Revisiting The Truth No One Wants To Tell You
Many are just now paying attention, due to the Obamacare scam perpetrated on the American public catching their attention and the resulting lack of trust which ensues such a breach. If you are just now coming to terms with the fact our government, both democrats and republicans, have been misappropriating funds, scheming to control our lives and incomes, ruining the American dream promised us, and shredding our constitution, I humbly invite you to peruse this website and educate yourself. You’re way behind. There are many topics covered on the site, and our sister site www.WatchdogCentral.org, please bring yourself up to speed for your own good, the good of your children, and the good of the country. Today, I post here, some of the articles posted during years of research, on the subject of global cooling/global warming/climate change along with information on Maurice Strong and friends, who through Agenda 21 and the global warming scam, and the corrupt United Nations are planning to subjugate you, your money, your way of life for their own enhancement. Unless you arm yourself with the facts, you are allowing them to do so. So that you may understand what is happening to us in this country, and the world for that matter, please, I beg you, learn. Start here. A snippet from each article is included for your convenience. Please view each link in it’s entirety to understand it’s context.
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/the-maurice-strong-file/
Below is some of the info we have on Maurice Strong and you can find much more about him and others targeting our way of life on our sister site Watchdog Central, at the last link. Please tell your friends. We must stop this now, although it may be too late. The more people that know, the better our chances. Thanks.
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/more-on-maurice-strong/
Here are some videos for you on Maurice Strong. Some we have run before, but we will gladly run them again along with ones new to us. It is so very important for all to realize what is going on here. It is almost too late, but if we speak up loudly and clearly and share what we know with those who are not yet paying attention, we stand a chance.
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/maurice-strong-the-interview/
Yesterday we talked to you about the “Earth Scouts” and showed you the newly released interview from Muarice Strong. Today we have the rest of that interview.
Maurice Strong, George Soros, and others of their ilk are involved in a campaign toward One World Order. They are almost there.
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/maurice-strong-man-behind-agenda-21/
This will be a perpetual database on Maurice Strong, a key player in the demise of America through his role in Agenda 21. This database will be updated as information becomes available and will be filed in my Enemies of the State Category for easy accessiblity here on the website. It is my hope this will be of some aide to the heralded watchdogs among us. Several shocking bits of information have come to my attention, many with help from fellow patriots JoAnne Moretti and Pam L. I wish to thank them for their help on assembling this laundry list of eye openers. There are so many that I find it necessary to merely provide a list with a synopsis and the link for you to comb over the full articles at will.
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/maurice-strong-man-behind-agenda-21-part-2/
This cancer, Agenda 21, also known as Local Agenda 21 or LA-21, is nothing short of an attack on this country. It came to life in 1992 and is spreading across the globe with the help of anyone who happens to buy into the idea of a global threat. Its real purpose is hidden inside a cloaked presentation of environmental sustainability, however, it is about control of your life, your children’s lives, their children’s lives and on into perpetuity.
In the conversation, Lord Moncton mentions Maurice Strong. Several shocking bits of information have come to my attention, many with help from fellow patriots JoAnne Moretti and Pam L. I wish to thank them for their help on assembling this laundry list of eye openers. There are so many that I find it necessary to publish under seperate cover with a short synopsis and the link for you to comb over at will.http://wp.me/pxG9Z-cn
My hope is that you will bookmark this column. The information here is valuable to you now. However, if you can not see why as of yet, you will soon come to understand why. I have included several videos, and while I know your time is very scarce, I urge you to watch them.
This 35 minute video is well worth your time. Even in the first ten minutes, Lord Monckton uses a … strategy of graphs and charts to clearly illustrate the ACTUAL data and how these scientists faked the results.
This is a must see not only for those who do not yet understand the truth on the green agenda, but should also be viewed by those who do. Lots of information here that is a must know for anyone living on the planet. Lord Monckton asks specifically to share this video with everyone.
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/lord-moctons-case-tied-up-in-a-bow/
Last Friday we had the good fortune to get a head’s up from Lord Christopher Moncton. If you haven’t seen that video yet, start here:http://wp.me/pxG9Z-cf Then we learned from him on Monday Maurice Strong played a vastly important roll in all this http://wp.me/pxG9Z-cn andhttp://wp.me/pxG9Z-cv which lead to an epiphany http://wp.me/pxG9Z-cz involving Agenda 21, which was discussed earlier here http://wp.me/pxG9Z-8X . Thursday we learned about the Club of Rome, a powerful group of people including American ex-presidents and other world leaders, top business people and other “trusted” figures, and saw a video that spelled out their agenda and how it morphed into Agenda 21. You may watch the video here http://wp.me/pxG9Z-cH Referred to in the video were two books. These books were controversial when published, but over time the authors, The Club of Rome, were able to “mainstream” them through lies, fake science, and indoctrination of our youth. I have provided free copies, as available, for you here:
We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National autodetermination practiced in past centuries. – David Rockefeller, 1991
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/maurice-strong-info-dump-continues/
The only change that has happened since 1992 is that Strong and Soros now have their Agent of Change coming to the White House.
In other words, the world according to Maurice Strong, is unfolding as it should.
In an era ridden by bankruptcies and job loss, Zombie-like cultists will swarm Washington, D.C. for the January 20, 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama.
Voluntary acceptance of global governance is the preferred means of achieving a takeover of America without a single shot having been fired.
“Education programs to teach the “global ethic” have been underway by UNESCO and by UNEP for more than twenty years.” (Page 90, The Rise of Global Governance). “That the U.S. government, through its representatives to the various U.N. agencies, has not already crushed this global governance agenda is s testament to the effectiveness of the U.N.’s education program.”
This week we will post links sent by readers with more information on Maurice Strong and his impact on formulating the fake science and erroneous, purposeful deceit behind the green movement. Many who have not been aware of what is behind this, as well as one world order, the movement against the Christian religions, etc.. will find the historical data on how we got here very enlightening. http://www.afn.org/~govern/strong.html
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/more-green-kool-aid-antidote/
“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical…The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system.” – Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology, and formerly of NASA, who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”
In late spring, there was a vast cover up at EPA over science that didn’t fit the administration’s agenda. (with video)
Former Vice President Al Gore declared that the Congressional climate bill will help bring about “global governance.”
“I bring you good news from the U.S., “Gore said on July 7, 2009 in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by UK Times. “Just two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill,” Gore said, noting it was “very much a step in the right direction.” President Obama has pushed for the passage of the bill in the Senate and attended a G8 summit this week where he agreed to attempt to keep the Earth’s temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C. Gore touted the Congressional climate bill, claiming it “will dramatically increase the prospects for success” in combating what he sees as the “crisis” of man-made global warming. “But it is the awareness itself that will drive the change and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governance and global agreements.”
After Edmund de Rothschild’s statement, without basis, at the 4th World Wilderness Congress in 1987, that CO2 is the cause of a non-existent global warming – and that combating it needs money (our money), he founded the World Conservation Bank for this reason. In 1991 its name was changed to The Global Environment Facility (GEF). The purpose of this facility is to lend money to the poorest countries, printed by the IMF out of thin air, and with the guarantee of our governments. The facility takes wilderness areas with mineral riches as security. The GEF money is then to flow back to our governments as reimbursement for paid loans.
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/new-report-out-on-the-ipcc-is-a-must-see/
I would especially like to bring to your attention a report released this week called IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks. The introduction reads as follows with the full report in pdf by clicking the title:
Unquestionably the world’s final authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings and recommendations have formed the bedrock of literally every climate-related initiative worldwide for more than a decade. Likewise, virtually all such future endeavors — be they Kyoto II, domestic cap-and-tax, or EPA carbon regulation, would inexorably be built upon the credibility of the same U.N. panel’s “expert” counsel. But a glut of ongoing recent discoveries of systemic fraud has rocked that foundation, and the entire man-made global warming house of cards is now teetering on the verge of complete collapse.
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/why-i-call-it-the-breath-tax/
Governments across the world are proceeding to force the global warming agenda down the throats of their citizens. This, after the House Minority report was released this past spring with hundreds of scientists objecting to findings regarding global warming. This, after Senator Inhofe telling us early this summer EPA was purposely hiding science which disagrees with their global warming initiatives. This, after 30,000 scientists are suing over the faulty science. This, even now, after the Climategate fiasco where leading scientists were caught by their own words manipulating the data to say what they wanted it to say.
According to the Institute for Energy Research, half of the nearly 1500 page House Cap and Trade Bill is not about carbon emissions at all, but rather completely alter America’s economy. Dr. Robert Michaels, a Senior Fellow with IER, who examined the bill, found that the rest of the bill is packed with regulations that would completely alter the United States’ economy. He argues that even without cap-and-trade, Waxman-Markey is the most repressive package of new taxes, wealth transfers and obstacles to economic activity that a Congress has ever assembled. His findings are available in a 39 page pdf document.
We’ve been telling you for months about how Cop 15, and global warming alarms in general, are nothing more than socialist (or worse) scams to redistribute wealth.
Socialist dictator Hugo Chavez leaves no doubt.
Rather than blaming his and other corrupt governments around the world for their troubles, they of course, blame the US. Even though we have given billions and billions of our own money to help these countries, the majority of it goes to line the pockets of wealthy, evil dictators, such as Chavez. The progressives in Washington, however, side with the socialists on this. They feel it appropriate to pay the lions share of the one hundred billion dollar annual pay off.
In an open letter to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), dated November 2, 2009, members of the Congressional Western Caucus expressed great concern to Attorney General Holder regarding the ongoing and apparent abuse of the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) by certain organizations including environmental and special interest groups. The Caucus highlights the complete lack of oversight, accountability, and transparency in the overall process and allocation of funds under EAJA, which appears to have contributed to the egregious abuse.
“Environmental groups have been working to deny grazing rights to America’s ranchers for decades. They do so by claiming violations of environmental policy, suing federal environmental agencies and ultimately, tying up ranchers’ time and resources in costly, and often baseless, court battles,” said Jeff Faulkner, Western Legacy Alliance (WLA) member. “What makes this situation worse is the fact that these environmental groups such as Western Watersheds Project and the Center for Biological Diversity are shaking down federal government programs so they can access taxpayer dollars to fund their radical agendas.”
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/reality-check-for-liberals/
If all this global warming – green agenda crap were true; if all of the people pushing this agenda really, sincerely, just wanted a healthy planet; if they actually took the time to read the so called “science” behind it, how could they actually be on the side of Cap-and-Trade or the Kyoto Treaty?
