PrintFebruary 9, 2007
Global Warming's Globalist Backers
The other shoe has dropped concerning global warming. Fasten your seat belts: an "international authortity" to act as enforcer has been demanded. Concurrent with the release of the International Panel on Climate Control's "report" (actually a twenty-page "summary for policy makers" with the report itself to be released eventually, maybe in April, maybe in May), we have a demand for an international authority to be set up to police compliance, voiced by none other than Jacques Chirac and seconded by no less than 45 countries. As yet no goals or specific regulations have been designated. But rest assured that "experts" will be consulted to spare us from the menace of carbon dioxide.
International authorities of this type, with full police powers and answerable to no one, are a venerable daydream of the UN bureaucracy and, not coincidentally, of the left at large. Kofi Annan's calls for taxation power and an independent army for the UN are other examples. Another, more subtle episode involved the UN's late-90s attempt to emplace international media rules derived from the censorship practices of third-world dictatorships. More recently we have heard rumblings concerning international gun control. What all these have had in common was their transparent goal of enabling the UN to horn in on the policies of independent states, and the fact that they went absolutely nowhere.
This style of internationalism - establishing a "global government" to act as a schoolmarm for recalcitrant nation-states -- has long been an ideal of the left, derived in large part from the supposed solidarity of the international proletariat, whose "class interests" were held to pull them together more than national and cultural differences pushed them apart. It's one of those left-wing ideas that fail to stand the test of reality. At the outbreak of WW I, every last European socialist party voted to support its country's war effort, something that nearly drove Lenin - then in exile in neutral Switzerland - out of his mind. The same division endured, despite decades of efforts by assorted Cominterns and Cominforms. But a form of internationalism survives as a kind of nucleus for a new, transnational revolutionary class.
At the dawn of the 50s, with all things Soviet beginning to look more than a little shabby, left-wingers transferred their allegiance to the UN, which (they hoped) would form the basis of a truly humane and progressive global government. This attitude was personified by Gary Davis, a misfit who carried out a sit-in at the UN's Turtle Bay construction site, demanding to be given a passport as a "world citizen". Despite every conceivable discouragement, this idea remains fixed in many minds as something of an ultimate goal for an enlightened international system.
It's also proven a recurring nightmare to the more unrestrained American paleocons, who repeatedly found evidence of UN encroachment in places where, to put it kindly, little was discernable to calmer eyes. The last panic afflicting this group was the entertaining "black helicopter" scare of the mid-90s, in which talk radio and the infant Internet blazed with tales of hordes of UN troops about to descend on the United States to enforce some sort of undescribed but horrible UN despotism. (If the standard run of UN blue helmet is any indication, they'd have probably have needed help getting off the choppers.) You'd almost think that these proposals were deliberately put forward to send the troglodytes raging.
But in fact, they're serious, though not in the sense offered. If UN efforts had anything to actually do with global warming, they would not consistently overlook China and India. Attempting to address a problem as vast as climatic change without accounting for the world's two most populous countries - both engaged in breakneck efforts at industrial modernization - is well beyond simply asinine. Particularly since China stands in a class by itself as far as pollution goes, messing up rivers, ecosystems, and entire orbital zones with equal abandon. There are, to choose only one example, evidently several hundred abandoned, blazing coal mines in the Chinese interior that have been left to burn themselves out. What effect this has to the carbon dioxide balance can only be imagined, since nobody has dared question the Chinese about it.
As far as climate change goes, what this translates into is (as Dr. Robert Giegengack puts it) that the battle is over. Every last SUV on every American highway wouldn't account for a drop in the bucket representing Chinese and Indian plans. So in the unlikely event that global warming is the case, we will simply have to learn to live with it, as the Vikings and everybody else did at the end of the last millennium
But of course, that's not the point. Apart from providing Chirac with something to step up to after leaving the helm of le Republique Grande, the aim of all these schemes, from Annan's tax plans to the Kyoto Treaty to the climate change authority, is simply to bridle the United States. If not to bring it under complete UN suzerainty, then to exercise some form of bureaucratic restraint over what the UN hierarchy has long viewed as an out-of-control colossus. The UN effectively controls many derelict third-world states (and even the occasional European example, such as Kosovo). Why not the U.S.?
The simple answer - and one we don't need to look past - is that the day the UN seriously attempts any such thing is the day it gets evicted. Nothing pulls together the irreconcilable elements of the American polity more completely than a threat to U.S. sovereignty. The 1997 vote on the Kyoto Treaty, 95-0, makes that clear. Many of those who voted against the protocol (including Kerry, Boxer, and Schumer) share global warming fears and even the internationalist impulse. But not to the extent of placing themselves under UN oversight. The transnational dream comes in many varied and dissimilar forms, depending on who's doing the dreaming.
So we can probably leave any sort of global warming authority out of our future calculations. Excepting one possible case: we've previously pointed out here that environmentalism displays all the aspects of a pseudo-religion. And religions - as we've seen in recent years with the Jihadis - represent the sole existing example of a working transnational structure. A militant global environmentalist creed might very well be capable of pushing such a program through. It wouldn't necessarily establish a warming authority as much as it would become one, in and of itself. A very spooky possibility, if only because there are plenty of people in the U.S. who would welcome such a thing. So it might be worth keeping one eye on the situation. But no morethan that. For a religion to spread in such a manner it would require a messiah. And the Greens, despite Al Gore's best efforts, don't have one of those yet.
J.R. Dunn is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.
