PrintUN Climate battle resumes
Bad ideas can be beaten back, but they never truly go away, especially if they have deep-pocket backers and an institutional structure as massive as the United Nations.
Those who breathed a sigh of relief when the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen failed to produce a treaty in December to replace the Kyoto Protocol should be aware that the battle is still on. A first round of new talks kicked off in Bonn, Germany last weekend (April 9-11) with more than 1700 delegates from 175 countries in attendance. Two more week-long conferences were authorized to take place between the next Bonn meeting at the end of May and the grand finale in Cancun, Mexico (Nov. 29-Dec. 10) to "pick up the pieces" of the Copenhagen conference.
Furthermore, the UN Human Rights Council decided at its March meeting in Geneva that the next Social Forum will focus on: "the negative effects of climate change on the full enjoyment of human rights."
The UN report for the April 9 opening session in Bonn gives the tone of the process,
In the afternoon, the eleventh session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments by Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP 11) held its opening plenary, adopting the agenda and organization of work (FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/1 and 2). In their opening statements, many developing countries stressed the importance of the AWG-KP negotiating track and called for agreement on ambitious emission reductions for Annex I countries under the Kyoto Protocol for the post-2012 period.
The Annex I countries are the developed nations of North America, Europe and Japan who are to bear the full weight of economic controls to limit greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming within the UN framework set in 2007. In contrast, the developing countries, led by BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) and the Group of 77 (chaired by China's ally Sudan) are to remain free to pursue economic growth without any formal constraints in the name of national sovereignty and "climate justice."
"The UN Climate Change Conference in Cancún must do what Copenhagen did not achieve: It must finalize a functioning architecture for implementation that launches global climate action, across the board, especially in developing nations,"
But the UN establishment, the transnational Green movement, and the developing bloc have not abandoned their desire to cripple the developed economies and transfer wealth and technology from West to the rest. And the Obama administration, which could have claimed a victory for national independence after Copenhagen, is still willing to stay in the UN game and surrender American freedom. The State Department sent a letter to the UNFCCC on goals for 2010, concluding,
The United States supports a legally binding outcome in Mexico provided that the legally binding elements in an otherwise acceptable agreement would apply in a symmetrical manner to all major economies.
In other words, if all the nations of the world can be brought under a UN dominion for climate control, President Obama will sign on.