They couldn’t.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Maurice Strong Info Dump Continues
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http://yedda.com/questions/New_World_Order_According_Maurice_5183161118675
Q: The New World Order According To Maurice Strong and George Soros ? Posted by MarineReconDad 1 year ago Have you ever wondered how capitalism was pushed over the edge of the cliff just six weeks before the American presidential election? “This interlocking…is the new reality of the century, with profound implications for the shape of our institutions of governance, national and international. By the year 2012, these changes must be fully integrated into our economic and political life.” These chilling words are in line with ones he used for the opening session of the Rio Conference (Earth Summit II) in 1992, that industrialized countries have: “Developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma. It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class—involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing—are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.” The only change that has happened since 1992 is that Strong and Soros now have their Agent of Change coming to the White House. It is Obama’s job to demoralize the 58 million people who did not buy into his campaign and for all of those who do not want One World Order. Starring among all the glitterati at the Inauguration Ball, Barack and Michelle are like the stick figures from a kindergartener’s drawing, for this is an emperor who truly has no clothes. Selected Strong Quotes
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/1201/1201strong.htm
Maurice Strong: Godfather of the international environmental movement By Neil Hrab While unknown to the general public, the name “Maurice Strong” elicits strong emotions from people who understand the politics of the environmental movement. To his fellow environmentalists, the septuagenarian Strong is a noble, unceasing activist for the “green” cause. Strong played a major role in organizing the path-breaking United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972. Two decades later he was center-stage at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where he helped lay the groundwork for the Kyoto global warming treaty that mandates reductions in carbon dioxide emissions to combat an unproven global warming threat. This year the Bush Administration rejected the treaty citing its drastic impact on Western industrial economies and the unsettled science on global warming. Strong continues to aggressively advocate the treaty’s ratification. As a leader of government and non-governmental organizations, he has rallied elite and popular opinion to support international environmental regulation. For a time, Strong led Ted Turner’s Better World Society, a foundation promoting the United Nations, and he has served as chair or director in a variety of pro-environmentalist organizations, including the United Nations Foundation, the Commission on Global Governance and the Stockholm Environment Institute. Strong has also had a major influence in helping set philanthropic giving priorities for environmental causes. Most notably, Turner named Strong a director on the board of the United Nations Foundation that the media mogul established in 1998. The Foundation has assets of $125.4 million and has made a total of $227.7 million in grants. In this and other positions, Strong has encouraged international agencies to steer funding support to non-governmental environmental organizations. A sympathetic biographer has observed: Strong has not been a typical environmentalist. He hasn’t made scientific discoveries like those made by Jane Goodall while observing the chimps in Africa. He hasn’t started any organizations like Friends of the Earth. The idea of sustainable development isn’t even his. But his role has been no less important. Before ideas like sustainable development can change the world, they must first be brought to its attention. And that is what Maurice Strong has done…He has been a tireless worker for planet Earth. This April, Strong published Where on Earth Are We Going? With a foreword by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and dust-jacket blurbs from World Bank president James Wolfensohn and former Colorado senator Tim Wirth, now president of Turner’s United Nations Foundation, the book parades the company Strong keeps. The memoir recounts years of personal environmental activism. But, more importantly, it describes the political strategies of the international environmental movement and is a scorecard on their achievements. Publicist for International Environmentalism How has Strong promoted concepts like sustainable development to consume the world’s attention? Mainly by using his prodigious skills as a networker. Over a lifetime of mixing private sector career success with stints in government and international groups, Strong has honed his networking abilities to perfection. He can bring presidents, prime ministers and potentates from the world’s four corners to big environmental conferences such as the 1992 Rio Summit, an environmental spectacle organized by Strong and attended by more than 100 heads of state. But the talent for networking that endears Strong to his green allies also attracts scorn. To many American conservatives, Strong is almost a sinister figure – a shadowy individual flitting endlessly from one gathering of world leaders to another, all the time promoting ominous concepts U.N. “global governance.” An 1997 piece on Strong in National Review expresses this suspicion well: “[Maurice Strong is] dangerous because he’s a much smarter and shrewder man [than many in the UN system],” comments Charles Lichenstein, deputy ambassador to the UN under President Reagan. “I think he is a very dangerous ideologue, way over to the Left.” “[Strong] is kind of the global Ira Magaziner,” says Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, comparing Strong to President Clinton’s chief advisor for his failed socialized medicine proposal. “If he is whispering in Kofi Annan’s ear this is no good at all.” In Where in the World Are We Going?, Strong scoffs at “the right-wing media in the United States” for claiming that he is “a dangerous leader of a conspiracy to establish a world government that would subvert the sovereignty of the United States.” Strong may be right to complain about mere suspicions. What’s truly alarming about Maurice Strong is his actual record. Strong’s persistent calls for an international mobilization to combat environmental calamities, even when they are exaggerated (population growth) or scientifically unproven (global warming), have set the world’s environmental agenda. That the Bush Administration has been forced into a feud with our European allies over the Kyoto treaty is only the most recent example of Strong’s amazing influence. An Amazing Life Maurice Strong was born on April 29, 1929 in Oak Lake, Manitoba, Canada. His family was hardly wealthy. “We were the poorest of the poor,” Strong once recalled during an interview. “When we went for groceries, the storekeeper would say, ‘Is this going on your bill again?'” Despite a difficult early life, Strong showed great promise—he claims to have skipped four grades during his schooling and qualified for university entrance at age 14. But education bored the precocious Strong, and so in 1943 he left home and worked at odd jobs, including as a fur trader in the Canadian far north, before joining a stock brokerage firm in Winnipeg. Some believe Strong’s early experiences – especially memories of growing up during the Great Depression – help explain his Leftist politics. As Peter Foster of Canada’s Financial Post has written: “[From a young age Strong] was haunted by the spectre of an economic “system” that — as conventional leftist wisdom would have it — had “broken down.” For many leftists, the Depression has always been one of the treasured rationales for government intervention (although it was in fact created by government policies), but Mr. Strong perhaps cleaves to this rationale more than most because he lived it. As a boy, he ate dandelion and pigweed. He saw his father wrap his feet in rags before going out to the bush to cut wood. He saw his educated mother lose her mind [to severe depression]. It would be impossible not to be moved by such a tale.” Ironically, a fair chunk of Strong’s early resume has him working for the oil industry. In the 1950s, he worked for Dome Petroleum, traveling throughout Africa to set up a network of service stations and recruit locals to run them. In the 1960s, he re-built an ailing oil firm called Ajax Petroleum into a powerhouse renamed Canadian Industrial Gas & Oil Co. Strong’s expertise in the energy field was highly respected. When Canada’s Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau set up a state-owned gas company called Petro-Canada in 1975, he made Strong its president. Subsequently, Strong combined his private sector experience with tours of duty in government and international agencies. In 1966, thanks in part to his ties to Canada’s then-ruling Liberal Party, Strong became chief of the Canadian International Development Agency. He held that post for four years before leaving to immerse himself in United Nations activities. Strong was secretary-general of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and later served as executive director of the UN Environment Program. During the African famine of the mid-1980s, he was Executive Coordinator of the UN Office for Emergency Operations. During these years Strong developed his passion for environmental policy. In Where on Earth Are We Going?, he writes: “I knew there was a role for me to play here [in the environmental movement]…I also began to sense one of the great underlying truths of environmental politics. The environment is supranational. It transcends the nation state. At the very least it has to be dealt with multilaterally.” A Major Force in Environmental Philanthropy Strong has had great success in using his industry and government contacts to generate funding for the environmental movement. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his association with Ted Turner. In 1985, Turner established the Better World Society to promote two of his pet issues: environmentalism and the UN. In Where on Earth Are We Going?, Strong describes how in 1991 Turner persuaded him to lead the organization: “Midway through lunch, [Turner] abruptly put down his knife and fork and got down on his knees… ‘Maurice,’ he said, ‘I’m down on my knees because I want you to become president of the Better World Society, and I beg you not to say no.'” Strong didn’t. The Better World Society was only the beginning. In January 1998, Turner donated $1 billion to the new United Nations Foundation. Its goal is to distribute $100 million a year for the next ten years to U.N. programs dealing with poverty, malnutrition, peacekeeping and the environment. Turner named Strong to the founding board of directors. UN Foundation environmental grants since 1999 have included a $900,000 grant for a joint one-year project of the UN Development Program and World Resources Institute to help China develop policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, alleged to be responsible for dangerous global warming. The Foundation also has contributed $520,000 to teach young people about the environment and it made a similar-sized grant so that a U.N. task force could study the environment in relation to human settlements. Turner and Strong have a mutual admiration society; they effusively praise one another for all they do on the world’s behalf. Turner’s penchant for insult and bombast seems not to bother Strong. In August 2000, Turner spoke to the U.N. “World Peace Summit” and denounced Christianity as “intolerant because it taught we were the only ones going to heaven. That confused the devil out of me since that would have left heaven a very empty place.” Turner went on to praise “indigenous” religious faiths and all the things humans have in common, including “love of birds, butterflies, wives and flowers.” Strong had enthusiastically introduced Turner, saying he had done more for peace and understanding, the environment, and the U.N. than any other person. Strong has raised money for environmental organizations in other ways. In his book Global Greens (Capital Research Center, 1998), James Sheehan describes how Strong used his personal connections to transform the World Bank from an enemy to an ally of environmental groups – and a donor to them. Until the mid-1990s, environmentalists charged the World Bank with financing the destruction of Brazilian rainforests, and they accused it of making loans to Third World governments that forced the poor from their homes. Environmentalists were so irate with the World Bank that they called for its elimination. Then in 1995, a new president, James Wolfensohn, took charge of the agency. A Wall Street investment banker, Wolfensohn was critical of Bank projects he considered environmentally harmful. He was also a Strong protégé. Strong watched approvingly as Wolfensohn instituted environmentalist-friendly policies, including the appointment of environmental NGOs to World Bank advisory committees. Many of these organizations received World Bank grants to implement biodiversity and global warming projects in developing nations. Says Sheehan, “The World Bank has done an excellent job of co-opting the environmental movement by re-packaging itself as a ‘sustainable development’ agency.” Strong was pivotal in this dramatic transformation of the Bank from foe to friend. Strong’s Environmental Philosophy Strong’s environmental views are distilled in a speech he gave as head of the United Nations Environment Programme more than 25 years ago. The Feb. 13, 1974 address at Iona College in Windsor, Canada contains what is still the core of his thinking. At the outset Strong noted: “I speak to you as a layman – one who has had the great privilege of receiving the help and advice in my work [at the UN] of a significant cross section of the world’s scientists and environmentalists. I would not pretend that I have been able to assimilate all of it or to draw the soundest conclusions from it [italics added].” The problem as Strong saw it was not the threat of environmental cataclysm, but the danger of “a series of more limited catastrophes affecting large segments of the world’s population and posing an acute moral, economic and political dilemma to the whole global community.” Their source was Western Man and his abiding “preoccupation with the physical, the material, the quantitative aspects of our lives – an obsession with the notion that more is better in all things…The relentless application of purely economic criteria to decision-making has grossly distorted allocation of resources in favour of the areas of highest economic return rather than of social priority.” Strong reviewed the assorted environmental dangers: “Scientists advise me that there is a possibility that we may already be in the beginning stages of a major shift in the dynamics of the earth’s climate system.” Next he worried about “forcing the oceans to bear an impossible burden as final global reservoirs of waste” and then shifted to population – “…the headlong pace of mass migration from rural areas to the cities, the rapid growth in unemployment, and escalating pressure on already overstrained resources and services, particularly in the developing world, will almost surely get worse before they can get better.” Strong said the right policies could prevent ecological disaster. “We urgently need an anti-disaster strategy. We need to find and repair to a safer course.” · Population growth had to be curbed “by improving the incentives to reduce family size by spreading the benefits of [economic] development more widely and by developing improved techniques of family planning for those with the incentive to use them.” · “The ethic of abundant resources must give way to the ethics of scarcity and conservation.” · Incentives should be created to move industry from the developed to the developing world—a giant job redistribution. The imperative here is “the need to avoid overburdening the environment in any particular area [of the world]…” The developed world must tighten its belt in other ways – people dwelling there must embrace “alternative life styles and patterns of consumption, oriented more to quality and non-material satisfactions and less to quantity.” What Strong’s sweeping call for “non-material satisfactions” meant for American consumers is now discernable in many environmentalist policy proposals. Environmental organizations, echoing Strong’s criticisms, frequently condemn the American lifestyle as wasteful and ecologically unsustainable. To “reform” public behavior, they argue for coercive laws and regulations to force people out of their cars and into mass transportation, out of single-family homes in spacious suburbs and into smaller apartments in congested cities, and out of jobs in industries like fossil fuels that they consider threats to the environment. But restrictions on domestic living standards are only the beginning. Strong’s speech asked the U.S. and First World nations to commit to an additional sacrifice – they should dedicate themselves to “a much larger flow of resources between rich and poor countries with heavy emphasis on the provision of basic social services to the poorest sectors.” In other words, Strong would have the U.S. spend billions on international aid programs. Key Environmental Strategy: Strengthen the U.N. Twenty-five years ago Strong sketched out a global political framework that would curtail the sovereignty of nations and expand the power of the U.N. and other international organizations. Strong’s downpayment on this vision have been the policies he subsequently has helped advance at a series of U.N.