent, and conceal information which detracts from a preconceived, ideologically driven, global warming narrative.

This shockingly candid look at the machinations of the high priests of global warming has given rise to renewed demands that the EPA, EU and global community cancel existing plans and programs designed to radically lower or cap and tax carbon emissions. These misguided policies already have created economic havoc in Europe, cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. and pose a major threat to the world economy.

Marc Morano, publisher of CFACT’s ClimateDepot.com, said that the emails, known collectively as Climategate 2.0, “arrived to drain what little life there was left in the man-made global warming movement.”

The new emails led Morano to conclude that they “… further expose the upper echelon of the UN IPCC as being more interested in crafting a careful narrative than following the evidence.” He notes, for example, that Penn State professor Michael Mann stated in one email that, “The important thing is to make sure they’re [climate skeptics] losing the PR battle.” The University of East Anglia’s Keith Briffa (a colleague of the already discredited EAU Climate Research Center head Phil Jones) also chimed in, “I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!”

The revelations come just as thousands are preparing to descend on Durban, South Africa, for the IPCC’s COP 17 Climate Change conference that begins on November 28th. CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker noted that “The release of these emails is yet another major setback for alarmists who are hyping fears over climate change in order to exercise influence over ever-increasing segments of the U.S. and world economy.”

CFACT, which has been a fully accredited non-governmental organization at these UN events for two decades, will be closely monitoring and offering daily reports on the developments in Durban. Rucker says the new emails provide even stronger reasons to oppose such radical Green initiatives as the World Wildlife Fund-Oxfam proposal for a new $25 per ton global tax on shipping with the goal of curtailing carbon emissions; the call by Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela for a new climate tax on worldwide financial transactions; and a proposed new “sustainability treaty.”

As Rucker notes, “The real agenda of the climate radicals is to promote massively expanded government regulation worldwide, at the expense of jobs creation and economic growth. The policies they advocate will do the greatest harm to the world’s poorest people and ensure that citizens of developing nations have no chance at true freedom and prosperity.”

Go to www.CLIMATEDEPOT.com for details on Climategate 2.0. More information on CFACT’s mission to Durban at www.CFACT.tv. Also at www.CFACT.org, & www.CFACT.eu.

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PRETORIA – From my vantage point here in South Africa, I am aware of the momentum of the major build-up to the next big United Nations world environment conference, COP 17, which will be held in December, in Durban, the city where I went to school and university. I am honored to be part of CFACT’s delegation to the Durban conference. We’ve certainly got our work cut out for us.

We hear of ‘the road to Durban’ on international news broadcasts and, daily, people of all ranks are making comments on the issues to be addressed at COP 17. The conference organizers have already announced that the availability of bottled water will be limited, or, perhaps, prohibited because Durban tap water is so good that anyone can drink water out of any tap – be it in a hotel room, restaurant or back garden. Curtailing bottled water will limit the environmental impact of all the plastic bottles, water transport, refuse transport, and so on. I agree with that – Durban municipal water is excellent everywhere.

I find other images also drifting through my mind, such as those of legendary scientist and philosopher Galileo, who dared to announce that he was of the opinion that it was not the sun that orbited the earth but that it was actually the other way around. He stated that it was the planets, including the earth, which orbited the sun. The establishment of the day jumped on Galileo and he was threatened with dire consequences if he did not toe the establishment line and recant his claims. He was forced to recant to stay alive, but he was placed under house arrest anyway to make sure that he did not spread his views, and his book was banned.

Many years later, when the French Revolution took place, there were baying mobs in the streets of Paris ready to chop off the head of anyone who was perceived not to be part of the new order. French scientist Antoine Lavoisier, the discoverer of both oxygen and hydrogen, was one of the unfortunate people to lose his head to the French guillotine.

In modern times, I fear that we are experiencing similar sentiments to those of the Galileo period and the French Revolution period, when the topics of climate change and global warming are discussed. In far too many instances, any person who dares to challenge the climate status quo is branded a denier and is treated as an enemy of society. This is not only sad, but is also dangerous to all of mankind.

A chanting climate change advocacy group that wants modern business and industry to be guilty so that the branded anti- social industrialists can be hunted down and punished is destructive to reasoned scientific debate about climate change issues.

The scientific evidence that anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) is solely to blame for any observed climate change is scientifically very shaky. There are far too many holes in the theory for it to pass the conventional rigour that should be applied to scientific debate.

The scientific evidence shows serious deviations from the CO2 claims, as does the historical and archaeological evidence, to just brush it aside.

The CO2 concentrations and observed temperature changes over the past century just do not correlate anywhere near as much as is necessary for scientific rigour.

Historical evidence clearly tells us that there was a Medieval Warm Period (MWP) of great health, wealth and prosperity during which temperatures were warmer than currently, but with no anthropogenic CO2 in the equation.

Archaeology and history show us that successful Viking settlements died out in Greenland after the MWP, as a global cooling period, set in, the coldest point of which is well documented as the Maunder Minimum. Ice fairs were held on the frozen River Thames in London. Contemporary paintings of these frozen festivals still exist today.

The global warming advocacy faction does not want to discuss these previous global warm and cold periods. In fact, there are more such periods in the records, such as the Roman Warming, so previous significant climatic changes are not rare events.

In the past decade, significant scientific evidence came to light to indicate that observed global warming can probably be entirely explained by cosmic ray incidence on earth, linked to the magnetic shielding of our earth, which, in turn, links to solar activity, as measured by sun spot activity.

This theory fits the facts very well, so why do we witness a paranoia to demonise and bury any hint of solar activity being the cause of observed global warming? Why is the fact that 1998 has been the warmest year in modern times, and since then gradual global cooling has been occurring, being so efficiently suppressed by many?

Such action is far too close to the Galileo affair and the response of the crowds during the French Revolution.

False and misguided government and corporate policy and actions worldwide will be highly detrimental to mankind in the coming decades, if it is based on misguided and inaccurate climate science conclusions.

In the future, mankind must not look back at history and group the Galileo era, the French Revolution era and climate change era as being similar for the rapid crowd suppression of the analytical truth.

Let us hope that some world leaders at COP 17 have the courage to stand up and demand scientific rigour of the type that has been developed over centuries.

Science and sensible analysis must triumph over reactionary crowd theory worship in the international climate science debate.

Dr. Kelvin Kemm is a CFACT scientific advisor. He holds a PhD in nuclear physics, is currently CEO of Stratek and lives in Pretoria, South Africa.

The Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

A D V I S O R Y

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 16, 2011

CONTACT: Audrey Mullen, +1 (703) 548-1160

CFACT to debunk climate propaganda and provide

balanced perspective at UN’s COP17 in Durban, South Africa

Lord Monckton, Marc Morano, Dr. Kelvin Kemm, Dr. Leon Louw, Craig Rucker

Available for all media

 Ready to rise above personal attacks, innuendo and unbalanced repetition of extreme global warming pronouncements?

Journalists seeking to improve upon the annual one-sided climate conference propaganda fest, kindly take notice:

CFACT, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (an international NGO and veteran of numerous UN conferences) is your go-to source to include balanced, open-minded perspective in your reporting.

CFACT will lead a learned, witty, well-informed, but unabashedly skeptical delegation to COP17, the UN Conference on Climate Change, November 28 to December 9 in Durban, South Africa.  CFACT’s delegation will be available for interviews and media appearances before, during and after COP17.

“Every December campaigners, bureaucrats and those seeking to cash in on climate, fly to a resort where the media parrots every dire or vitriolic pronouncement no matter how baseless or extreme,” said CFACT’s Craig Rucker who will lead the delegation.   “Polls show the public is tired of the hype and wants more.  CFACT is ready to clear the air once and for all.  Will the media rise to the occasion?”

Marc Morano, who publishes CFACT’s “Climate Depot” will feature his report “From A-Z” which details a full gamut of failures in the argument for global warming.

Lord Monckton and Marc Morano both make extremely articulate, informed and interesting guests on television and radio and offer valuable balance for print and online journalism.  Kelvin Kemm and Leon Louw will offer unique South African perspectives.  Craig Rucker co-founded CFACT well over two decades ago and offers a wealth of public policy experience.

Global warming science and policy is anything but settled.  CFACT looks forward to engaging in a balanced, civil, informed and genuine dialogue in Durban.

More details as well as contact information in Durban will be forthcoming at www.CFACT.tv.  Comment and news also at www.CFACT.org, www.CLIMATEDEPOT.com & www.CFACT.eu.

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This is important.

We cannot allow climate propaganda and radical policies at the UN to go unchallenged.

CFACT has assembled an outstanding delegation of climate and policy experts to keep you informed about this important conference as it happens and to ensure your voice is heard in the negotiations.

We cannot do it alone. Join CFACT and become a key sponsor of this important diplomatic initiative. Your gift of any amount large or small, $25, $50, $100, $500 or more, the best help you can offer, is needed right now to permit us to inject vital information from Lord Christopher Monckton, Dr. Kelvin Kemm, Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Leon Louw, Professor Fred Singer and more into the negotiations.

President Obama would like to bypass the Senate and use this conference to commit us to a new rash of spending, regulation, redistribution and energy restrictions that will do great harm to our economy and freedoms. CFACT is taking on Obama, Gore and the UN on their home turf. We need your support and need it now.

CFACT spins the wheel

Washington, D.C. — Collegians For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) is attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with interactive criticism of President Barack Obama’s – a giant hamster wheel.

CFACT is allowing CPAC attendees to run in a human sized hamster wheel that powers a small light bulb.  CFACT’s National Director Bill Gilles explains, “Considering the restrictions President Obama wants to put on energy production and the failure of government subsidized wind and solar, we may very well be reduced to running in the hamster wheel to produce the energy we need.”

According to CFACT’s policy advisor Paul Driessen, “America runs on abundant, reliable, affordable energy to support jobs and living standards, and power homes, schools, offices, factories, campuses, hospitals, computers and internet services. Nearly 85% of our nation’s energy still comes from oil, gas and coal. Making energy more expensive, less reliable and less accessible destroys jobs, reduces living standards, and hurts poor and minority families.”

President Obama stated on the campaign trail that, “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.

President Obama called for a “renewable portfolio standard” in his 2011 State of the Union Address.  He wants 80% of America’s electricity to come from “clean energy sources” by 2035.  Gilles commented, “The hamster wheel may be clean, but it’s no more practical than the wind and solar sources President Obama calls for.”

Driessen states that, “We need to let free markets tap America’s energy resources and creative potential.  Government should set rules that prevent harm to people and the environment, and then let our vibrant marketplace create the technologies, opportunities and jobs we need.”

CFACT is borrowing the human sized hamster wheel from the Randolph College Physics Department.  CFACT organizer Christina Wilson noted, “In no way should the generosity of the physics club be construed as an endorsement of our message, but we are grateful to them for lending us the wheel.”

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It is time to say “well done, but now let’s get busy!” A year-end gift will help CFACT close the books on a very effective 2010, then hit the ground running in 2011.  CFACT has become the preeminent organization presenting constructive alternatives to green radicalism that hold the left at bay.  Your gift will have a direct impact on our educational programs and on our award-winning outreach. Whether it’s Climate Depot, campus activism, innovative analysis, first-rate journalism, sound science, lampooning hypocrisy, or going toe to toe with the UN on it’s own turf, CFACT is the best investment anyone can make who values liberty, prosperity, technology, free markets, and the rule of law. Join us. Together we can make a real difference in 2011.

Make your contribution today!

On one side of this tropical strip, UN delegates, media, and observers shuttle between luxurious hotels, posh restaurants, a white sandy beach with turquoise water, and a modern convention center where they spend their time bemoaning man-made climate change and planning the energy future for the rest of the globe.

One the other side of the Cancun “Hotel Zoneria,” just 10 or 15 kilometers from downtown, live countless numbers of Mexican families without electricity, running water, or any of the other modern conveniences we in the developed world take for granted everyday.

It was to this other side that CFACT traveled, bringing delegates and reporters to see what energy poverty looks like, up-close and in-person. (Click here to read more)

CFACT is now funding the installation of the school’s first electric lights.

Executive Director, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow

This was a big day for CFACT at COP16. We held our press conference in the Cancunmesse. The last few days have been jam packed.

Yesterday my colleague David Rothbard reported on the tour CFACT conducted of a Mexican village minutes from the conference where people live without electricity. While we heard tales of how hard it is to cook when you can’t afford fuel, Marc Morano, founder of CFACT’s award winning Climate Depot web site released a major new report which turns the idea of consensus science on its head.

