By: Rachel Marsden
Environmental evangelicals are the most gullible constituency on the planet. They will be spouting industrial quantities of domga at the Copenhagen treaty summit this December. Here’s a prediction: after it’s all over, the last man standing at the BS Corral may well turn out to be Stephen Harper – Conservative prime minister of Canada, normally a country susceptible to Green scare stories.
James Delingpole argued recently that the UN has managed to leverage the evangelicals to create support for a whole new wealth transfer scheme that will require productive countries to hand over their cash to those with a proven track record of p—ing it away. A larger-scale version of what the EU is doing already, if you will.
Environmentalism would indeed be the perfect marketing façade – because no world leader wants to be seen as anti-planet. And trading something as abstract as air credits ensures the requisite separation between your money and any real sense of what’s being spent. It’s like when you’re on a cruise ship and the purser requests your credit card, then issues you buckets of “funny money” casino tokens to spend aboard the ship. It divorces you from your credit card, and you lose track of how much you’re spending – until a ship staffer comes knocking on your cabin door one day to inform you that you’ve maxed out your card. “How the hell did that happen?” you wonder. Well, you stupid git, you’ve spent the last week throwing imaginary plastic around, all the while forgetting that it’s tied to your bank account.
This is precisely what carbon credits are. And, like anything else “managed” by the United Nations, it will give birth to a whole new system of pocket-liners, fraudsters and corruption.
But Harper, currently enjoying his highest-ever polling numbers, has shown an acute lack of interest in international ol’ boy back-slapping. He shows up late for world leader photos in which he usually appears somewhere on the periphery; in September he skipped the organised daytime UN “climate change” blathering and re-emerged in time for dinner, and largely held out on emptying the treasury while other governments were doing so in a manifestly misguided attempt to spend their way to prosperity. Here’s what Harper had to say on the issue during the September summit:
“Our government is committed to working toward a comprehensive and effective international agreement that puts the world on a clean energy path. We need the commitment of both developed and developing nations on a framework that is fair and ambitious, yet realistic and responsible, in addressing the challenges of climate change.”
In political speak, he’s not committing to signing anything – although he used the term “climate change”, which will lead some to think he must be a true believer and not simply applying it with the same linguistic weight as, say, a preposition. But look again. He’s supporting a world pact for “clean energy”, but also says it has to be “realistic and responsible”. If the Copenhagen Treaty isn’t, he has left himself an out.
Worst case scenario: Everyone can sign this thing, then just ignore it just as Canada and some other countries are doing with the Kyoto agreement. It’s “enforced” by the United Nations. What are they going to do? Invade Canada?