-sponsored conferences from Stockholm and Rio to Kyoto and, next year, Johannesburg. Strong appears to rule out a formal world government when he suggests that “the technological society [his shorthand expression for life in a globalized world] cannot be managed by traditional systems of hierarchical control.” Instead, “it requires a network of institutions, governmental and non-governmental, local, regional, national and international, to perform the wide variety tasks and functions necessary to the operation of that society.” This new network does not exactly end nation-state sovereignty. Instead, it should lead to the creation of a formalized “system of international organizations” whose purpose will be to “provide the instrumentalities for carrying out those common tasks which it is either not feasible or advantageous for [individual nation-states] to carry out themselves.” There’s no need to describe the peril of handing over U.S. sovereignty – a sovereignty that guarantees the freedoms of U.S. citizens – to a centralized and often corrupt foreign bureaucracy whose agenda is frequently at odds with U.S. policies and values. Strong’s enthusiasm for the U.N. completely ignores its history of failure in numerous policy areas. In the years since Strong’s 1974 speech the U.N. has failed to alleviate poverty – and ecological devastation – in Africa and other developing nations. And its peacekeeping efforts in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia failed to deter aggression in the 1990s. Global Warming Alarmism Critics say Strong and other environmentalists are transfixed by disaster scenarios built on junk science. Nowhere is this more apparent than Strong’s attitude toward global warming. Global warming is the theory that rising man-made carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, autos and other industrial activities will cause a dangerous increase in temperatures that will wreak havoc on the planet’s climate in myriad ways, from melting the polar ice caps to causing powerful storms and severe droughts. In Where on Earth Are We Going? Strong presents a fictional “Report to the Shareholders, Earth Inc.” bearing the date January 1, 2031 and built around the imagined impact of global warming. In Strong’s telling North America will be a hell on earth. The Midwest will be struggling through a tenth straight year of drought, and New Orleans will be ravaged by tropical diseases to such an extent that it becomes little more than a “shrinking fortress held only with poisonous amounts of lethal pesticides.” In Los Angeles, “water vendors with armed guards roam the streets…” Both cities are better off than the state of Florida, which will have fallen under the sea. Strong advocates ratification of the Kyoto treaty to stop the impending crisis. Negotiated by the Clinton Administration in December 1997, the treaty requires the U.S. to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30 to 40 per cent by 2010. But according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, that could cost the economy $400 billion per year, raise electric utility rates by 86 per cent, hike the cost of heating oil by 76 per cent, and impose a permanent “Kyoto gasoline tax” of 66 cents per gallon. In total, each U.S. household would have to spend an extra $1,740 per year on energy. WEFA, an economic information and consulting firm, reports that 2.4 million jobs would be lost and manufacturing wages cut by 2.1 per cent. This gives Strong no pause. Indeed, he seems to want to inflict economic damage on Western industrial democracies. When it comes to environmental policy, Strong says, “Economic growth is not the cure, it is the disease.” Strong supports Kyoto despite the scientific evidence. The U.N. has repeatedly scaled down its prediction of rapid temperature increases in coming decades. In 1990, for instance, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that global temperatures would rise six degrees farenheit by 2100. Just three years later, the IPCC adjusted its projection downward to a rise of less than two degrees farenheit. NASA satellites, the most accurate measure of global temperature, show that the Earth has slightly cooled since 1979, contradicting doomsayers who predicted global warming should have caused the temperature to increase six-tenths of a degree by now. Scientists who once strongly believed in the theory are now more skeptical. Dr. James Hansen, the NASA scientist who inaugurated the global warming debate in 1988, said then that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would cause the temperature to increase and lead to increased drought by the end of the 20th century. In 1998, Hansen candidly admitted his predictions had not come true because he didn’t know enough about the climate system. In 2000, Hansen went further and said carbon dioxide is not responsible for global warming. Hansen still subscribes to the global warming theory but he believes the treaty should be abandoned because it targets the wrong greenhouse gas and harms international relations by turning developing and developed nations into “adversaries.” Conclusion Environmental politicians like Maurice Strong don’t follow the science. They push for power. Strong has devoted his life to establishing international legal procedures to enforce his vision. And his imagination is haunted by a parade of environmental horribles. Scientists doubt they may ever come to pass, but Strong, like many contemporary environmentalists, is motivated more by fervent conviction than scientific evidence. Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” never exploded, and the Club of Rome’s reports on the limits to growth are famously wrong. Not one catastrophe hypothesized by Strong and other environmentalists has occurred. But that hasn’t stopped them from building the environmental movement. Neil Hrab is a graduate of the University of Toronto and served as a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow at Capital Research Center. Other related articles: (open in a new window)
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http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0401strong.htm
Global snake oil salesman By Alan Caruba Okay, so this guy comes up to you and swears he’s got the inside scoop on what’s going to happen over the next thirty years. You figure you can cash in big-time because this guy is a multimillionaire, has rubbed shoulders with presidents, prime ministers, movie stars, the whole power structure thing. With the inside information he’s about to give you, you’re going to be on easy street. He pulls out his crystal ball, gazes into it and here’s just a little of what he tells you will occur: It is January 1, 2031 and central authority has broken down in thirty-two more nations. India has long since disintegrated. The European Union has collapsed. Again. What had been called Russia is just a bunch of city-states and regions run mostly by warlords. Oh, by the way, there have been massive forest fires in Siberia that have destroyed towns, cities, and industries there. Nine more countries in Latin America have reverted to military dictatorships. In the US, a President has been assassinated and the new one is even more “politically impotent with effective power increasingly concentrated among the extremists who now control Congress in concert with the military and the FBI.” Are you with me so far? I mean, this is one heck of a crystal ball and so filled with interesting news about the future. I know you are just dying to hear all about the environment and, let me tell, you, it’s the pits! There have been “unprecedented extremes of weather.” Florida is-I kid you not-under water and the lowlands of the Carolinas are lagoons. Most of California is totally devastated, particularly since the “Great Earthquake of 2026.” Did I mention there’s been a drought in the US Great Plains area and Canada too? It’s been going on for seven years. The Colorado River “long since stolen from the Mexicans by California” is now only a trickle. The summer’s heat wave in 2030 was so bad it closed down Washington, DC. In fact, “deaths from heat-related causes exceeded a hundred thousand” but like bad weather makes for bad news. Take, for example, the way “refugees are even entering North America from the north, stumbling over the polar icecaps, perishing in their hundreds.” (The good news is that the polar bear population has topped one million. Just kidding!) Things are no better in Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Water as far as the eye can see, millions dead. Whole South Pacific Islands have disappeared. Come to think of it, at least 100 million have died in China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and other Asian nation. Yup, things have really gone down hill since 2001. And in only thirty years! Ironically, drinking water is worth more than oil in 2031, but, then again, a barrel of oil costs $50. And guess what? The one country that is doing well is Germany. Yes, it turns out that the Germans have elected someone who, like Hitler, granted himself emergency powers, “giving him total authority.” Now, all the good Germans are working together “for the common good and share equitably in both the sacrifices and the benefits achieved through a total mobilization of citizens to deal with their problems.” Why, old Adolf himself couldn’t have said it better. Now, here’s where it gets really interesting. This multimillionaire soothsayer puts his crystal ball away and leans forward. In a tone of the most sincerity, he asks you, if everything he’s told you is “just a sour fantasy, the dismal fiction of a doomsayer?” What’s your answer? Do you think this scenario is accurate? Everything above came from a new book, “Where on Earth are We Going?”, by Maurice Strong, the organizer of the 1992 UN Rio Earth Summit and a senior advisor to the United Nations and World Bank. What’s useful about his memoir by one of the most influential figures in the global environmental movement is his belief, shared by the movement’s true believers, that the earth is on the brink of chaos. Global warming, right around the corner, will drown whole nations, devastate the coasts of all nations, bring about plagues, and rival the Bible itself for the horrors that will occur if…if we don’t do just exactly what Maurice wants us to do. You see, the problem is our “industrial civilization.” It’s going to require “some very fundamental changes…” What are they? You can read about them in Agenda 21 and all the other lunatic reports and books about the earth that have been produced by the United Nations and people like Maurice Strong. Essentially, if you thought the Dark Ages were fun, you will love the “fundamental changes” the Greens have in mind. In 1990, I created The National Anxiety Center as a clearinghouse for information about scare campaigns. They were and are the proliferating efforts to frighten people, not just in America, but worldwide, into accepting the idea that the earth is facing an environmental Armageddon for which the only answer is a global government. It’s being put together right now by an army of faceless, unelected bureaucrats in the United Nations and their fellow travelers, the “non-governmental organizations” who would also share power. No more United States of America. No more Great Britain. No more Sweden, Brazil, China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia or Russia. No more France, Kenya, Nepal, Bermuda or Tunisia, Just one big family, all being run out of the United Nations by people who don’t have to worry about being elected by anyone. One huge redistribution of wealth from the industrialized Western nations to the under-developed nations of the world in order to end their poverty. And then everyone will be happy, right? This is the classic Communist scenario. When Communism failed in Russia, as it will in China, and everywhere else it is imposed by force, people discover that only free markets, competition, and a lot of really hard work, coupled with a legal system that protects private property, generates wealth and the higher living standards that come with it. You just don’t get much distribution of wealth if some despot is running your country with the help of his family and close friends. You get, oh, say, Indonesia under Suharto. Cuba under Castro. Iraq under Hussein. Or just about any nation on the continent of Africa. It’s a long list. Let’s thank Maurice Strong for publishing his memoir, for giving us a tiny look at what a very wealthy, very well-connected, very dedicated crackpot can do once he is totally convinced the world is coming to an end. “Ecological destruction is a sign of the imbalance in the way our industrial civilization sets its priorities and governs itself.” Those of us who see him for the lunatic he is are, in his view, members of “the paranoid right.” Indeed, everything others and I have written over the past years about the Greens and the United Nations are just “the deluded and paranoid ravings of the Western far right.” Strong’s predictions of what life will be in 2031 are, of course, not paranoid ravings.
Alan Caruba is a frequent contributor. His weekly column, “Warning Signs” is posted every Friday on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center. © Alan Caruba, 2001.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28719
The legacy of Maurice Strong
Posted: August 24, 2002 By Joan Veon
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Ten years ago, as I was reading a very small article in the Washington Post on the Rio Earth Summit, I laughed and told my husband, “Those crazy environmentalists who don’t know their right foot from their left foot are having this huge meeting in Rio and it won’t go anywhere.” On their own, their movement would never amount to a hill of beans. However, given the environmental mandate of “The Report from Iron Mountain,” a secret report commissioned by the Kennedy administration in 1961 to find political and economic alternatives for a time in which the world would have no more wars, I was very naive and wrong. Maurice Strong who was the secretary-general of the 1972 and 1992 environmental conferences made the following comments 10 years ago at the closing meeting:
Using what has been put in place in the last 10 years and the current program of action let me update you with his legacy. The earth is not the same. We have been turned upside down and inside out. The reordering of God’s balance for earth and the demotion of man to being equal to a plant or animal is the first understanding. You and I are no longer valued the same as we were when God’s rules reigned in the hearts of government. We are now a species, or a class, instead of a human as in being, soul, individual, person or creature. We are more expendable now and, as you will see, can be herded like cows. With regard to climate change – which basically says cows, human and plants give off too much carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases – it maintains that pollution and the burning of forests and coal must be reduced. Because we all share the atmosphere, climate warming became the “first global problem” that individual firms and countries could not solve on their own. The major transnational corporations have been working on a scheme of trading carbon permits as a way for us to transfer part of our carbon to lesser-developed countries that have less pollution. At a World Bank Conference on sustainable development several years ago, when economist Joseph Stiglitz presented this concept, I asked him if he was basically “bringing a new company public or a stock to market” in creating this permit-trading system. He answered, “Yes,” and with a very large grin said, “And we will do very well!” Within the last year, a carbon-trading market was established in Chicago. Interestingly enough, Maurice Strong is one of its directors. Furthermore, it has been suggested that if the price of energy went up, it would encourage people to change to more efficient technologies, thus reducing carbon in the air. Can you imagine the profit insiders and interested parties would make on another oil embargo, let alone the money they will make bartering the carbon trading permits? “Agenda 21” is now the earth’s new gospel. I believe that in the future it just may replace “The Communist Manifesto.” Ever read it? Your children are being taught it in their elementary schools through college. Furthermore there are high school environmental clubs that are being taught how to protest. The follow-up to “Agenda 21” is being put forth at this summit. It calls for a number of actions – specifically in the areas of biodiversity, health, energy, water and agriculture. The more than 150 action items create a web of control, management and expense that will bring unbelievable hardship for each of us. Furthermore, “Agenda 21” is changing and evolving. These geniuses are learning by trial and error. You and I and all of God’s Creation have become a global laboratory. Because the kings, princes, presidents and prime ministers agreed to “Agenda 21,” they need money to implement it. And with this summit, they even need more money. There are numerous proposals on the table which include establishing a world solidarity fund to eradicate poverty, “[significant] increases in the flow of foreign direct investment to developing countries,” and “develop ways of generating new public and private innovative sources of finance through the use of special drawing rights for development purposes through the IMF.” Those agreed to include: “adopt and implement polices and measures aimed at promoting sustainable patterns of production and consumption applying the polluter-pays principle and internationally agreed development goals will require significant increases in the flow of financial resources [including through new and additional financial resources] in particular to developing countries.” Currently the countries of the world give about 0.3 percent of GNP to developing countries. At the March Financing for Development Conference, a number of countries committed more money toward the ideal goal of 0.7 percent of GNP goal for Overseas Development Assistance. This is not enough. Now the World Bank estimates that they will need double the amount annually to meet the Millennium Summit Development Goals incorporated into the program of action. Here in Johannesburg, the masters of the universe have upped the ante. They have proposed “0.15 to 0.20 percent of GNP of developed countries to least developed countries” in addition to the current goal of 0.7 percent of GNP for developing countries! When is enough enough? The world is not the same. We have been hijacked by a group of rogue kings, princes, presidents and prime ministers – not to mention corporate CEOs, insiders and international bankers. “Agenda 21” basically pits the proletariat against the serfs. The more I hear, the more I read, I believe that making the 21st century sustainable is nothing more than a time of 21st-century “feudalism.” This is Maurice Strong’s legacy to us. |
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Continuing Our Info Dump on Maurice Strong and Friends
WHO IS MAURICE STRONG?
The adventures of Maurice Strong & Co. illustrate the fact that nowadays you don’t have to be a household name to wield
global power.
By Ronald Bailey Published in The National Review September 1, 1997
Mr. Bailey is a freelance journalist and television producer in Washington, D.C. He is author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (St. Martin’s) and The True State of the Planet (Free Press).
“The survival of civilization in something like its present form might depend significantly on the efforts of a single man,” declared The New Yorker. The New York Times hailed that man as the “Custodian of the Planet.” He is perpetually on the short list of candidates for Secretary General of the United Nations.
This lofty eminence? Maurice Strong, of course. Never heard of him? Well, you should have. Militia members are famously worried that black helicopters are practicing maneuvers with blue-helmeted UN troops in a plot to take over America. But the actual peril is more subtle. A small cadre of obscure international bureaucrats are hard at work devising a system of “global governance” that is slowly gaining control over ordinary Americans’ lives. Maurice
Strong, a 68-year-old Canadian, is the “indispensable man” at the center of this creeping UN power grab.
Not that Mr. Strong looks particularly indispensable. Indeed, he exudes a kind of negative charisma. He is a grey, short, soft-voiced man with a salt-and-pepper toothbrush mustache who wouldn’t rate a second glance if you passed him on the street. Yet his remarkable career has led him from boyhood poverty in Manitoba to the highest councils of international government.
Among the hats he currently wears are: Senior Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; Senior Advisor to World Bank President James Wolfensohn; Chairman of the Earth Council; Chairman of the World Resources Institute; Co-Chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum; member of Toyota’s International Advisory Board. As advisor to Kofi Annan, he is overseeing the new UN reforms.
Yet his most prominent and influential role to date was as Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development — the so-called Earth Summit — held in Rio de Janeiro, which gave a significant push to global economic and environmental regulation.
“He’s dangerous because he’s a much smarter and shrewder man [than many in the UN system],” comments Charles Lichenstein, deputy ambassador to the UN under President Reagan. “I think he is a very dangerous ideologue, way over to the Left.”
“This guy is kind of the global Ira Magaziner,” says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute. “If he is whispering in Kofi Annan’s ear this is no good at all.”
Strong attracts such mystified suspicion because he is difficult to pin down. He told Maclean’s in 1976 that he was “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.” And his career combines oil deals with the likes of Adnan Khashoggi with links to the environmentalist Left. He is in fact one of a new political breed: the bi-sectoral entrepreneur who uses business success for leverage in politics, and vice versa.
Strong started in the oil business in the 1950s. He took over and turned around some small ailing energy companies in the 1960s, and he was president of a major holding company — the Power Corporation of Canada — by the age of 35. This was success by any standard. Yet on more than one occasion (including once in Who’s Who), Strong has been caught exaggerating. He claimed, for instance, to have forfeited a $200,000 salary when he left Power. The real figure, said a company officer, was $35,000. Why this myth-making? Well, a CEO is just a CEO — but a whiz-kid is a potential cabinet officer.