Morano’s 321-page report lists 1,000 + scientists who dissent over man-made global warming. “I am ashamed of what climate science has become today,” Swedish climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring is quoted as saying in the report. “The science community is relying on an inadequate model to blame CO2 and innocent citizens for global warming in order to generate funding and to gain attention. If this is what ‘science’ has become today, I, as a scientist, am ashamed…Science is too important for our society to be misused in the way it has been done within the Climate Science Community.” At the press conference David Rothbard told those assembled that there is not now and never has been a scientific consensus supporting catastrophic man-made warming, nor is consensus an appropriate scientific approach. Science must be grounded in such inconvenient approaches as fact, openness and verification. The Morano report can be downloaded at www.ClimateDepot.com.

CFACT’s press conference featured Lord Christopher Monckton and Dr. Roy Spencer who co-developed NASA’s temperature measuring satellite service.

Dr. Spencer challenged a paper on cloud feedback released by Dr. Andrew Dessler in Science today. “Andy Dessler’s study will not stand hard scrutiny.” He told us. “COP16 delegates worried about the ongoing credibility problems of climate modeling will find no solace in Dessler’s work.” Dr. Spencer explained that prevailing climate models do not adequately account for feedbacks and are particularly weak in accounting for the effect of clouds which his research shows produce negative feedback. Prevailing climate models are not adequate to reliably predict future climate, overstate warming trends, and should not be used as a basis in which to undertake severe action.

Lord Monckton told us that policies being proposed at the conference pose a threat to national sovereignty and individual freedom. He released a statement which provides a peek into the massive bureaucracy proposed by climate campaigners. No one expects this bureaucracy to be effective at anything other than moving us another step towards ineffective world government, imposing massive burdens on working people and of course raking in cash.

COP16 has been marked by failure to advance a climate treaty with even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon terming the negotiations “fruitless.” The climate debate, which started with bullying, name calling, fear and intimidation, is gradually becoming more balanced, despite the massive funds and resources available to promote alarmist views. Opinion polls show public acceptance of the case for catastrophic man-made global warming continuing to slide.

The best COP16 seems able to hope for at the moment is minor agreements, with a large transfer of wealth over deforestation the strongest prospect. No treaty appears possible at COP16 and no treaty is warranted. Both the science and proposed solutions to any warming are unsound. However, last-minute back room deals are always a possibility at these conferences. Anything arising from such a deal will be a negative and CFACT strongly warns against rushing in.

Absent a hail Mary pass it continues to look as if Kyoto will remain dead. With the warming scare subsiding and no new treaty likely, if your paycheck is dependent on the global warming industry, this would be a smart time to start seeking career counseling.

The Dessler Cloud Feedback Paper in Science:

Step Backward for Climate Research

Statement of Dr. Roy W. Spencer

Principal Research Scientist

The University of Alabama Huntsville

How clouds respond to warming – the ‘cloud feedback’ problem – will likely determine whether manmade global warming becomes either the defining environmental event of the 21^st Century, or is merely lost in the noise of natural climate variability.

Unfortunately, diagnosing cloud feedback from our global satellite observations has been surprisingly difficult. The problem isn’t the quality of the data, though. The problem is figuring out what the cloud and temperature behaviors we observe in the data mean in terms of cause and effect.

So, Andy Dessler’s (a Texas A&M climate researcher) new paper appearing in Science this week is potentially significant, for it claims to have greatly closed the gap in our understanding of cloud feedback.

Dessler’s paper claims to show that cloud feedback is indeed positive, and generally supportive of the cloud feedbacks exhibited by the IPCC computerized climate models.  This would in turn support the IPCC’s claim that anthropogenic global warming will become an increasingly serious problem in the future.

Unfortunately, the central evidence contained in the paper is weak at best, and seriously misleading at worst. It uses flawed logic to ignore recent advancements we have made in identifying cloud feedback.

In fact, the new paper is like going back to using only X-rays for medical imaging when we already have MRI technology available to us.

What the New Study Shows

So what is this new evidence of positive cloud feedback that Dessler has published? Well, actually it is not new.  It’s basically the same evidence we published in the Journal of Geophysical Research earlier this year, available at:

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/Spencer-Braswell-JGR-2010.pdf

Yet we came to a very different conclusion, which was that the only clear evidence of feedback we found in the data was of strongly negative cloud feedback.

But how can this be? How can two climate researchers, using the same dataset, come to opposite conclusions?

The answer lies in an issue that challenges researchers in most scientific disciplines – separating cause from effect.

Dessler’s claim (and the IPCC party line) is that cloud changes are caused by temperature changes, and not the other way around.  Causation only occurs in one direction, not the other.

In their interpretation, if one observes a warmer year being accompanied by fewer clouds, then that is evidence of positive cloud feedback.  Why? Because if warming causes fewer clouds, it lets in more sunlight, which then amplifies the warming.  That is positive cloud feedback in a nutshell.

But what if the warming was caused by fewer clouds, rather than the fewer clouds being caused by warming? In other words, what if previous researchers have simply mixed up cause and effect when estimating cloud feedbacks?

A Step Backwards for Climate Science

What we demonstrated in our JGR paper earlier this year is that when cloud changes cause temperature changes, it gives the illusion of positive cloud feedback – even if strongly negative cloud feedback is really operating!

I can not overemphasize the importance of that last statement.

We used essentially the same satellite dataset Dessler uses, but we analyzed those data with something called ‘phase space analysis’.  Phase space analysis allows us to “see” behaviors in the climate system that would not be apparent with traditional methods of data analysis.  It is like using an MRI to see a type of tumor that X-rays cannot reveal.

What we showed was basically a new diagnostic capability that can, to some extent, separate cause from effect.  This is a fundamental advancement – and one that the news media largely refused to report on.

The Dessler paper is like someone publishing a medical research paper that claims those tumors do not exist, because they still do not show up on our latest X-ray equipment…even though the new MRI technology shows they exist!

Sound strange? Welcome to my world.

We even replicated that behavior see in the satellite data analyzed with phase space analysis — our ‘MRI for the climate system’ – by using a simple forcing-feedback climate model containing negative.  We demonstrated that the same satellite data Dessler analyzed are actually showing negative cloud feedback, not positive feedback.

Why Dessler Assumed We Are Wrong

To Dessler’s credit, he actually references our paper.  But he then immediately discounts our interpretation of the satellite data.

Why?

Because, as he claims, (1) most of the climate variability during the satellite period of record (2000 to 2010) was due to El Nino and La Nina (which is largely true), and (2) no researcher has ever claimed that El Nino or La Nina are caused by clouds.

This simple, blanket statement was then intended to negate all of the evidence we published.

