It's the Economy, Stupid!

By Cathie Adams
December 13, 2004

Do you think that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are victims of pollution and that your tax dollars should help finance diversification of their economies? I am certain that you do not, but that is the mischief OPEC is up to at the United Nations (U.N.) meeting being held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 6-17 December.

The U.N. has concluded its first week of discussions on the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The premise of the Protocol is that elevated levels of GHGs will cause catastrophic weather changes. GHGs are produced when people breathe out or drive cars that burn fossil fuels or when industries use fossil fuels to manufacture goods.

The good news is that the U.N. nor OPEC has fooled the American delegation in Buenos Aires. Alternate head of the U.S. delegation Dr. Harlan L. Watson frankly told the press this week that, "The Kyoto Protocol was a political agreement. It was not based on science." Indeed, the Protocol has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with the economy. Let me explain.

Harald Diaz-Bone, a spokesman for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, boasted that "the successful decoupling of economic growth from increasing carbon dioxide emissions in Finland" is a result of that nation's economy shifting to high-tech industries. He stopped short of the obvious fact that Finland's manufactured goods must now be imported from other countries.

Americans have lots of experience with this game. The "made in China" label has replaced the "made in the USA" on too many of our manufactured goods. Likewise, the industrial jobs in Finland simply moved elsewhere.

What effect does this have on GHG emissions? NONE! It does not reduce them; it merely moves the industries and thus the GHG emissions from one of the 30 developed nations bound by the Kyoto Protocol to one of the more than 150 undeveloped nations, like China, which is not bound by the treaty.

Even worse than not affecting GHG emissions, this ruse allows multinational corporations to prop up the Communist Chinese government while looking the other way as their citizens are abused as slave laborers. And it provides more than enough funding to enable them to build a military force that one day will have to be reckoned with, maybe from as close as the Panama Canal.

Over the last decade, U.N. bureaucrats have developed this global wealth redistribution system, and they have had lots of help not only from dictatorships in the Third World who want American taxpayers' jobs and money, but also from a myriad of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The newsletter Hotspot is published by Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe, a "global coalition of 365 environmental NGOs," 90 in Europe, including most European member states. In their November 2004 edition, they questioned, "Whither Adaptation Funding?" After blaming floods in Bangladesh, China and Mozambique, heat waves in Europe, droughts in Africa and hurricanes in the Caribbean on global warming, they hassled industrialized countries to give money to a new Adaptation Fund created at a global warming Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting in Morocco in 2001. The purpose of the fund is to assist Least Developed Countries (LDCs in U.N.-speak), like OPEC members, to diversify their economies!

CAN also calls for "much more rigorous emission reductions" than called for in the Kyoto Protocol, which neither former President Clinton nor President Bush submitted to the U.S. Senate for ratification because the treaty would devastate the U.S. economy. While the 1997 Protocol calls for a five percent reduction of GHGs below 1990 levels, Clinton/Gore agreed to reduce U.S. levels by seven percent below 1990 levels. Accumulatively this would amount to about a 40% GHG emissions reduction below 1990 levels.

As the U.N. and their NGOs talk about saving the world from catastrophic weather changes by reducing GHGs, in reality they are sponsoring a global Communist dream to redistribute wealth. This scheme has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with the economy.