And it is in politics that Strong’s talents really shine. He is the Michelangelo of networking. He early made friends in high places in Canada’s Liberal Party — including Paul Martin Sr., Canada’s external-affairs minister in the Sixties — and kept them as business partners in oil and real-estate ventures. He cultivated bright well-connected young people — like Paul Martin Jr., Canada’s present finance minister and the smart money’s bet to succeed Jean Chretien as prime minister — and salted them throughout his various political and business networks to form a virtual private intelligence service. And he always seemed to know what the next political trend would be — foreign aid, Canadian economic nationalism, environmentalism.
In 1966, by now a Liberal favorite, Strong became head of the Canadian International Development Agency and thus was launched internationally. Impressed by his work at CIDA, UN Secretary General U Thant asked him to organize what became the first Earth Summit — the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. The next year, Strong became first director of the new UN Environment Program, created as a result of Stockholm. And in 1975, he was invited back to Canada to run the semi-national Petro-Canada, created by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the wake of OPEC’s oil shocks.
Petro-Canada was a sop to Canada’s anti-American Left, then denouncing American ownership of the country’s oil companies. Strong talked a good economic-nationalist game — but he himself was a major reason why Canada’s oil companies were U.S.-owned. Ten years before, while at Power Corporation, he had enabled Shell to take over the only remaining all-Canadian oil company by throwing a controlling block of shares in its direction. As Maclean’s wrote, he now returned “amid fanfares” to rectify this.
After a couple of years, Strong left Petro-Canada for various business deals, including one with Adnan Khashoggi through which he ended up owning the 200,000-acre Baca ranch in Colorado, now a “New Age” center run by his wife, Hanne. (Among the seekers at Baca are Zen and Tibetan Buddhist monks, a breakaway order of Carmelite nuns, and followers of a Hindu guru called Babaji.) Not for long the joys of contemplation, however. In 1985, he was back as executive coordinator of the UN Office for Emergency Operations in Africa, in charge of running the $3.5-billion famine-relief effort in Somalia and Ethiopia. And in 1989, he was appointed Secretary General of the Earth Summit — shortly thereafter flying down to Rio.
Strong’s flexibility, however, must not be mistaken for open-mindedness. His friends, his allies among Canadian Liberals, his networks in the UN and the Third World, even his long-term business partners (like the late Paul Nathanson, wartime treasurer of the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Committee) all lean Left. He has said the Depression left him “frankly very radical.” And given his ability to get things done, the consistency of his support for a world managed by bureaucrats is alarming. As Elaine Dewar wrote in Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine:
It is instructive to read Strong’s 1972 Stockholm speech and compare it with the issues of Earth Summit 1992. Strong warned
urgently about global warming, the devastation of forests, the loss of biodiversity, polluted oceans, the population time bomb. Then as now, he invited to the conference the brand-new environmental NGOs [non-governmental organizations]: he gave them money to come; they were invited to raise hell at home. After Stockholm, environment issues became part of the administrative framework in Canada, the U.S., Britain, and Europe. IN the meantime, Strong continued the international networking on which his influence rests. He became a member of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission). He found time to serve as president of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, on the executive committee of the Society for International Development, and as an advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund. Above all, he served on the Commission on Global Governance — which, as we shall see, plays a crucial part in the international power grab. Sometimes, indeed, it seems that Strong’s network of contacts must rival the Internet. To list a few:
— Vice President Al Gore. (Of course.)
— World Bank President James Wolfensohn, formerly on the Rockefeller Foundation Board and currently on the Population Council Board; he was Al Gore’s favored candidate for the World Bank position.
— James Gustave Speth, head of the Carter Administration’s Council on Environmental Quality, crafter of the doomladen Global 2000 report, member of the Clinton – Gore transition team; he now heads the UN Development Program.
— Shridath Ramphal, formerly Secretary General of the (British) Commonwealth, now Co-Chairman of the Commission on Global Governance.
— Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute — which works closely with the World Bank, the UN Environment Program, and the UN Development Program — and Co-Chairman of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.
— Ingvar Carlsson, former Swedish prime minister and Co-Chairman of the Commission on Global Governance.
But Strong is no snob; he even counts Republican Presidents among his friends. Elaine Dewar again:
Strong blurted out that he’d almost been shut out of the Earth Summit by people at the State Department. They had been overruled by the White House because George Bush knew him. He said that he’d donated some $100,000 to the Democrats and a slightly lesser amount to the Republicans in 1988. (The Republicans didn’t confirm.)
I had been absolutely astonished. I mean yes, he had done a great deal of business in the U.S., but how could he have managed such contributions?
Well, he’d had a green card. The governor of Colorado had suggested it to him. A lawyer in Denver had told him how.
But why? I’d asked.
“Because I wanted influence in the United States.”
So Strong gave political contributions (of dubious legality) to both parties; George Bush, now a friend, intervened to help him stay in charge of the Rio conference; he was thereby enabled to set a deep green agenda there; and Bush took a political hit in an election year. An instructive tale — if it is not part of Strong’s mythmaking. Most of Strong’s friends are more obviously compatible, which may explain why they tend to overlap in their institutional commitments. For example, James Wolfensohn (whom Strong had hired out of Harvard in the early Sixties to run an Australian subsidiary of one of his companies) appointed him as his senior advisor almost immediately upon being named chairman of the World Bank.
“I’d been involved in . . . Stockholm, which Maurice Strong arranged,” says Wolfensohn, who, more recently, has been credited with co-drafting (with Mikhail Gorbachev) the Earth Charter presented for consideration at the Rio + 5 meeting in Brazil earlier this year. As head of the Earth Council, Maurice Strong chaired that meeting.
It’s not a conspiracy, of course: just a group of like-minded people fighting to save the world from less prescient and more selfish forces — namely, market forces. And though the crises change — World War II in the Forties, fear of the atom bomb in the Fifties, the “energy crisis” in the Seventies — the Left’s remedy is always the same: a greater role for international agencies. Today an allegedly looming global environmental catastrophe is behind their efforts to increase the power of the UN. Strong has warned memorably: “If we don’t change, our species will not survive. . . . Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.” Apocalypse soon — unless international bodies save us from ourselves.
LAST week, Secretary General Annan unveiled Maurice Strong’s plan for reorganizing the UN. To be sure, the notoriously corrupt and inefficient UN bureaucracy could do with some shaking up. Strong’s plan, however, mostly points in a different direction — one drawn from a document, Our Global Neighborhood, devised by the interestingly named Commission on Global Governance.
The CGG was established in 1992, after Rio, at the suggestion of Willy Brandt, former West German chancellor and head of the Socialist International. Then Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali endorsed it. The CGG naturally denies advocating the sort of thing that fuels militia nightmares. “We are not proposing movement toward a world government,” reassuringly write Co-Chairmen Ingvar Carlsson and Shridath Ramphal, “. . . [but] this is not to say that the goal should be a world without systems or rules.” Quite so. As Hofstra University law professor Peter Spiro describes it: “The aim is not a superstate but rather the establishment of norm-creating multilateral regimes . . . This construct already constrains state action in the context of human rights and environmental protection and is on a springboard in other areas.”
The concept of global governance has been fermenting for some time. In 1991, the Club of Rome (of which Strong is, of course, a member) issued a report called The First Global Revolution, which asserted that current problems “are essentially global and cannot be solved through individual country initiatives [which] gives a greatly enhanced importance to the United Nations and other international systems.” Also in 1991 Strong claimed that the Earth Summit, of which he was Secretary General, would play an important role in “reforming and strengthening the United Nations as the centerpiece of the emerging system of democratic global governance.” In 1995, in Our Global Neighborhood, the CGG agreed: “It is our firm conclusion that the United Nations must continue to play a central role in global governance.”
Americans should be worried by the Commission’s recommendations: for instance, that some UN activities be funded through taxes on foreign-exchange transactions and multinational corporations. Economist James Tobin estimates that a 0.5 per cent tax on foreign-exchange transactions would raise $1.5 trillion annually — nearly equivalent to the U.S. federal budget. It also recommended that “user fees” might be imposed on companies operating in the “global commons.” Such fees might be collected on international airline tickets, ocean shipping, deep-sea fishing, activities in Antarctica, geostationary satellite orbits, and electromagnetic spectrum. But the big enchilada is carbon taxes, which would be levied on all fuels made from coal, oil, and natural gas.
“A carbon tax,” the report deadpans, “. . . would yield very large revenues indeed.” Given the UN’s record of empire-building and corruption, Cato’s Ted Carpenter warns: “One can only imagine the degree of mischief it could get into if it had independent sources of revenue.”
Especially significant for the U.S. was the CGG’s proposal for eventual elimination of the veto held by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The Commission knew that the current permanent members of the Security Council, including the U.S., would not easily surrender their vetoes, and so it recommended a two-stage process.
In the first stage, five new permanent members (without a veto) would be added to the Security Council — probably Japan, Germany, Brazil, India, and Nigeria — along with three new slots for non-permanent members. But the real threat to U.S. interests is the second stage: “a full review of the membership of the Council . . . around 2005, when the veto can be phased out.” These plans are advancing. In March, the president of the UN General Assembly, Razali Ismail of Malayasia, unveiled his own formula for reforming the Security Council. It closely tracks the CGG’s proposals. In particular, Razali proposed “urg[ing] the original permanent members to limit use of the veto . . . and not toextend [it] to new permanent members.” He wanted to make the veto “progressively and politically untenable” and recommended that these arrangements be reviewed in ten years.
In July the State Department compromised — accepting five new Security Council members but remaining silent on the veto. It plainly hopes that the veto issue will go away if the U.S. concedes on enlarging the Council. Yet the CGG’s report makes clear that we are facing a rolling agenda to expand the power of UN bureaucrats. The veto issue may be postponed for ten years — but what then?
“This is an initiative that should be resisted by the United States with special vehemence,” says Ted Carpenter. For if the veto were eliminated, the United States would face the prospect of having other countries make key determinations that affect us without our consent.
THE Commission also wants to strengthen “global civil society,” which, it explains, “is best expressed in the global non-governmental movement.” Today, there are nearly 15,000 NGOs. More than 1,200 of them have consultative status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council (up from 41 in 1948). The CGG wants NGOs to be brought formally into the UN system (no wonder Kenneth Minogue calls this Acronymia). So it proposes that representatives of such organizations be accredited to the General Assembly as “Civil Society Organizations” and convened in an annual Forum of Civil Society.
But how would these representatives be selected? This June, the General Assembly held a session on environmental issues called Earth Summit +5. President Razali selected a number of representatives from the NGOs and the private sector for the exclusive privilege of speaking in the plenary sessions.
“I have gone to a lot of trouble with this, choosing the right NGOs,” he declared. So whom did he choose?
Among others: Thilo Bode, executive director of Greenpeace, to represent the scientific and technological community; Yolanda Kakabadse, the president of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; and “from the farmers, I have chosen an organic farmer, Denise O’Brien from the United States, who is a member of the Via Campesina.” In what sense are these people “representative”? Whom do they > represent? Were the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the chairman of Toshiba, and the president of the Farm Bureau all too busy to come talk to the General Assembly?
Another example of how this selection process operates was the “great civil society forum” convened at the behest of Strong’s Earth Council and Mikhail Gorbachev’s Green Cross International this past March. Some five hundred delegates met, supposedly to assess the results of the Earth Summit, but in reality to condemn the “inaction” of signatory countries in implementing the Rio treaties. The delegates were selected through a process based on national councils for sustainable development, themselves set up pursuant to the Earth Summit. Membership in these councils means that an organization is already persuaded of the global environmental crisis. So you can bet that the process did not yield many delegates representing business or advocating limits on government power.
This kind of international gabfest is, of course, a sinister parody of democracy. “Very few of even the larger international NGOs are operationally democratic, in the sense that members elect officers or direct policy on particular issues,” notes Peter Spiro. “Arguably it is more often money than membership that determines influence, and money more often represents the support of centralized elites, such as major foundations, than of the grass roots.” (The CGG has benefited substantially from the largesse of the MacArthur, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations.)
Hilary French, Vice President of the alarmist Worldwatch Institute, justifies this revealingly as “a paradox of our time . . . that effective governance requires control being simultaneously passed down to local communities and up to international institutions.” Paradoxically or not, the voters hardly appear in this model of governance. It bypasses national governments and representative democracy in order to empower the sort of people who are willing to sit in committee meetings to the bitter end. Those who have better things to do — businessmen, workers, moms — would be the losers in the type of centralized decentralization envisioned by Worldwatch. The result would be decisions reached by self-selecting elites. In domestic politics, we have a name for such elite groups — special interests.
ANOTHER CGG recommendation is that the old UN Trusteeship Council “be given a new mandate over the global commons.” It defines the global commons to include the atmosphere, outer space, the oceans beyond national jurisdiction, and the related environmental systems that contribute to the support of human life. A new Trusteeship Council would oversee “the management of the commons, including development and use of their resources . . . [and] the administration of environmental treaties in such fields as climate change, biodiversity, outer space, and the Law of the Sea.”
It is hard to see what this expansive definition would exclude from the jurisdiction of the Trusteeship Council. Biodiversity encompasses all the plants and animals on the earth, including those that live in your backyard. Will UN troops swoop in to stop you from cutting down trees on your property? Doubtless not. But a recent case near Yellowstone National Park may be a foretaste of how international agencies can meddle in U.S. domestic affairs.
Yellowstone has been designated a “World Heritage Site.” These Sites are natural settings or cultural monuments recognized by the World Heritage Committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as having “outstanding universal value.” Sites are designated under a Convention ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1973, and it is possible to place such sites on a “List of World Heritage Sites in Danger.”