But this is not what we were claiming, nor is it a necessary condition for our interpretation to be correct.  El Nino and La Nina represent a temporary change in the way the coupled atmospheric-ocean circulation system operates.  And any change in the atmospheric circulation can cause a change in cloud cover, which can in turn cause a change in ocean temperatures.  We even showed this behavior for the major La Nina cooling event of 2007-08 in our paper!

It doesn’t mean that “clouds cause El Nino”, as Dessler suggests we are claiming, which would be too simplistic and misleading of a statement.  Clouds are complicated beasts, and climate researchers ignore that complexity at their peril.

Very Curious Timing

Dessler’s paper is being announced on probably THE best day for it to support the IPCC’s COP-16 meeting here in Cancun, and whatever agreement is announced tomorrow in the way of international climate policy.

I suspect – but have no proof of it – that Dessler was under pressure to get this paper published to blunt the negative impact our work has had on the IPCC’s efforts.

But if this is the best they can do, the scientists aligning themselves with the IPCC really are running out of ideas to help shore up their climate models, and their claims that our climate system is very sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions.

The weak reasoning the paper employs – and the evidence we published which it purposely ignores! – combined with the great deal of media attention it will garner at a time when the IPCC needs to regain scientific respectability (especially after Climategate), makes this new Science paper just one more reason why the public is increasingly distrustful of the scientific community when it comes to research having enormous policy implications.

Dr. Roy W. Spencer is Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He was formerly a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA. He is co-developer of the original satellite method for precise monitoring of global temperatures from Earth-orbiting satellites.  He has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming.  He recently wrote, The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientist. In 2008 he wrote The New York Times bestseller, Climate Confusion.

Statement of the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Negotiating the abdication of the West at COP16

Cancun, Mexico, December 9, 2010

I usually add some gentle humor when I report. Not today. Read this and weep. Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West. The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself. No one in the mainstream media will tell you this, not so much because they do not see as because they do not bl**dy care.

The 33-page Note (FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/CRP.2) by the Chairman of the “Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Co-operative Action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”, entitled Possible elements of the outcome, reveals all. Or, rather, it reveals nothing, unless one understands what the complex, obscure jargon means. All UNFCCC documents at the Cancun conference, specifically including Possible elements of the outcome, are drafted with what is called “transparent impenetrability”. The intention is that the documents should not be understood, but that later we shall be told they were in the public domain all the time, so what are we complaining about?

Since the Chairman’s note is very long, I shall summarize the main points:

Finance: Western countries will jointly provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to an unnamed new UN Fund. To keep this sum up with GDP growth, the West may commit itself to pay 1.5% of GDP to the UN each year. That is more than twice the 0.7% of GDP that the UN has recommended the West to pay in foreign aid for the past half century. Several hundred of the provisions in the Chairman’s note will impose huge financial costs on the nations of the West.

The world-government Secretariat: In all but name, the UN Convention’s Secretariat will become a world government directly controlling hundreds of global, supranational, regional, national and sub-national bureaucracies. It will receive the vast sum of taxpayers’ money ostensibly paid by the West to the Third World for adaptation to the supposed adverse consequences of imagined (and imaginary) “global warming”.

Bureaucracy: Hundreds of new interlocking bureaucracies answerable to the world-government Secretariat will vastly extend its power and reach. In an explicit mirroring of the European Union’s method of enforcing the will of its unelected Kommissars on the groaning peoples of that benighted continent, the civil servants of nation states will come to see themselves as servants of the greater empire of the Secretariat, carrying out its ukases and diktats whatever the will of the nation states’ governments. Many of the new bureaucracies are disguised as “capacity-building in developing countries”. This has nothing to do with growing the economies or industries of poorer nations. It turns out to mean the installation of hundreds of bureaucratic offices answerable to the Secretariat in numerous countries around the world. Who pays? You do, gentle taxpayer. Babylon, Byzantium, the later Ottoman Empire, the formidable bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, the vast empire of 27,000 paper-shufflers at the European Union: add all of these together and multiply by 100 and you still do not reach the sheer size, cost, power and reach of these new subsidiaries of the Secretariat.

In addition to multiple new bureaucracies in every one of the 193 states parties to the Convention, there will be an Adaptation Framework Body, a Least Developed Countries’ Adaptation Planning Body, an Adaptation Committee, Regional Network Centers, an International Center to Enhance Adaptation Research, National Adaptation Institutions, a Body to Clarify Assumptins and Conditions in National Greenhouse-Gas Emission Reductions Pledges, a Negotiating Body for an Overall Level of Ambition for Aggregate Emission Reductions and Individual Targets, an Office to Revise Guidelines for National Communications, a Multilateral Communications Process Office, a Body for the Process to Develop Modalities and Guidelines for the Compliance Process, a Registry of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions by Developed Countries, a Body to Supervise the Process for Understanding Diversity of Mitigation Actions Submitted and Support Needed, a Body to Develop Modalities for the Registry of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions, an Office of International Consultation and Analysis; an Office to Conduct a Work Program for Development of Various Modalities and Guidelines; a network of Developing Countries’ National Forest Strategy Action Plan Offices; a network of National Forest Reference Emission Level And/Or Forest Reference Level Bodies; a network of National Forest Monitoring Systems; an Office of the Work Program on Agriculture to Enhance the Implementation of Article 4, Paragraph 1(c) of the Convention Taking Into Account Paragraph 31; one or more Mechanisms to Establish a Market-Based Approach to Enhance the Cost-Effectiveness Of And To Promote Mitigation Actions; a Forum on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures; a Work Program Office to Address the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures; a Body to Review the Needs of Developing Countries for Financial Resources to Address Climate Change and Identify Options for Mobilization of Those Resources; a Fund in Addition to the Copenhagen Green Fund; an Interim Secretariat for the Design Phase of the New Fund; a New Body to Assist the Conference of the Parties in Exercising its Functions with respect to the Financial Mechanism; a Body to Launch a Process to Further Define the Roles and Functions of the New Body to Assist the Conference of the Parties in Exercising its Functions with respect to the Financial Mechanism; a Technology Executive Committee; a Climate Technology Center and Network; a Network of National, Regional, Sectoral and International Technology Centers, Networks, Organization and Initiatives; Twinning Centers for Promotion of North-South, South-South and Triangular Partnerships with a View to Encouraging Co-operative Research and Development; an Expert Workshop on the Operational Modalities of the Technology Mechanism; an International Insurance Facility; a Work Program Body for Policy Approaches and Positive Incentives on Issues Relating to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries; a Body to Implement a Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures; and a Body to Develop Modalities for the Operationalization of the Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures.

