Reports from Cathie Adams, Eagle Forum International Issues Chair

Report #3, May 6, 2011

Green Climate Fund Fundamentally

Transforms the Global Economy

Americans, and particularly the U.S. Congress, need to be aware of this UN taxing scheme before it is submitted for approval to the UNFCCC meeting this December.

The design of a new $100 billion a year Green Climate Fund (GCF) to “enable developing [poor] countries to address climate change” is a facet of last December’s Cancun Agreement of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a  treaty signed by President George H.W. Bush and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1992.

Following the annual 2009 UNFCCC meeting in Copenhagen, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon assembled a 20-member High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing to make recommendations to the design team for the GCF. Group members included George Soros, Chairman of the Soros Fund Management, a representative from the World Bank, and Lawrence Summers, the Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to President Obama for Economic Policy.

The High-level Advisory Group proposals for the GCF would fulfill the Secretary-General’s 2010 call for nations “to fundamentally transform the global economy — based on low-carbon, clean energy resources.” And the U.S. would be the biggest loser in every funding scheme:

•   a carbon tax,

•   a tax on international aviation and shipping,

•   a financial transaction tax, and

•   a wire tax for producing electricity.

  They also proposed taking 100% of the fossil fuel subsidies and redirecting them to international climate action.

The first meeting of the GCF design team, called the Transitional Committee (TC), met in Mexico City on April 28 & 29. The 40-member TC’s charge is to prepare “operational specifications for the GCF in time for approval by the next UNFCCC meeting in Durban [South Africa] in December [2011].”

Granting taxing authority to the UN would undermine national sovereignty and effectually transform the UN from “governance” to “government.” The UN’s “governance” already consists of an executive branch of appointed bureaucrats, a legislative branch that convenes when nations meet at a myriad of global meetings, and a judicial branch in the International Criminal Court, which the U.S. Senate has not ratified.

The scheme began in earnest in 1997, in Kyoto, Japan, when nations from around the world met to discuss the “global warming” theory, a thesis that “climate change” is caused when greenhouse gases are emitted when fossil fuels are burned. The meeting’s outcome was the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that sets legally binding limits on greenhouse gases based upon this scientifically inconclusive theory.

At the outset, the U.S. Senate understood the negative impact it would have on the U.S. economy and unanimously passed a resolution advising President Clinton and VP Gore NOT to sign a treaty that would negatively impact our economy or would be applied to some but not all nations. The Kyoto Protocol failed on both counts. It applies to only 37 rich nations, but not the remaining 155, and would severely damage our economy.

Even so, President Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol, yet did not send it to the U.S. Senate for ratification. President George W. Bush later unsigned the treaty, but remained a party to the UNFCCC.

Climate facts have not deterred the global agenda. “Climate-gate” and “glacier-gate” have tremendously undermined the manmade “global warming” theory pushed within the UN system by the International Panel on Climate Change and exposed it as more of a political statement, than a scientific conclusion.  

Whether a natural disaster, a drought or flood, a record-setting heat or cold, manmade “climate change” is blamed because the poor nations want the GCF to become a major funding source to their economies. Even though China has surpassed the U.S. in greenhouse gas emissions, it is not bound by the treaty. Some even blame the U.S. for China’s emissions because China is a major manufacturer of American products. 

Observers must conclude that since “global warming” is an unproven scientific theory, and since the greatest greenhouse gas producer is exempt from legally binding emissions limits, then the primary purpose of the GCF is to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor countries.

Report #2, May 5, 2011

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) Transitional Committee (TC) concluded its two-day meeting in Mexico City on April 29. 

Tasked with establishing a $100 billion annual fund by 2020, the 40-member committee decided only their organizational structure and a “workplan.” 

Three co-chairmen from Mexico, Norway and South Africa are to work with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres to define their roles and responsibilities, as well as those of the facilitators, committee members, the TC secretary and the Technical Support Unit. 

TC members from Spain and Barbados will act as facilitators for the first of four “workstreams,” (subcommittees) which is to focus on “scope, guiding principles and cross-cutting issues.” 

Workstream II is facilitated by Switzerland and the Democratic Republic of Congo and will focus on governance and institutional arrangements for the GCF which is a “designated operating entity of the financial mechanism of the Convention.” 

Australia and Pakistan will facilitate Workstream III which is to provide general guidance on the operational modalities of the GCF. That includes “support projects, programs, policies and other activities in developing country Parties” through “a variety of financial instruments, funding windows and access modalities, including direct access, with the objective of achieving a balanced allocation between adaption and mitigation.” 

The fourth and final Workstream, led by Bangladesh and Sweden, is to monitor and evaluate the GCF’s performance and mechanisms aimed at ensuring financial accountability and performance of activities supported by the GCF. 

Nations that attended the Cancun meeting last December already decided that the GCF would be governed by a Board of 24 members with specific distribution among nations, “have an interim trustee with a clearly defined role, and be supported by an independent secretariat.” A standing committee on finance will be created. 

The World Bank is to oversee the GCF for 3 years and many believe it will be tough to replace them at the end of that term. 

Two technical workshops and three TC meetings are planned in order to present operational specifications to the UNFCCC conference in Durbin, South Africa, in December.

Report #1, April 28, 2011

The plan to design a new Green Climate Fund (GCF) was an outcome of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that met in Cancun, Mexico, last December. The design team, called the Transitional Committee (TC) for the new GCF, is holding its first two-day meeting on April 28 & 29 in Mexico City. The GCF goal is to amass a minimum of $100 billion each year by 2020.

Even though the UN held many behind-the-scenes meetings to decide who would make the cut of 192 member nations for the 40-member design team, they got off to a halting start in Mexico City because they could not agree on who would lead the meeting.

 Mexico thought that since they were hosting the meeting, they would lead it, but that did not meet with approval from the other 39 nations’ representatives. Among those vying for leadership were from nations as geographically, politically and economically varied as Samoa, Philippines, Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Pakistan, Australia, Germany, the U.S., the U.K., Belize, Singapore, Switzerland, Ethiopia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia; a total of 25 “developing” (poor) nations and 15 “developed” (rich) nations. Late in the first day, co-chairmen were finally chosen from Mexico, Norway and South Africa.

 “Developing” countries claim that they are the “worst and first” impacted by climate change and insist that the “developed” countries pay for their mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, which they are convinced is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. They are demanding “climate justice” and some are even calling for reparations.

 None of the “developed” countries disagreed with the premise that climate change is manmade or caused by burning fossil fuels. Instead, they seemed more interested in creating the Green Climate Fund with global governance, to replace their many smaller agreements between nations that have been developed since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s legally-binding treaty based on the unproven “global warming” theory. The 40-member TC is advocating for “scaling-up” the funds with global governance.

 Capping the first day was a testimony from a global “youth” who advocated for a complete transformation of the global economy to “0” fossil fuel emissions by 2050 with complete “equity” and “transparency.”

 No one is expecting the TC to complete the design for the GCF in Mexico City. Many are planning to meet at least three more times this year, but even then it is questionable whether they will have a plan to submit to the upcoming December UNFCCC meeting in Durban, South Africa.