In this case, a mining company wanted to construct a gold mine outside the boundaries of Yellowstone. The normal environmental review of the project’s impact was still proceeding under U.S. law. But a group of environmentalist NGOs opposed to the mine were not content to wait for that review to take its course. They asked that members of the World Heritage Committee come to Yellowstone to hold public hearings. George Frampton, the Clinton Administration’s Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, wrote to the WHC saying: “The Secretary [Bruce Babbitt] and the National Park Service have clearly expressed strong reservations with the New World Mine proposal.” Frampton added: “We believe that a potential danger to the values of the Park and surrounding waters and fisheries exists and that the committee should be informed that the property as inscribed on the . . . List is in danger.” Four officials of the WHC duly came to Yellowstone and held hearings. And at its December 1995 meeting in Berlin, the Committee obligingly voted to list Yellowstone as a “World Heritage Site in Danger.”
“It was, in my opinion, a blatantly political act,” declared Rep. Barbara Cubin (R., Wyo.) during congressional hearings about the listing. “It was done to draw attention, public reaction, public response, and public pressure to see that the mine wasn’t developed.” Jeremy Rabkin, a Cornell political scientist, agrees that the international listing of such sites “provides an international forum through which to put pressure on U.S. policy.”
Would the mine really have endangered Yellowstone? We’ll never know. The environmental-impact statement was never issued, and, under pressure, the mining company accepted a $65-million federal buyout plus a trade for unspecified federal lands somewhere else. Thus, even with no enforcement power, this UN dependency was able to make land-use policy for the United States.
These events prompted Rep. Don Young (R., Alaska) to introduce the American Land Sovereignty Act. With 174 co-sponsors to date, the Act aims to “preserve sovereignty of the United States over public lands and . . . to preserve State sovereignty and private property rights in non-federal lands surrounding those public lands.” Congress would have to approve on a case-by-case basis land designations made pursuant to any international agreements.
But is U.S. sovereignty really in danger? In an interview, Strong dismissed Young’s anxieties. “I do not share his concern. It is no abdication of sovereignty to exercise it in company with others, and when you’re dealing with global issues that’s what you have to do.” He continues: “If you put yourself in a larger unit, of course, you get some advantages and you give up some of your freedom. And that’s what’s happening in Europe, that the states of Europe have decided that overall they’re better off to create a structure in which they give up some of their national rights and exercise them collectively through the Union.”
This example of the European Union, however, worries Ambassador Lichenstein. The EU’s bureaucracy in Brussels, he complains, “is responsible to no one. Governments get together — foreign ministers, finance ministers — they presumably hand down the guidelines, but don’t kid yourself, the bureaucrats are running things.”
The Yellowstone case is an example of how “feel-good” symbolism about the environment can be transformed into real constraints upon real people imposed outside the law, with no democratic oversight and no means of redress. Ironically, Strong himself had a run-in with Colorado environmentalists over local water rights. They did not have the wit to call in an international agency against the New Age rancher — or maybe they realized that Strong was one property owner whose rights the UN would respect.
AS troubling as the Yellowstone incident is, much greater potential for mischief lies in a new series of “framework treaties” designed to handle global environmental issues. Initially, the treaties called for voluntary actions by governments and set up a consultative process. But environmental activists like Hilary French know very well how this process works. “Even though it can look disappointing, the political will created [by these framework conventions] can lead to commitments of a more binding nature,” she said. This is already happening.
“Although its declaration of principles was transparently aspirational, the 1972 Stockholm world conference on the human environment is generally recognized as a turning point in international environmental-protection efforts,” wrote Peter Spiro. “From it emerged a standing institution (the UN Environment Program); weak but more focused ‘framework’ treaties followed, which in turn are being filled out by specific regulatory regimes. The 1985 Vienna Convention on the Protection of the Ozone Layer itself included no obligations, but the 1987 Montreal protocols and subsequent amendments set a full phaseout of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-depleting substances by 1996.
The regime covers 132 signatories with a total population of 4.7 billion people. Between 1987 and 1991, global CFC consumption was in fact reduced by half. A similar filling-out process is likely to occur with the biodiversity and climate-change conventions signed at Rio.” The “conventions” that Spiro was talking about emerged from the Earth Summit chaired by Maurice Strong. They deal with two of the alleged global environmental crises — global warming and species extinction.
At the time of the Earth Summit, some scientists predicted on the basis of climate computer models that the earth’s average temperature would increase by 4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century because of the “greenhouse effect.” These predictions are controversial among scientists. And as the computer models are refined, they show that the atmosphere will warm far less than originally predicted. Furthermore, more accurate satellite measurements show no increase in the average global temperature over the last two decades. Finally, an important study published in Nature concluded that even if the warming predictions are right, it could well be less costly to allow greenhouse gas emissions to continue to rise for a decade or more because technological innovations and judicious capital investment will make it possible to reduce them far more cheaply at some point before they become a significant problem. In other words, we needn’t take drastic and costly action now.
The process forges ahead anyway. The Framework Convention on Global Climate Change signed by President George Bush at the Rio Earth Summit is already beginning to harden. Initially, countries were supposed voluntarily to reduce by the year 2000 the “greenhouse gases” to the level emitted in 1990. Then, a year ago, at a UN climate-change meeting in Geneva, the Clinton Administration offered to set legally binding limits on the greenhouse gases the United States can emit. In June of this year, at the UN’s Earth Summit +5 session, President Clinton reaffirmed this commitment. And mandatory limits on carbon emissions are to be finalized at a global meeting of Convention signatories in Kyoto this December.
Estimates of the costs to the United States of cutting emissions range from $90 billion to $400 billion annually in lost Gross Domestic Product and a loss of between 600,000 and 3.5 million jobs. Global costs would be proportionately higher. Yet while the U.S. may be committing itself to limits, 130 developing nations, including China and India, are excluded under the Framework Convention from having to reduce their emissions, which, on present trends, will outstrip those of the industrialized world early in the next century. If the U.S. and other industrial countries have to limit energy use while the Third World is exempt, many industries will simply decamp to where energy prices are significantly lower.
If they are permitted to do so. For, as Sen. Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.) asked at a conference on “The Costs of Kyoto” held by the Competitive Enterprise Institute: “Who will administer a global climate treaty? . . . Will we have an international agency capable of inspecting, fining, and possibly shutting down American companies?” Sen. Hagel is not alone is his concern. In July the U.S. Senate passed 95 to 0 a resolution urging the Clinton Administration not to make binding concessions at the Kyoto conference.
But the climate-change treaty is not the only threat to U.S. interests. Though Mr. Bush refused to sign the Bio-diversity Convention at the Rio Earth Summit — chaired, remember, by GOP contributor Strong — that only delayed things. The Clinton Administration signed shortly after its inauguration. Since the treaty obliges signatories to protect plant and animal species through habitat preservation, its implementation could make the World Heritage Committee’s activities on U.S. land use seem penny-ante by comparison.
MEANWHILE, how much further down the path sketched out by the CGG will the UN reforms developed by Maurice Strong and announced by Kofi Annan last week take us? The most important initiative is the recommendation that the General Assembly organize a “Millennium Assembly” and a companion “People’s Assembly” in the year 2000. (The “People’s Assembly” mirrors the CGG’s “Civil Society Forum” idea — among other things, only accredited NGOs would be invited to advise the General Assembly.) But what would these grand new bodies actually do? The Millennium Assembly would invite “heads of Government . . . to articulate their vision of prospects and challenges for the new millennium and agree on a process for fundamental review of the role of the United Nations [emphasis added].” That last innocuous phrase is diplomatese for opening up the UN Charter for amendment. If that happens, so could anything — notably eliminating the veto in the Security Council.
The Millennium Assembly would also consider adopting Strong’s Earth Charter. For the most part the Charter reads like another feel-good document — its draft says that “we must reinvent industrial-technological civilization” and promises everybody a clean environment, equitable incomes, and an end to cruelty to animals — but we have seen how such vacuous symbolism can have real consequences down the line. Inevitably, the Charter advocates that “the nations of the world should adopt as a first step an international convention that provides an integrated legal framework for existing and future environmental and sustainable-development law and policy.” This is, of course, a charter for endless intervention in the internal affairs of independent states.
Which leaves external affairs. Hey presto! In line with the CGG’s plan, Annan/Strong urge that the UN Trusteeship Council “be reconstituted as the forum through which member states exercise their collective trusteeship for the integrity of the global environment and common areas such as the oceans, atmosphere, and outer space.” For the time being, however, Annan and Strong have avoided calling for global taxes or user fees to finance the UN. One spokesman said that the issue was simply “too hot to handle right now.” What they propose is a Revolving Credit Fund of $1 billion so that the UN will have a source of operating funds even if a major contributor (e.g., the U.S.) withholds contributions for a time. In short, the CGG’s blueprint for a more powerful UN closely resembles the movement to expand the requirements of the Framework Convention on Global Climate Change. While the process may be piecemeal, the goal is clear: a more powerful set of international institutions, increasingly emancipated from the control of the major powers, increasingly accountable not to representative democratic institutions but to unelected bureaucracies, and increasingly exercising authority over how people, companies, and governments run their affairs — not just Americans, but everyone. In short, Col. Qaddafi’s definition of his leftist Green Revolution: “Committees Everywhere.”
If so, the future looks good for Maurice Strong. One UN source suggested that, at the very least, he would like to be made Secretary General of the Millennium Assembly or the People’s Assembly. Others suspect that, even at age 68, Strong is angling to be the next UN Secretary General. Such eminence may help explain a puzzling incident in his early career. Having long had political ambitions, he decided to enter the Canadian Parliament. A candidate was evicted from a safe constituency by the Liberal leadership, and Strong moved in. Then, with only a month to go before the 1979 election, he suddenly pulled out of the race.
Strong’s business deals were especially complicated at the time — he was setting up a Swiss oil-and-gas exploration company with partners that included the Kuwaiti Finance Minister and the Arab Petroleum Investment Corporation — and that is the explanation usually given. But maybe he just decided that for a man who wants power, elections are an unnecessary obstacle.
The Maurice Strong- Rothschild Connection: Beyond the CO2 Scam and into Control of Land and Food
What follows is a summary of and a link to another alarming connection of Maurice’s Strong. Edmund de Rothschild, his involvement with the CO2 Scam and his grab for our money and our food.
From Euro-med.dk: Summary: After Edmund de Rothschild’s statement, without basis, at the 4th World Wilderness Congress in 1987, that CO2 is the cause of a non-existent global warming – and that combating it needs money (our money), he founded the World Conservation Bank for this reason. In 1991 its name was changed to The Global Environment Facility (GEF). The purpose of this facility is to lend money to the poorest countries, printed by the IMF out of thin air, and with the guarantee of our governments. The facility takes wilderness areas with mineral riches as security. The GEF money is then to flow back to our governments as reimbursement for paid loans. I.e. We give away our tax money. For what? When a country cannot repay loans to the GEF it must give up a piece of its territory to the Rothschild banks (GEF, IMF, World Bank) – up to 30% of the Earth are meant. If land cannot be offered as collateral the country must starve (Haiti, Argentina and others). Rothschild´s stroke of genius was that he had his GEF smuggled into the UN system at the Rio UN Summit in 1992 by his friend, Maurice Strong. So now high-ranking ministerial officials from 179 countries are in the the council of the bank – blessing Rothschild grabbing the world! This article brings interviews with a man who was a participant at the 4th World Wilderness Congress,a man who knows what happened there and knew Rothschild personally – as well as David Rockefeller, who tried to threaten him to silence about what he had learned at the Wilderness Congress. The GEF is to manage the money just promised to the developing countries in Copenhagen (100 billion dollars a year from 2020 – 30 bn over the next 3 years) with the help of the World Bank. However, Rothschild does not leave it there. He and his henchmen are now joining the race of certain governments (China, Saudi Arabia), to buy up large areas of farmland in developing countries, having the crops transported back to the home countries. This leaves the locals, already starving, with much less crops available – with food prices rising rapidly – which is exactly Rothschild’s expectation. This makes people flee from Africa to Europe. Food prices have doubled in the past year or so – so that many people in Haiti before the earthquake, could not even afford to buy mud pies with minimal nourishment. And so it goes on. This is the ultimate goal of Rothschild’s New World Order
“ How Edmund de Rothschild Managed to Let 179 Governments Pay Him for Grasping Up to 30% of the Earth ”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 4 so far )More on Maurice Strong
Here are some videos for you on Maurice Strong. Some we have run before, but we will gladly run them again along with ones new to us. It is so very important for all to realize what is going on here. It is almost too late, but if we speak up loudly and clearly and share what we know with those who are not yet paying attention, we stand a chance.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )The Maurice Strong File
Maurice Strong and the Indoctrination of Our Youth
This is a multipart series on the indoctrination of the youth of America. We will be continuing this series for the next few days. The above video is important to illustrate what history has to teach us on this issue.
Introducing The Earth Scouts
Here is the 329 page book distributed to “troop” leaders across the country for the Earth Scouts.
The Inside Cover states: Resources for families bringing up children in the spirit of the Earth Charter. Illustrations on the cover page tout Participatory Democracy, Economic Justice, Human Rights, Respect for Nature, Peace and Non-Violence
The guide was made possible through a grant from the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County, Florida. CBHC is funded through tax dollars.
It is important you visit the link provided, however, allow me to provide small snippets of the first few pages in order for you to understand their stated goals.
The Earth Scouts are groups of 5 to 15 children ages 3 to 15 and their adult facilitators, committed to live the ideals of the Earth Charter The Earth Charter is a set of principles. It is a vision for a human race that aspires to live in peace, practice respect for human rights, and pledges to consume resources with wisdom and concern for all life now and in the future.