The world government’s powers: The Secretariat will have the power not merely to invite nation states to perform their obligations under the climate-change Convention, but to compel them to do so. Nation states are to be ordered to collect, compile and submit vast quantities of information, in a manner and form to be specified by the secretariat and its growing army of subsidiary bodies. Between them, they will be given new powers to verify the information, to review it and, on the basis of that review, to tell nation states what they can and cannot do.

Continuous expansion: The verb “enhance”, in its various forms, occurs at least 28 times in the Chairman’s note, Similar verbs, such as “strengthen” and “extend”, and adjectives such as “scaled-up”, “new” and “additional”, are also frequently deployed, particularly in relation to funding at the expense of Western taxpayers. If all of the “enhancements” proposed in the note were carried out, the cost would comfortably exceed the annual $100 billion (or, for that matter, the 1.5% of GDP) that the note mentions as the cost to the West over the coming decade.

Intellectual property in inventions: Holders of patents, particularly in fields related to “global warming” and its mitigation, will be obliged to transfer the benefits of their inventiveness to developing countries without payment of royalties. This is nowhere explicitly stated in the Chairman’s note, but the transfer of technology is mentioned about 20 times in the draft, suggesting that the intention is still to carry out the explicit provision in the defunct Copenhagen Treaty draft of 15 September 2009 to this effect.

Insurance: The Secretariat proposes, in effect, to interfere so greatly in the operation of the worldwide insurance market that it will cease to be a free market, with the usual severely adverse consequences to everyone in that market.

The free market: The failed Copenhagen Treaty draft stipulated that the “government” that would be established would have the power to set the rules of all formerly free markets. There would be no such thing as free markets any more. In Cancun, the Chairman’s note merely says that various “market mechanisms” may be exploited by the Secretariat and by the parties to the Convention: but references to these “market mechanisms” are frequent enough to suggest that the intention remains to stamp out free markets worldwide.

Knowledge is power: The Chairman’s note contains numerous references to a multitude of new as well as existing obligations on nation states to provide information to the Secretariat, in a form and manner which it will dictate. The hand of the EU is very visible here. It grabbed power from the member-states in four stages: first, acting merely as a secretariat to ensure stable supplies of coal and steel to rebuild Europe after the Second World War; then as a registry requiring member states to supply it with ever more information; then as a review body determining on the basis of the information supplied by the member states whether they were complying with their obligations on the ever-lengthier and more complex body of European treaties; and finally as the ultimate law-making authority, to which all elected parliaments, explicitly including the European “Parliament”, were and are subject. Under the Cancun propsoals, the Secretariat is following the path that the plague of EU officials here have no doubt eagerly advised it to follow. It is now taking numerous powers not merely to require information from nation states but to hold them to account for their supposed international obligations under the climate-change Convention on the basis of the information the nations are now to be compelled to supply.

Propaganda: The Chairman’s note contains several mentions of the notion that the peoples of the world need to be told more about climate change. Here, too, there is a parallel with the EU, which administers a propaganda fund of some $250 million a year purely to advertise its own wonderfulness to an increasingly sceptical population. The IPCC already spends millions every year with PR agencies, asking them to find new ways of making its blood-curdling message more widely understood and feared among ordinary people. The Secretariat already has the advantage of an uncritical, acquiescent, scientifically illiterate, economically innumerate and just plain dumb news media: now it will have a propaganda fund to play with as well.

Damage caused by The Process: At the insistence of sensible nation states such as the United States, the Czech Republic, Japan, Canada, and Italy, the Cancun outcome acknowledges that The Process is causing, and will cause, considerable economic damage, delicately described in the Chairman’s note as “unintended side-effects of implementing climate-change response measures”. The solution? Consideration of the catastrophic economic consequences of the Secretariat’s heroically lunatic decisions will fall under the control of – yup – the Secretariat. Admire its sheer gall.

Damage to world trade: As the power, wealth and reach of the Secretariat grow, it finds itself rubbing uncomfortably up against other supranational organizations. In particular, the World Trade Organization has been getting antsy about the numerous aspects of the Secretariat’s proposals that constitute restrictions on international trade. At several points, the Chairman’s note expresses the “decision” – in fact, no more than an opinion and a questionable one at that – that the Secretariat’s policies are not restrictive of trade.

The Canute provision: The conference will reaffirm the decision of its predecessor in Copenhagen this time last year “to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”, just like that. In fact, temperature in central England, and by implication globally, rose 2.2 Celsius in the 40 years 1695-1735, as the Sun began to recover from its 11,400-year activity minimum, and rose again by 0.74 C in the 20^th century. There has been no warming in the 21^st century, but we are already well over 2 Celsius degrees above pre-industrial levels. The Canute provision, as some delegates have dubbed it (after the Danish king of early England who famously taught his courtiers the limitations of his power and, a fortiori, theirs when he set up his throne on the beach and commanded sea level not to rise, whereupon the tide came in as usual and wet the royal feet), shows the disconnect between The Process and reality.

Omissions: There are several highly-significant omissions, which jointly and severally establish that the central intent of The Process no longer has anything to do with the climate, if it ever had. The objective is greatly to empower and still more greatly to enrich the international classe politique at the expense of the peoples of the West, using the climate as a pretext, so as to copy the European Union by installing in perpetuity what some delegates here are calling “transnational perma-Socialism” beyond the reach or recall of any electorate. Here are the key omissions:

Ø      The science: The question whether any of this vast expansion of supranational power is scientifically necessary is not addressed. Instead, there is merely a pietistic affirmation of superstitious faith in the IPCC, where the conference will “recognize that deep cuts in global [greenhouse-gas] emissions are required according to science, and as documented in the [IPCC’s] Fourth Assessment Report.”

Ø      The economics: There is no assessment of the extent to which any of the proposed actions to mitigate “global warming” by cutting emissions of carbon dioxide or to adapt the world to its consequences will be cost-effective. Nor, tellingly, is there any direct comparison between mitigation and adaptation in their cost-effectiveness: indeed, the IPCC was carefully structured so that mitigation and adaptation are considered by entirely separate bureaucracies producing separate reports, making any meaningful comparison difficult. Though every economic analysis of this central economic question, other than that of the now-discredited Lord Stern, shows that mitigation is a pointless fatuity and that focused adaptation to the consequences of any “global warming” that may occur would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective, the Cancun conference outcome will continue to treat mitigation as being of equal economic utility with adaptation.