Earth Scouts participate in planning their own activities to fulfill their mission: Changing the world one fun badge at a time.
Earth Scouts learn and practice skills that will serve them throughout their lives. They experience cooperative work and group decision making that will improves self-esteem, and offer safe-passage on each child’s journey from self-centeredness to respect for the interconnected web of life.
Earth Scouts learn about people who have identified problems and created their own strategies to act on those problems effectively. They learn about policies and practices in their own neighborhood, city, state, nation and global community that interfere with the ability of people to live together happily and healthfully. Earth Scouts co-create their own strategies to address issues of mutual concern. These strategies may be as simple as doing research or as dynamic as passing a new law.
Earth Scouts co-create these strategies in groups that are supportive and cooperative. The goal of Earth Scouts is to empower participants to be leaders, invite them to fully embrace their role as members of local and national communities and institutions, and inspire the courage to live true to your beliefs even if it means being different.
Earth Scouts learn and grow together, becoming a values-oriented peer group bonded by the shared experience of transforming concern into action.
…Our goal for Earth Scouts is to support families evolving their own sustainable lifestyles, by bringing you activities, stories of successful community service dreamed up and carried out by youth, group process tips, explanations of the Earth Charter, and the experiences of other Earth Scout Communities. Our definition of family for this book is broad: loving people who join together in the hard and important work of raising children. Living by the principles in the Earth Charter, and trying to be a caring and responsible member of our Global Human Family requires creativity and a supportive community. We hope you find tools and ideas for both in the pages of this book.
…The National Earth Scouts organization is a program of the non-profit organization Earth Charter Communities, USA, and pursues the mission of supporting Earth Scouts groups with informational resources, and networking assistance. Individual scout communities are independent both financially and authoritatively. In other words, the national organization does not determine policies, or dictate programs, fundraise for individual groups or collect money from them. The national organization does unify Earth Scout communities under one identity and purpose: the official Earth Scouts Mission Statement. As such, it is the Earth Charter document itself that provides individual scout communities with the guidelines to shape how they conduct scout activities and fundraising. The national office only supports and promotes Earth Scout communities that operate in alignment with Earth Charter values and principles.
They credit the book to Earth Charter Communities founder, Jan Roberts. The idea for Earth Scouts, they say, was “willed into existence” via Jan Roberts by “inviting people to share her vision as a gardener would tirelessly gather, plant, and tend a fertile plot of land.”
Jan Roberts, according to zoom-info, “has been working with grassroots leaders throughout the US, where political support for the Charter has been weaker than in many other countries” and ” is a longtime civic activist, former private practice psychotherapist, and founder of several nonprofits, including women’s and behavioral health agencies.Jan serves as founder and president of the Institute for Ethics & Meaning in Tampa.The Institute serves as the national organizing body for Earth Charter grassroots activities in the United States. The Earth Charter is an international people’s Declaration of Interdependence that was written by over 100,000 people in 78 countries over the course of 12 years.The concept of the Earth Charter is that all life is interdependent,” Roberts said.”It’s not only about cleaning up the air and the water, but it’s also about economic and social justice.” Here is the one minute Public Service Announcement:
Their slogan is “Changing the world one fun badge at a time—youth working together to make the Earth Charter a reality at home and in the community.”
Who is the face behind the earth charter? Maurice Strong.
If you don’t recognize that name, it’s crucial you make his acquantance: Maurice Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6
Here he is in a very recent interview discussing the Earth Charter:
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 7 so far )Why I Call It the Breath Tax
Rudd had hoped to take his carbon emissions trade scheme to next week’s global talks in Copenhagen, where world leaders will discuss new targets to curb greenhouse gas emissions….
The rejection gives Rudd a legal trigger to call an election, that could come as early as March or April 2010, and to then ram his laws through a special joint sitting of both houses of parliament if he is returned to power.
“We will do all we can, and continue to do all we can to safeguard our children’s future. And we will not take a backward step,” Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told a hostile Senate at the end of a marathon week-long debate….
The Senate rejection throws the future of carbon trading in Australia into confusion, creating new uncertainty for business which had sought clarity from the political debate.
“From the point of view of a lot of businesses in Australia they’re now back in the dark. No-one knows what is coming next,” said Tim Hanlin, chief executive of the Australian Climate Exchange.
Unfortunately, the target for climate stabilization may be moving more quickly than progress on policy. Recent empirical evidence indicates climate change is taking place considerably faster than scientists had expected only a decade ago. Furthermore, paleoclimatic research indicates that earlier climate change episodes also took place rapidly. If rapid change is occurring, a considerably lower policy target than 450 ppm is justified. The 350 ppm CO2 goal is only starting to receive attention among policy makers or in the global political discussions over climate, although Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Nicholas Stern, author of the 2006 Stern Review, have recently endorsed the 350 ppm target. The chief climate scientist at NASA, James Hansen, argues that a reduction from the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 385 ppm, to 350 ppm CO2 by 2100 will be essential to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change. The lag in the discussion is in part due to the lack of analyses in the economics literature of the costs and benefits of a 350 ppm CO2 stabilization trajectory. For this reason, Economics for Equity and the Environment Network (E3) initiated this study of the economics of the 350 ppm target.
Hansen and his co-authors describe a detailed scenario for reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the goal of
reaching 350 ppm CO2 by 2100:
• Coal burning is phased out or achieves 100 percent carbon capture by 2030.
• Oil and gas prices rise steadily as these finite resources approach exhaustion.
• A combination of ending deforestation and initiating large-scale reforestation causes significant
negative emissions (that is, a withdrawal of CO2 from the atmosphere).
What does it take to get to 350?
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The authors of the SEI proposal use less elegant language: “The GDRs’ burden-sharing system is progressive with respect to both responsibility and capacity.”
They reason that 15.6% of the world’s population are in countries in the “high income” bracket and should be responsible for 78.5% of GDR costs of emissions control. Countries in the “low income” bracket contain 36.7% of the world’s population and should be responsible for only 0.5% of the costs.
The United States, they calculate, should pay 34.3% of the global bill, more than four times the burden of any other country.
SEI estimates that American taxpayers would need to pay $2,697 in annual per capita costs to achieve GDR’s global goals.
This amount is in addition to what taxpayers would pay for a carbon tax or cap-and-trade costs to cut emissions. The SEI study does not hazard a guess as to how much it would cost developed countries like the U.S. to cut their own emissions. Nor does it compare the cost and effectiveness of various policy alternatives.
Even with respect to only the high-income nations, the average U.S. taxpayer is very heavily punished. The average burden among high-income nations is only $1,845 per taxpayer. Taxpayers in 47 nations have to pay, on average, less than $5 each. People in 17 nations wouldn’t owe a penny.
SEI’s headquarters is in faraway Stockholm, Sweden. But a U.S. headquarters office opened at the Tufts University campus in Somerville, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, in April 2006.
According to IRS records, the U.S. Center of the Stockholm Environment Institute reported revenue of $1,483,391, with U.S. government agency support of $929,786. The total amount of revenue available to SEI is unavailable because many SEI-US projects, such as the GDR framework proposal, are developed in conjunction with SEI in Sweden, which has disclosed its revenue sources but not their amounts.
According to its 2007 annual report, SEI support comes from universities, foundations, corporations, the Swedish, U.S. and other foreign governments, and various nongovernmental organizations
SEI also works closely with the Earth Island Institute, one of America’s most radical environmental groups. Earth Island’s “EcoEquity” project was co-founded by Tom Athanasiou, one of the authors of the GDR framework.
The Earth Island Institute, which has been featured in numerous Capital Research Center reports, was founded in 1982 by David Brower, an anti-technology extremist so radical he was once kicked out of the Sierra Club.
Earth Island regards itself as an “incubator” and “fiscal sponsor” for grassroots activist groups like Athanasiou’s EcoEquity project.
One of the announced purposes of EcoEquity is to “prepare the American people” for the demands that GDR will make of them.
Earth Island receives funding from the Surdna Foundation ($150,000 in 2006), George Soros’s Open Society Institute ($300,000 in 2006), Marisla Foundation ($40,000 in 2006), Tides Foundation (more than $420,000 since 1999), and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation (more than $150,000 since 1999). (Read more about the Earth Island Institute in “Ted Turner: Down, But Not Out,” Foundation Watch, November 2004; “‘Energy Independence’: A Formula For Attacking Energy Production,” Organization Trends, January 2007; and “Eco-Terrorism,” Organization Trends, February 2007.
Just as in Australia, our government is trying to force this global warming hoax down our throats. In less than one week, our President will head to Copenhagen. Please make sure the White House knows how you feel on treaties and legislation that would lead to an eventual “Breath Tax”.
The Greatest Scam In The History of Earth
Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a “climate emergency.” As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the “trigger” placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee.
As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points out, the Kerry-Boxer bill requires the declaration of a “climate emergency” if the concentration of carbon dioxide and other declared greenhouse gases in the atmosphere exceeds 450 parts per million (ppm). It was at about 286 ppm before the Industrial Revolution and now sits at around 368 ppm.
That figure was picked out of a hat because the warm-mongers believe that’s the level at which the polar ice caps will disappear, boats can be moored on the Statue of Liberty’s torch and dead polar bears will wash up on the beaches of Malibu.
The Senate version includes a section that gives the president authority, under this declared “climate emergency,” to “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions … to address shortfalls” in achieving greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions.
What the “appropriate actions” might be are not defined and presumably left up to the discretion of the White House. Could the burning of coal be suspended or recreational driving be banned? Sen. David Vitter, R-La., asked the EPA for a definition and received no response.
Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Chris Horner says “this agenda transparently is not about GHG concentrations, or the climate. It’s about what the provision would bring: almost limitless power over private economic activity and individual liberty for the activist president and, for the reluctant leader, litigious greens and courts” packed by liberal Democrat appointees.
“Environmental groups have been working to deny grazing rights to America’s ranchers for decades. They do so by claiming violations of environmental policy, suing federal environmental agencies and ultimately, tying up ranchers’ time and resources in costly, and often baseless, court battles,” said Jeff Faulkner, Western Legacy Alliance (WLA) member. “What makes this situation worse is the fact that these environmental groups such as Western Watersheds Project and the Center for Biological Diversity are shaking down federal government programs so they can access taxpayer dollars to fund their radical agendas.”
Two of the federal programs that are seemingly handing out millions, and possibly billions, to environmental groups are the EAJA and the Judgment Fund.
The EAJA was established approximately 30 years ago by Congress to ensure that individuals, small businesses and/or public interest groups with limited financial capacity could seek judicial redress from unreasonable government actions that threatened their rights, privileges or interests.
According the U.S. Department of the Treasury website, the Judgment Fund, which was created in the 1960’s, “…is available for most court judgments and Justice Department compromise settlements of actual or imminent lawsuits against the government. Congress has added a number of administrative claim awards (settlements by agencies at the administrative level, without a lawsuit). The Judgment Fund has no fiscal year limitations, and there is no need for Congress to appropriate funds to it annually or otherwise. Moreover, disbursements from it are not attributed to or accounted for by the agencies whose activities give rise to awards paid. Absent a specific statutory requirement, the agency responsible is not required to reimburse the Judgment Fund.”
Since 2003, the Judgment Fund has paid out $4.7 billion in judgments, including the reimbursement of attorney’s fees. It appears environmental groups have accessed millions of taxpayer dollars from this fund; however, the Web site reporting these payments does not indicate to whom the payments were made or for what purpose. Additional investigation reveals that the same environmental groups benefiting from EAJA payments are accessing the Judgment Fund to millions of dollars each year.
An article at Fox News about the open letter noted:
American taxpayers are being forced to fund thousands of lawsuits filed against the federal government by environmental organizations — with their lawyers clocking thousands of hours and charging fees of up to $650 an hour.
The U.S. government hands out millions of dollars each year to various environmental organizations to help protect fish, wildlife and other aspects of the environment. And every year, those same groups spend millions suing the government over everything from forest policy and carbon emissions to water quality and wolf habitats.
Who paid the attorneys fees? The American taxpayers did.
In the lucrative world of environmental law, the biggest defendant is the federal government, and taxpayers foot the bill. The nation’s ten largest environmental groups have sued the government more than 3,000 times in a nine-year period, according to legal fund the Western Legacy Alliance, an Idaho-based legal fund that defends ranchers and farmers.
Now, the growing number of cases is beginning to attract the attention of some lawmakers in Congress.
Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., has written to the Department of Justice asking for an investigation, pointing out that much of the money being paid comes out of the Equal Access to Justice Act fund, which Congress set up for the indigent and public interest groups to recover legal fees.
Right now, the government does not account for how much is paid out to whom or for what reason.
“These are taxpayer dollars that are being used by the federal government to compensate people who have sued the federal government. I believe that taxpayers have the right to know who those people are and how much they’ve been paid,” Lummis told Fox News.
They should not expect any help from the current Administration, however.
Bloomberg noted: Billionaire George Soros, looking to address the “political problem” of climate change, said he will invest $1 billion in clean-energy technology and donate $100 million to an environmental advisory group to aid policymakers. [He] announced the investment in Copenhagen on Oct. 10 at a meeting on climate change sponsored by Project Syndicate. The group is an international association made up of 430 newspapers from 150 countries.
…Soros’s announcement comes two months before 190 nations will gather in the Danish capital for a final round of negotiations on a new climate treaty that includes provisions to finance clean- energy projects in developing nations. Talks last week in Bangkok were marked by a dispute between richer and poorer nations over whether to renew or abandon the Kyoto Protocol, the only existing global agreement to reduce carbon dioxide, which is blamed for global warming.
Soros, 79, also will establish the Climate Policy Initiative, a San Francisco-based organization to which he will donate $10 million a year for 10 years.
Extreme left journalist George Monbiot ignored all the facts I provided when he was pointing a finger at me. He’s ignoring them again, which forces him to assume the deniers are at fault. He wrote, “There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.”
The sphere is expanding for several reasons.
- All evidence rejects the hypothesis that human CO2 is causing warming or climate change.
- Facts are gradually getting to the public despite obstructionism by journalists like Monbiot.
- Temperature projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are consistently wrong.
- Record cold temperatures are occurring everywhere.
- Motives of those pushing the need for reduction in CO2 are being exposed.
- Economic costs of a completely unnecessary action are emerging.
Britain’s Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia, suffered a data breach in recent days when a hacker apparently broke into their system and made away with thousands of emails and documents. The stolen data was then posted to a Russian server and has quickly made the rounds among climate skeptics. The documents within the archive, if proven to be authentic, would at best be embarrassing for many prominent climate researchers and at worst, damning.
The electronic break in itself has been verified by the director of the research unit, Professor Phil Jones. He told Britain’s Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”
The paper goes on to discuss, at length the individual emails, and if you have not yet seen them, I urge to to follow the link.
In Australia, where the story first broke, the Herald Sun noted:
…So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below – emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down skeptics.
This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.
Not surprising, then, that Steve McIntyre reports:
Earlier today, CRU cancelled all existing passwords. Actions speaking loudly.
Hackers have broken into the data base of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – one of the world’s leading alarmist centers – and put the files they stole on the Internet, on the grounds that the science is too important to be kept under wraps.
The ethics of this are dubious. But the files suggest, on a very preliminary glance, some other very dubious practices, too, and a lot of collusion – sometimes called “peer review”. Or even conspiracy.
“The files contain so much material that it is going to take some time t o put it all in context,” says Ball. “However, enough is already known to underscore their explosive nature. It is already clear the entire claims and positions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on falsified manipulated material and is therefore completely compromised.
“The fallout will be extensive as material continues to emerge. Reputations of the scientists involved are already destroyed, however fringe players will continue to be identified and their reputations destroyed or sullied.”
While the mainstream media is bending into pretzels to keep the scandal under the rug, Climategate is already the biggest scientific scandal in history because of the global policy implications.
Soldier for Liberty Exclusive: “Roger” This? Maurice Strong connection to Future of US Healthcare
The Crown Jewel of Understanding- Agenda 21 and The Club of Rome
So, what exactly is the Club of Rome and who are its members? Founded in 1968, the CoR describes itself as “a group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity.” It consists of current and former Heads of State, UN beaureacrats, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe.
I would like to start this analysis of the Club of Rome by listing some prominent members of the CoR and its two sub-groups, the Clubs of Budapest and Madrid. Personally it isn’t what the CoR is that I find so astonishing; it is WHO the CoR is! This isn’t some quirky little group of green activists or obscure politicians. They are the most senior officials in the United Nations, current and ex-world leaders, and the founders of some of the most influential environmental organisations. When you read their reports in the context of who they are – its gives an entirely new, and frightening, context to their extreme claims.
The Club of Rome subsequently founded two sibling organizations, the Club of Budapest and the Club of Madrid. The former is focused on social and cultural aspects of their agenda, while the latter concentrates on the political aspects. All three of these ‘Clubs’ share many common members and hold joint meetings and conferences. As explained in other articles on this website it is abundantly clear that these are three heads of the same beast. The CoR has also established a network of 33 National Associations. Membership of the ‘main Club’ is limited to 100 individuals at any one time. Some members, like Al Gore and Maurice Strong, are affiliated through their respective National Associations (e.g. USACOR, CACOR etc).
Some current members of the Club of Rome or its two siblings:
Al Gore – former VP of the USA, leading climate change campaigner, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Academy Award winner, Emmy winner. Gore lead the US delegations to the Rio Earth Summit and Kyoto Climate Change conference. He chaired a meeting of the full Club of Rome held in Washington DC in 1997.
Javier Solana – Secretary General of the Council of the European Union, High Representative for EU Foreign Policy.
Maurice Strong– former Head of the UN Environment Programme, Chief Policy Advisor to Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the Rio Earth Summit, co-author (with Gorbachev) of the Earth Charter, co-author of the Kyoto Protocol, founder of the Earth Council, devout Baha’i.
Mikhail Gorbachev– CoR executive member, former President of the Soviet Union, founder of Green Cross International and the Gorbachev Foundation, Nobel Peace Prize winner, co-founder (with Hidalgo) of the Club of Madrid, co-author (with Strong) of the Earth Charter.
Diego Hidalgo– CoR executive member, co-founder (with Gorbachev) of the Club of Madrid, founder and President of the European Council on Foreign Relations in association with George Soros.
Ervin Laszlo– founding member of the CoR, founder and President of the Club of Budapest, founder and Chairman of the World Wisdom Council.
Anne Ehrlich – Population Biologist. Married to Paul Ehrlich with whom she has authored many books on human overpopulation. Also a former director of Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, and a member of the UN’s Global Roll of Honor.
Hassan bin Talal – President of the CoR, President of the Arab Thought Forum, founder of the World Future Council, recently named as the United Nations “Champion of the Earth”
The Dalai Lama – The ‘Spiritual Leader’ of Tibet. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
David Rockefeller– CoR executive member, former Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, founder of the Trilateral Commission, executive member of the World Economic Forum, donated land on which the United Nations stands.
Sir Crispin Tickell – former British Permanent Representative to the United Nations and Permanent Representative on the Security Council, Chairman of the ‘Gaia Society’, Chairman of the Board of the Climate Institute, leading British climate change campaigner.
Kofi Annan– former Secretary General of the United Nations. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
Javier Perez de Cuellar – former Secretary General of the United Nations.
Gro Harlem Bruntland – United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Change, former President of Norway
Robert Muller – former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, founder and Chancellor of the UN University of Peace.
Father Berry Thomas– Catholic Priest who is one of the leading proponents of deep ecology, ecospirituality and global consciousness.
Stephen Schneider– Stanford Professor of Biology and Global Change. Professor Schneider was among the earliest and most vocal proponents of man-made global warming and a lead author of many IPCC reports.
Bill Clinton– former President of the United States, founder of the Clinton Global Iniative.
Jimmy Carter– former President of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
Bill Gates – founder of Microsoft, philanthropist
Garret Hardin – Professor of Human Ecology. Originator of the ‘Global Commons‘ concept. Has authored many controversial papers on human overpopulation and eugenics.
OTHER CURRENT INFLUENTIAL MEMBERS:
(these can be found on the membership lists of the COR (here, here, and here), Club of Budapest, Club of Madrid and/or CoR National Association membership pages)
Ted Turner – media mogul, philanthropist, founder of CNN
George Soros – multibillionare, major donor to the UN
Tony Blair – former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Deepak Chopra – New Age Guru
Desmond Tutu – South African Bishop and activist, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Timothy Wirth – President of the United Nations Foundation
Henry Kissinger – former US Secretary of State
George Matthews – Chairman of the Gorbachev Foundation
Harlan Cleveland – former Assistant US Secretary of State and NATO Ambassador
Barbara Marx Hubbard – President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution
Betty Williams – Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Marianne Williamson – New Age ‘Spiritual Activist’
Robert Thurman – assistant to the Dalai Lama
Jane Goodall – Primatologist and Evolutionary Biologist
Juan Carlos I – King of Spain
Prince Philippe of Belgium
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands
Dona Sophia – Queen of Spain
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero – current Prime Minister of Spain
Karan Singh – Former Prime Minister of India, Chairman of the Temple of Understanding
Daisaku Ikeda – founder of the Soka Gakkai cult
Martin Lees – CoR Secretary General, Rector of the UN University of Peace
Ernesto Zedillo – Director of The Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Frithjof Finkbeiner – Coordinator of the Global Marshall Plan
Franz Josef Radermacher – Founder of the Global Marshall Plan
Eduard Shevardnadze – former Soviet foreign minister and President of Georgia
Richard von Weizsacker – former President of Germany
Carl Bildt – former President of Sweden
Kim Campbell – former Prime Minister of Canada and Senior Fellow of the Gorbachev Foundation
Vincente Fox – former President of Mexico
Helmut Kohl – former Chancellor of Germany
Romano Prodi – former Prime Minister of Italy and President of the European Commission
Vaclav Havel – former President of the Czech Republic
Hans Kung – Founder of the Global Ethic Foundation
Ruud Lubbers – United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Mary Robinson – United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
Jerome Binde – Director of Foresight, UNESCO
Koïchiro Matsuura – Current Director General of UNESCO
Federico Mayor – Former Director General of UNESCO
Tapio Kanninen – Director of Policy and Planning, United Nations
Konrad Osterwalder – Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations
Peter Johnston – Director General of European Commission
Jacques Delors – Former President of the European Commission
Domingo Jimenez-Beltran – Executive Director of the European Environment Agency
Thomas Homer-Dixon – Director of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Toronto
Hazel Henderson – Futurist and ‘evoluntionary economist’
Emeka Anyaoku – former Commonwealth Secretary General, current President of the World Wildlife Fund
Wangari Maathai – Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, founder of the Green Belt Movement
While I can not prove this next statement, my gut tells me President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the promise of his signature on UN Kyoto Protocol treaty in December of this year at COP 15 in Copenhagen. Look at all the Peace Prize recipients on the list.
The pieces now begin to fall into place. I will spend the next several days, laying out pieces of this for you in as much as I can.
If you have anything to contribute to this, please leave your information in the comment section. I am merely a citizen like you, with a full time job. Any help that can be given to me would be appreciated.
Time is short. Please, tell everyone you know, no matter what side of the fence they are on. Please point them here. We will try to learn about this together, quickly. I will be posting additional information on this daily until it’s all laid out.
Saturday is the 64th anniversary of the UN. I will be in my hometown protesting with a few others that understand what is happening. It only takes one to protest. Call your friends. Hold up signs. “Say no to Agenda 21- Tell our President NOT TO SIGN AWAY OUR SOVEREIGNTY IN DECEMBER OR EVER”. As I say repeatedly, change starts with YOU.
No matter what side of the proverbial fence you are on, I’ll bet this is not Change You Can Believe In!
Maurice Strong- Man Behind Agenda 21 – Part 2
Once again, thank you to Pam L. for your help in bringing this information to our attention! This is part 2 of the Maurice Strong database. See part one here: http://bit.ly/3YktrQ
The link between Agenda 21 and your changing world – socialism http://www.middletownca.com/MAURICE-STRONG-SOCIALIST.htm
The biggest threat to the sovereignty of the United States has to be United Nations Agenda 21. Its tentacles are so interwoven into our lives it is like an aggressive cancer.
This cancer, Agenda 21, also known as Local Agenda 21 or LA-21, is nothing short of an attack on this country. It came to life in 1992 and is spreading across the globe with the help of anyone who happens to buy into the idea of a global threat. Its real purpose is hidden inside a cloaked presentation of environmental sustainability, however, it is about control of your life, your children’s lives, their children’s lives and on into perpetuity.
Maurice Strong is an admitted socialist. His sister was a Marxist. He thinks you and yours have eaten too much, used too much and now must pay. Of course like every elite socialist, that just means you, not him, or his fellow elitist.
In 1991, Strong wrote the introduction to a book published by the Trilateral Commission, called Beyond Interdependence: The Meshing of the World’s Economy and the Earth’s Ecology, by Jim MacNeil. (David Rockefeller wrote the foreword). Strong said this:
“This interlocking…is the new reality of the century, with profound implications for the shape of our institutions of governance, national and international. By the year 2012, these changes must be fully integrated into our economic and political life.”
He told the opening session of the Rio Conference (Earth Summit II) in 1992, that industrialized countries have:
“developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma. It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.”
In an essay by Strong entitled Stockholm to Rio: A Journey Down a Generation, he says:
“Strengthening the role the United Nations can play…will require serious examination of the need to extend into the international arena the rule of law and the principle of taxation to finance agreed actions which provide the basis for governance at the national level. But this will not come about easily. Resistance to such changes is deeply entrenched. They will come about not through the embrace of full blown world government, but as a careful and pragmatic response to compelling imperatives and the inadequacies of alternatives.”
“The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. What is needed is recognition of the reality that in so many fields, and this is particularly true of environmental issues, it is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.”
Yesterday there was a call by the United Nations to add a new tax to airline tickets to subsidize the poor of the world. If this happens, you will have just been taxed not by your government but by a pseudo world government that is being handed control over your life. Your airline company which is owned by an American Corporation will be directed by the United Nations to levy and collect a tax on their behalf and when that happens our United States Government will have to be complicit in that action.