Ø      Termination: Contracts have termination clauses to say what happens when the agreement ends. Nothing better illustrates the intent to create a permanent world-government structure than the absence of any termination provisions whatsoever in the Cancun outcome. The Process, like diamonds, is forever.

Ø      Democracy: Forget government of the people, by the people, for the people. Forget the principle of “no taxation without representation” that led to the very foundation of the United States. The provisions for the democratic election of the new, all-powerful, legislating, tax-raising world-government Secretariat by the peoples of the world may be summarized in a single word: None.

How did this monstrous transfer of power from once-proud, once-sovereign, once-democratic nations to the corrupt, unelected Secretariat come about? The story begins with Sir Maurice Strong, an immensely wealthy UN bureaucrat from Canada who, a quarter of a century ago, established the IPCC as an intergovernmental, political body rather than as a scientific body precisely so that it could be maneuvered into assisting in the UN’s long-term aim, reiterated at a summit of senior UN officials this May by Ban Ki-Moon himself, of extinguishing national sovereignty and establishing a world government.

The Process began in earnest in 1988, when the IPCC was established. Shortly thereafter, on a June day in Washington DC deliberately chosen by Al Gore because it was unusually hot, his political ally and financial benefactor James Hansen appeared before a Congressional committee and put before it a wildly-exaggerated graph predicting global warming over the coming 20 or 30 years. Yet June 2008, the 20^th anniversary of his testimony, was cooler globally than June 1988, and worldwide warming has happened at less than half the rate he predicted.

The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 allowed environmental groups and world “leaders” to grandstand together. From that summit emerged the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which began holding annual conferences on “global warming”.

The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 committed its signatories to cut back their national CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. Most are not going to make it. The US Senate, with Al Gore as its president, voted 95-0 to reject any treaty such as Kyoto, which bound only the West while leaving developing nations such as China to emit carbon dioxide without constraint.

Very little progress had been made by the time of the Bali conference in 2007: but at that conference a “road-map” was constructed that was to lead to a binding international treaty in Copenhagen in 2009.

Just one problem with that. The US Constitution provides that, even if the President has signed a treaty, his signature is meaningless unless the treaty has been debated in the Senate, which must ratify it by the votes of at least 67 of the 100 Senators. It became clear to everyone, after the Obama administration failed to cajole or bully even 60 Senators into passing the Waxman/Markey cap-and-tax Bill, that no climate treaty would pass the Senate.

Worse, the Secretariat grossly overreached itself. Believing its own propaganda to the effect that none but a few vexatious, fossil-funded sceptics believed that “global warming” would be small enough to be harmless, it drafted and posted up on its website a 186-page draft Treaty of Copenhagen, proposing to turn itself into an unelected world government with unlimited powers to impose direct taxation on member nations without representation, recourse or recall, to interfere directly in the environmental policies of individual nations, and to sweep away all free markets worldwide, replacing them with itself as the sole rulemaker in every marketplace (treaty draft, annex 1, articles 36-38). Some quotations from the draft reveal the sheer ambition of the UN:

“The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism. … The government will be ruled by the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies.” (Copenhagen Treaty draft of September 15, 2009, para. 38).

The three central powers that the UN had hoped to grant itself under the guise of Saving The Planet from alleged climate catastrophe were as follows:

“Government”: This use of the word “government” is the first use of the term to describe a world government in any international treaty draft.

“Financial mechanism”: The “financial mechanism” was a delicate phrase to describe a new power of the UN to levy unlimited taxation directly on the peoples of its member states: taxation without representation, and on a global scale.

“Facilitative mechanism”: This mechanism would, for the first time, have given the UN he power directly to coerce and compel compliance on the part of its member states, by force if necessary. The Treaty draft describes it as –

“… a facilitative mechanism drawn up to facilitate the design, adoption and carrying out of public policies, as the prevailing instrument, to which the market rules and related dynamics should be subordinate.”

In short, there was to be a New World Order, with a “government” having at its command a “financial mechanism” in the form of unlimited rights to tax the world’s citizen’s directly, and a “facilitative mechanism” that would bring the rules of all formerly free markets under the direct control of the new UN “government”, aided by an already-expanding series of bureaucracies.

At no point anywhere in the 186 pages of the Treaty draft do the words “democracy”, “election”, “ballot”, or “vote” appear. As the EU has already demonstrated, the transfer of powers from sovereign democracies to supranational entities brings those democracies to an end. At the supranational level, in the UN, in the EU and in the proposed world government, decisions are not made by anyone whom we, the voters, have elected to make such decisions.

The exposure of the draft treaty in major international news media panicked the UN into abandoning the draft before the Copenhagen conference even began. Instead, the UN is now legislating crabwise, as the European Union does, with a series of successive annual agreements, the last of which was the Copenhagen Accord, each transferring more power and wealth from individual nations to its supranational bureaucracy. The latest of these agreements is being finalized here in Cancun.

The European Union, which has stealthily stamped out democracy over the past half-century by a series of treaties each transferring a little more power and wealth from elected hands in the member states to unelected hands in Brussels, has been advising the Secretariat on how to do the same on a global scale.

After the spectacular bloody nose the Secretariat got in Copenhagen, it was most anxious not to endure a second failure in Cancun. To this end, it obtained the agreement of the German government to host a monthly series of conferences in Bonn in the early part of 2010, some of which were open to outside observers and some were behind closed doors in a comfortable suburban palace, where the new way of legislating for the world – in secret – first came into use.

The Chinese regime, anxious to get a piece of the action, agreed to host an additional session in Tientsin a few weeks ago. The purpose of this near-perpetual international junketing – which the national delegates have greatly enjoyed at our expense – was to make sure that nearly all of the elements in the Cancun agreement were firmly in draft and agreed well before Cancun, so as to avoid what too many journalists have tediously and obviously described as a “Mexican stand-off”.

It is precisely because of all this massive and expensive preparation that the note by the Chairman, whose main points are summarized above, may well reflect what is finally decided and announced here in a couple of days’ time. The Chairman is not simply guessing: this Note reflects what the Secretariat now confidently expects to get away with.

However, following the Copenhagen disaster, our grim future New Masters are taking no chances. They persuaded their friends in the mainstream news media, who cannot now easily back out of their original declarations of blind faith in the Church of “Global Warming” and are as anxious not to lose face as the Secretariat is, to put it about that at Cancun this year and even at Durban next year very little of substance will occur.

The intention is that, after not one but two international climate conferences, the second of them in Rio in 2012 on the 20^th anniversity of the Earth Summit that began it all, the Secretariat will have become so wealthy and will have accreted so much power to itself that no one – not even the US Senate – will dare to resist ratifying the Treaty of Rio that brings democracy to an end worldwide and fulfils Lord Mandelson’s recent statement that “we are now living in a post-democratic age.”

Over my dead body. The people know best what is best for the people. The governing class no doubt knows what is best for the governing class, but does not necessarily know what is best for the people, and must always be kept in check by the ballot-box.

If we are to have a world government at all (and, as the science of “global warming” alarm continues to collapse, the current pretext for world domination by a privileged few is wearing more than a little thin), then it is essential that the world government should be an elected government, and that, as Article 1, Section 1 of the US Constitution makes plain when it grants “All legislative power” to the elected Congress and to the now-elected Senate, none shall make laws for the world or impose taxes upon the world except those whom the people of the world have elected by universal secret ballot.

How can we, the people, defeat the Secretariat and keep the democracy we love? Simply by informing our elected representatives of the scope, ambition, and detail of what is in the Cancun agreement. The agreement will not be called a “Treaty”, because the Senate, particularly after the mid-term elections, will not pass it. But it can still be imposed upon us by the heavily Left-leaning Supreme Court, which no longer makes any pretence at judicial impartiality and may well decide, even if Congress does not, that the Cancun agreement shall stand part of US law on the ground that it is “customary international law”.

I call on COP16 delegates and the citizens of the world to repent of this dangerous course and so inform their government officials.  It is the power of individual nations and individual citizens that is being taken away.  It is democracy, that will perish from the Earth unless this burgeoning nonsense is stopped.

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Lord Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, has been a leader of CFACT’s delegations to numerous UN summits.  He has held positions with the British press and in government, as a press officer at the Conservative Central Office and as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policy adviser. Monckton advised Thatcher on technical issues such as warship hydrodynamics, psephological modeling; embryological research, hydrogeology, public-service investment analysis, public welfare modeling, and epidemiological analysis.  He is author of a detailed analysis and summary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes’s Fourth Assessment Report.

MEDIA ADVISORY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Wolfgang Mueller

December 9, 2010 (+521) 998 225 9854

Meet the skeptics at CFACT’s COP16 press conference

Monckon, Spencer & Rothbard on Climate Science & Policy

EXTRAS: Dr. Roy Spencer to debunk cloud feedback study w/in hour of its release

Climate Depot releases 321 page report – over 1,000 skeptical scientists

(Cancun, Mexico)  CFACT will hold a press conference on Thursday, December 9^th, at 3:00 PM in the Cancunmesse, room Desierto. This will be an opportunity for journalists to balance their coverage of COP16 by listening to all points of view.  This is particularly important as the scientific case for catastrophic man-made global warming continues to erode along with public support around the globe

Science will release Dr. Andrew Dessler’s new paper on cloud feedback at 2 PM (EST) on Thursday and Dr. Roy Spencer will release a statement at CFACT’s press conference which raises serious questions about the study and details its flaws. “Andy Dessler’s study will not stand hard scrutiny.  COP16 delegates worried about the ongoing credibility problems of climate modeling will find no solace in Dessler’s work,” Spencer said.

Lord Christopher Monckton will skewer the flaws in climate science & policy and discuss the threat a climate treaty poses for national sovereignty and individual freedom.

Wednesday Marc Morano, founder of CFACT’s Climate Depot, released a 321 page report listing over 1,000 scientists who dissent over man-made global warming which Morano termed a “consensus buster.”

Wednesday CFACT brought COP16 delegates and press to tour a local village without electricity to show the impacts of energy poverty.  CFACT is installing electric light in the village school for the first time.

Dr. Roy W. Spencer is Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama Huntsville. He was formerly a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA. He co-developed the original satellite method for precise monitoring of global temperatures from Earth-orbiting satellites.  He has provided congressional testimony on the subject of global warming.  He recently wrote, The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists. In 2008 he wrote The NY Times bestseller, Climate Confusion.

Lord Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, has been a leader of CFACT’s delegations to numerous UN summits.  He has held positions with the British press and in government, as a press officer at the Conservative Central Office and as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policy adviser. Monckton advised Thatcher on technical issues such as warship hydrodynamics, psephological modeling; embryological research, hydrogeology, public-service investment analysis, public welfare modeling, and epidemiological analysis.  He is author of a detailed analysis and summary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes’s Fourth Assessment Report.

David Rothbard is president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) a public policy organization he co-founded in 1985.  He co-hosts a daily radio commentary called Just the Facts, which airs on over 100 radio stations.  His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Times and many others.  He has particpated in over a dozen UN conferences.

CFACT is an international public policy organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. which promotes market and technological solutions to issues of environment and development.

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CFACT visits the Mexican Village "La Libertad"

On one side of this tropical strip, UN delegates, media, and observers shuttle between luxurious hotels, posh restaurants, a white sandy beach with turquoise water, and a modern convention center where they spend their time bemoaning man-made climate change and planning the energy future for the rest of the globe. One the other side of the Cancun “Hotel Zoneria,” just 10 or 15 kilometers from downtown, live countless numbers of Mexican families without electricity, running water, or any of the other modern conveniences we in the developed world take for granted everyday. It was to this other side that CFACT traveled today, bringing delegates and reporters to see what energy poverty looks like, up-close and in-person. “As COP16 participants consider the future of the world’s energy policy, it is vital that the voices of those suffering energy poverty are heard,” I said in our announcement.

Children from the school gathered to hear Rothbard speak

So off we went in a convoy of white vans – Germans and Kenyans and Americans and Kazahkstanis and English and Tawainese and others – to see a side of Cancun featured in no magazines or travelogs. Fifteen minutes on the highway headed through the Yucatan jungle, another five minutes or so on Merida Road, and then a bumpy, twisting ride over a pothole scarred back road, and there we were, in the Comunidad de La Libertad, more easily known as “Community of Freedom” back in Des Moines or Omaha. One young mother graciously agreed to let us visit her makeshift house – made of some wood planks and stone and a bit of cement – and share with us how she and her family live. After telling us through a translator that “her heart was beating out of her chest because she’s never had any visitors like this,” she went on to show the sparse interior of her abode, and then took us outside where most of her work is done. She cooks most food in an old metal barrel over an open fire – tortillas on a metal pan or beans boiling in a pot of water – because she can only afford a little gas for her indoor stove, and wouldn’t waste a week’s worth of energy on one pot of beans. Thus, she and her two little children get to breathe in the smoke from the cooking fire; smoke that kills an estimated two to three million women and children around the world each year from respiratory diseases. There is no plumbing or proper sanitation – just an outhouse-style bathroom where basin baths and other necessities are attended to. Clothes-washing is done by hand, taking hours of time, and water comes from a small hand-pumped well that provides relatively convenient, but certainly not uncontaminated, water.

Running water is not a "luxury" for the people in this village.

One son is able to attend school, but the younger daughter, age five, is not able to attend because even though tuition is free, there are small expenses associated with going to school that can’t be met on her husband’s one-day-yes, one-day-no part-time labor. So the delegates looked, and listened, and asked questions – and were thankful for having the chance to get away from the UN gabfest, and remember who it is that actually has the most skin in the climate and energy game. “It is one thing to talk about poverty, but it is another to come here in person – where you can feel it,” commented one representative from India who joined the CFACT tour. “I would have left anything at the summit to come here and see this,” he added. But for others, the visit was surprising from an opposite perspective. One delegate from Tanzania said the women’s house would be like a palace back home, and that his own mother doesn’t have a house even half as good. But maybe that’s not so surprising after all, since 90% of those living in sub-Saharan Africa have no electricity, and children there must also do their homework by candlelight or paraffin lamps, as CFACT demonstrated when it organized a visit with local Kenyan schoolchildren during the COP12 meeting in Nairobi. CFACT’s energy poverty tour of Cancun ended on a joyful note as the group visited the local elementary school of La Libertad – the sole school in the area for four large communities – and sponsored a small lunchtime fiesta for the children complete with a mariachi band, piñatas, and a magician. CFACT also pledged to provide the school with its first electric lights. In remarks at the school, I noted that CFACT’s “adopt a village” program actually started in Cancun in 2003 during the WTO summit when the group began a relationship with a neighboring community, delivering two tons of food and visiting three more times over the next few years to provide solar ovens and panels, laptops, and various cleanup efforts. “For many years, we merely talked about public policy, but in 2003, we decided to actually get involved hands-on, and work alongside communities to help lift them out of poverty.” Despite such hopeful efforts, the sad reality remains that many global warming campaigners are here in Cancun proposing treaty provisions that would do nothing to affect the climate. But they would callously trap millions of families, like the one we visited today, in perpetual energy poverty.

CFACT is helping people like these children avoid the energy poverty trap.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Wolfgang Mueller

Wednesday, December 8, 2010                                                          (+521) 998 225 9854

(Cancun, Mexico) Few things divide rich from poor like access to affordable energy.  In this 21^st century it has been estimated that 1.4 billion people lack access to electricity while 3 billion people cook with solid fuel.  On Wednesday, December 8, CFACT transported COP16 delegates, press and observers to the Mexican village of La Libertad, where people cook, heat and live without electricity.  La Libertad presents a compelling picture of the plight of the energy poor.

“As COP16 considers the future of the world’s energy policy, it is vital that the voices of those suffering energy poverty are heard,” said CFACT President David Rothbard.

“Today’s visit was both sobering and inspiring,” Rothbard said.  “We and our guests saw the harsh realities of what life is like without basic necessities, such as electricity, which we take for granted.  Yet among the people of La Libertad we saw remarkable joyfulness and hope in the midst of poverty – especially among the many school children – this humbled us.  CFACT believes these children deserve every opportunity that our children enjoy, including affordable, abundant electricity and all the benefits that brings.  We must not set energy policy in a vacuum and create obstacles to the progress of countless communities like La Libertad.”

Access to affordable energy has led to a cleaner, greener environment and a rebound of natural habitats and wildlife throughout the developed world.  Efficient agriculture and distribution, both of which require abundant energy, permit developed nations to devote less land to food production, while minimizing the need to forage for wood for cooking and heating.

Billions know a different reality.  Energy poverty means a life without the nutrition, health care, refrigeration, jobs, information and education the rest of us take for granted.  Without electricity, foraging for food and fuel leads to deforestation and pressures wildlife, while an estimated 1-2 million people die every year from respiratory diseases linked to the burning of wood, charcoal, dung and other solid fuels.

CFACT has worked for years with impoverished people around the world including Valle Verde and other villages in the Yucatan peninsula and witnessed the consequences of energy poverty first hand.

“Global warming campaigners are here in Cancun proposing treaty provisions that would frustrate recovery for developed economies while doing nothing to alter the climate,” said Craig Rucker, CFACT’s Executive Director.  “It is vital we also turn our attention to those in the developing world whom too many are callously willing to trap in energy poverty permanently.  Wealthy activists advocating policies that hold the poor down makes for a sorry spectacle indeed.  Payoffs to developing countries to do without efficient energy will benefit elites in those countries while leaving the needy behind.  This is a disaster for both the energy poor and the working people who pay the bills.”

International aid should focus on helping developing nations construct an efficient energy infrastructure including electricity generation and transmission.  Rucker said, “For villages like La Libertad if there is energy, there is hope.”

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MEDIA ADVISORY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT:         Wolfgang Mueller

December 7, 2010 (+521) 998 225 9854

Media invited to tour energy-poor village of La Libertad near COP16 summit

(Cancun, Mexico)  On Wednesday, December 8^th, CFACT will bring COP16 delegates and press to tour La Libertad, a Mexican community only minutes from the comforts of the Cancun tourist zone, where the poor live without electricity.  CFACT will provide transportation which will depart the Westin Hotel (first stop on COP16 shuttle one) at 9:30 AM.  Return approximately 1 PM.  Lunch provided.

Participants will visit with local people, learn about the challenges of living without electricity, and then spend some light-hearted time with village school children.  CFACT is working with local organizers to install electric lights in the community school for the first time.

CFACT regularly provides assistance to local villages to help them develop.  Over the years CFACT has provided electricity, computers, food and environmental cleanups in the Cancun area.

CFACT president David Rothbard said, “As delegates to COP16 consider the future of the world’s energy policy, it is vital that the voices of those suffering energy poverty are heard.”

If you would like to participate please call (+521) 998 225 9854 or email CFACT@CFACT.org.

Visit to La Libertad, an energy-poor village

Depart:  Westin Hotel 9:30 AM

Return:  Approximately 1 PM

Lunch & Transportation Provided

RSVP Required

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