The U.N. Plan for Your “Sustainable” Community By Berit Kjos – 1998 http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/la21_198.html
“…current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary. which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations…” Maurice Strong , opening speech at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development
Note: This global contract binds all nations and spreading regions to the the collective vision of “sustainable development.” They must commit to pursue the three E’s of “sustainability”: Environment, Economy and Equity referring to the UN blueprint for environmental regulations, economic regulations, and social equity. Agenda 21, the UN blueprint for global transformation, sounds good to many well meaning people. Drafted for the purpose of creating “sustainable societies”, it has been welcomed by nations around the world. Political, cultural, and media leaders have embraced its alluring visions of social justice and a healthy planet. They hide the lies behind its doomsday scenarios and fraudulent science. Relatively few consider the contrary facts and colossal costs. After all, what could be wrong with preserving resources for the next generation? Why not limit consumption and reduce energy use? Why not abolish poverty and establish a global welfare system to train parents, monitor intolerance, and meet all our needs? Why not save the planet by trading cars for bikes, an open market for “self-sustaining communities,” and single dwellings for dense “human settlements” (located on transit lines) where everyone would dialogue, share common ground, and be equal? The answer is simple. Marxist economics has never worked. Socialism produces poverty, not prosperity. Collectivism creates oppression, not freedom. Trusting environmental “scientists” who depend on government funding and must produce politically useful “information” will lead to economic and social disaster. Even so, local and national leaders around the world are following the UN blueprint for global management and “sustainable communities,” and President Clinton is leading the way. A letter I received from The President’s Council on Sustainable Development states that – “In April 1997, President Clinton asked the council to advise him on: next steps in building a new environmental management system for the 21st century… and policies that foster U.S. leadership on sustainable development internationally. The council was also charged to ensure that social equity issues are fully integrated…” (Emphasis added) Many of our representatives are backing his plan. In a 1997 letter congratulating the Local Agenda 21 Advisory Board in Santa Cruz for completing their Action Plan, Congressman Sam Farr wrote, “The Local Agenda 21 Action Plan not only has local significance, it also will have regional and national impacts. As you know, the President’s Council on Sustainable Development is beginning Phase III of its work with an emphasis on sustainable communities.” (emphasis added) This agenda may already be driving your community ís “development”, so be alert to the clues. Notice buzzwords such as “visioning,” “partners,” and “stakeholders.” Know how to resist the consensus process. Ask questions, but don’t always trust the answers. Remember, political activists, like self-proclaimed education “change agents”, have put expediency above integrity. As North Carolina school superintendent Jim Causby said at a 1994 international model school conference, “We have actually been given a course in how not to tell the truth. You’ve had that course in public relations where you learn to put the best spin on things.”
This agenda for the 21st Century was signed by 179 nations at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Among other things, it called for a Global Biodiversity Assessment of the state of the planet. Prepared by the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), this GBA armed UN leaders with the “information” and “science” they needed to validate their global management system. Its doomsday predictions were designed to excuse radical population reduction, oppressive lifestyle regulations, and a coercive return to earth-centered religions as the basis for environmental values and self-sustaining human settlements. The GBA concluded on page 763 that “the root causes of the loss of biodiversity are embedded in the way societies use resources.” The main culprit? Judeo-Christian values. Chapter 12.2.3 states that- “This world view is characteristic of large scale societies, heavily dependent on resources brought from considerable distances. It is a world view that is characterized by the denial of sacred attributes in nature, a characteristic that became firmly established about 2000 years ago with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious traditions. “Eastern cultures with religious traditions such as Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism did not depart as drastically from the perspective of humans as members of a community of beings including other living and non-living elements.”6 Maurice Strong, who led the Rio conference, seems to agree. His ranch in Colorado is a gathering place for Buddhist, Bahai, Native American, and other earth-centered religions. Yet, while spearheading the restructuring of the United Nations (see ” World Heritage Protection?”), he also helped design the blueprint for the transformation of our communities. And in his introduction to The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide, he called local leaders around the world to “undertake a consultative process with their populations and achieve a consensus on ‘Local Agenda 21’ for their communities.”
AL GORE’S MENTOR IN ALL OF THIS IS MAURICE STRONG – THE ORIGINAL GAIA PROMOTER Posted By: Rayelan Date: Wednesday, 31-Oct-2007 15:45:43
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/noframes/read/112258
Maurice Strong has been the gray imminence behind the United Nations Secretary General for years. He has also been an adviser of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
“[I am] a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.”
-Maurice Strong as quoted in Macleans.
RMN readers will remember that I speculated back in 1999 that Hillary would use her run for the Senate as a stepping stone to the Presidency and she would appoint Bill as Secretary General.
Maurice Strong is an enemy of our way of life. He is the one behind Agenda 21 and the race to eliminate humans from most of the wild lands. He is the one behind Al Gore and Gore’s books.
“[The Earth Summit will play an important role in] reforming and strengthening the United Nations as the centerpiece of the emerging system of democratic global governance.”
-Maurice Strong quoted in the September 1, 1997 edition of National Review magazine.
I was told, shortly after Al Gore’s first book came out that the book was written long before Al Gore ever had an inkling that he would be promoting “Global Warming”. I was told he was handed the book, told to read it, and show up at his book signing. I believe Maurice Strong and his cadry of supporters wrote the book.
In the opening session of the Rio Earth Summit, Strong commented: “The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.”
He believes that the only way to save the planet is to destroy civilization.
Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.” -Maurice Strong quoted in the September 1, 1997 edition of National Review magazine.
This man is the man who is the mentor to Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and to a lesser extent, Bill Clinton.
Please take the time to read this snip from an old RMN article:
“…placing Strong in charge of U.N. reform could pose a significant threat to the American way of life as Strong has used his position to centralize power in the U.N. at the expense of national sovereignty.
In the early 1970s, U.N. Secretary General U Thant tapped Strong to organize and direct the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. The conference came to be known as the first Earth Summit. In the following year, Strong became the first director of the U.N. Environment Program. These two U.N. positions marked the beginning of Strong’s methodical march toward global governance. Strong’s most significant role at the U.N. to-date has been his position as
Secretary General of the 1992 U.N. Conference on the Environment and Development, the Rio Earth Summit.
In the opening session of the Rio Earth Summit, Strong commented: “The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised
unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.”
Interestingly, Strong had initially been blocked from participating in the conference by the U.S. Department of State. When Strong learned of this, however, he persuaded then-President George Bush to overrule the State Department.
Strong is also involved in the U.N. Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Through his work in UNESCO, Strong promotes Gaia, the Earth God(dess), among the world’s youth. Strong is also the director of The Temple of Understanding in New York. He uses The Temple to encourage Americans concerned about the environment to replace Christianity with the worship of “mother earth.”
Strong also directs the U.N.’s Business Council on Sustainable Development. Under his leadership, the council tries to affect peoples’ lives through U.N. policies that attempt to reduce the availability of meat products; limit the use of home and workplace air conditioners; discourage private ownership of motor vehicles; encroach on private property rights; and work to reduce the number of single family homes.
Selected Strong Quotes
Strong on national sovereignty at the opening session of the 1992 Earth Summit…
“The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The
global community must be assured of environmental security.” -Maurice Strong at the 1992 Earth Summit.
Strong responding to a question by a reporter asking why he gave large donations to both political parties in the United States during the 1988 election cycle… “Because I wanted influence in the United States.” -Maurice Strong quoted in Saturday Night magazine.
Strong on the impending global environmental catastrophe…
“If we don’t change, our species will not survive… Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.” -Maurice Strong quoted in the September 1, 1997 edition of National Review magazine.
Strong discussing the role the Earth Summit would play in the emerging system of global governance…
“[The Earth Summit will play an important role in] reforming and strengthening the United Nations as the centerpiece of the emerging system of democratic global governance.” -Maurice Strong quoted in the September 1, 1997 edition of National Review magazine.
Maurice Strong’s Outlook on COP15 Climate Change Negotiations by Fred Dubee & Marisha Wojciechowska-Shibuya: 10/14/09(MaximsNewsNetwork) http://www.maximsnews.com/news20091013mauricestronginterview10910130801.htm Maurice Strong has been at the forefront of international environmental negotiations for over 40 years, namely as the Secretary-General of both the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which launched the world environment movement, and the 1992 Earth Summit.
More recently, Mr. Strong has been actively advocating international compromise for tackling climate change. As the international community is frantically attempting to broker a new global climate treaty to combat climate change (set to be adopted in Copenhagen this December), we turn to Mr. Strong for perspective.
What is the crux of the climate change challenge?
Maurice Strong: The unsustainable nature of our current economic system was dramatically revealed by both the climate change and the economic crises. They are inextricably linked on a systemic, integrated basis and cannot be managed as separate and competing issues.
The climate change challenge requires us to make changes in the fundamental nature and functioning of our economic system and resist the temptation merely to patch up the existing system to enable to continue, however, temporally, on the pathway that led to its crisis.
Only through fundamental change can we transcend these crises and rebuild the economic and social foundations of our civilization to ensure its survival and sustainability….
Maurice Strong by Julie Walsh July 27, 2007
http://www.openmarket.org/2007/07/27/maurice-strong/
Why am I not surprised to see his name involved with cap-and-trade? Let’s see, he was involved in Oil for Food, and cash funneled via U.N. agencies to North Korea, and under Kofi Annan received a million dollar check bankrolled by Saddam Hussein’s U.N.-sanctioned regime that was delivered by Tongsun Park—Maurice Strong embodies all that is sinister and shady.
Today he is involved in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), the only firm in the U.S. that trades carbon credits, no doubt because he cares about the environment.
WHO IS MAURICE STRONG? National Review, Sept 1, 1997 by Ronald Bailey
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n16_v49/ai_19722906/
.. Among the hats he currently wears are: Senior Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; Senior Advisor to World Bank President James Wolfensohn; Chairman of the Earth Council; Chairman of the World Resources Institute; Co-Chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum; member of Toyota’s International Advisory Board. As advisor to Kofi Annan, he is overseeing the new UN reforms.
Yet his most prominent and influential role to date was as Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development –the so-called Earth Summit — held in Rio de Janeiro, which gave a significant push to global economic and environmental regulation.
“He’s dangerous because he’s a much smarter and shrewder man [than many in the UN system],” comments Charles Lichenstein, deputy ambassador to the UN under President Reagan. “I think he is a very dangerous ideologue, way over to the Left.”
“This guy is kind of the global Ira Magaziner,” says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute. “If he is whispering in Kofi Annan’s ear this is no good at all.” …
| At the United Nations, the Curious Career of Maurice Strong |
| Claudia Rosett, George Russell, Fox News | |
| 02/06/2007 http://www.defenddemocracy.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11779069&Itemid=347 Before the United Nations can save the planet, it needs to clean up its own house. And as scandal after scandal has unfolded over the past decade, from Oil for Food to procurement fraud to peacekeeper rape, the size of that job has become stunningly clear.
But any understanding of the real efforts that job entails should begin with a look at the long and murky career of Maurice Strong, the man who may have had the most to do with what the U.N. has become today, and still sparks controversy even after he claims to have cut his ties to the world organization. From Oil for Food to the latest scandals involving U.N. funding in North Korea, Maurice Strong appears as a shadowy and often critically important figure. Strong, now 77, is best known as the godfather of the environmental movement, who served from 1973-1975 as the founding director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi. UNEP is now a globe-girdling organization with a yearly budget of $136 million, which claims to act as the world’s environmental conscience. Strong consolidated his eco-credentials as the organizer of the U.N.’s 1992 environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, which in turn paved the way for the controversial 1997 Kyoto Treaty on controlling greenhouse gas emissions. But his green credentials scarcely begin to do justice to Strong’s complicated back-room career. He has spent decades migrating through a long list of high-level U.N. posts, standing behind the shoulder of every U.N. secretary-general since U Thant . Without ever holding elected office, he has had a hand in some of the world’s most important bureaucratic appointments, both at the U.N. and at the World Bank. A Canadian wheeler-dealer with an apple face and pencil mustache, Strong has parlayed his personal enthusiasms and connections into a variety of huge U.N. projects, while punctuating his public service with private business deals. Along the way, Strong has also been caught up in a series of U.N. scandals and conflicts of interest. These extend from the notorious Oil-for-Food program to the latest furor over cash funneled via U.N. agencies to the rogue regime of North Korea, which involves, among other things, Strong’s creative use of a little-known, U.N.-chartered educational institution called the University for Peace. Above all, the tale of Maurice Strong illustrates the way in which the U.N., with its bureaucratic culture of secrecy, its diplomatic immunities, and its global reach, lends itself to manipulation by a small circle of those who best know its back corridors. … Since then, Strong has receded, as he often does, into the shadows. He is currently spending most of his time in China. His name flickered recently through the speaker lineup for a gala dinner for clean technologies in San Francisco, but the organizers say he then canceled because “he has so much going on” in China. China is a special place for Strong, a self-declared, life-long socialist. It is the burial place of a woman said to be one of his relatives, the famous pro-communist American journalist Anna Louise Strong, a vociferous supporter of Lenin and Stalin until the mid-‘30s, and a strong booster of Mao Zedong’s China. Maurice Strong’s presence in Beijing, however, raises awkward questions: For one thing, China, while one of the world’s biggest producers of industrial pollution, has been profiting from the trading of carbon emissions credits – thanks to heavily politicized U.N.-backed environmental deals engineered by Strong in the 1990s. Strong has refused to answer questions from FOX News about the nature of his business in China, though he has been linked in press reports to planned attempts to market Chinese-made automobiles in North America, and a spokesman for the U.S.-based firm that had invited him to speak in San Francisco, Cleantech Venture Network, says he has recently been “instrumental” in helping them set up a joint venture in Beijing. Strong’s assistant in Beijing did confirm by e-mail that he has an office in a Chinese government-hosted diplomatic compound, thanks to “many continuing relationships arising from his career including 40 years of active relationships in China.” And from China, Strong has to this day maintained a network of personal and official connections within the U.N. system that he has long used to spin his own vast web of non-governmental organizations, business associates and ties to global glitterati. Within that web, Strong has developed a distinctive pattern over the years of helping to set up taxpayer-funded public bureaucracies, both outside and within the U.N., which he then taps for funding and contacts when he moves on to other projects. The Legacy of Maurice Strong from WND By Joan Veon |
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28719
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Ten years ago, as I was reading a very small article in the Washington Post on the Rio Earth Summit, I laughed and told my husband, “Those crazy environmentalists who don’t know their right foot from their left foot are having this huge meeting in Rio and it won’t go anywhere.”
On their own, their movement would never amount to a hill of beans. However, given the environmental mandate of “The Report from Iron Mountain,” a secret report commissioned by the Kennedy administration in 1961 to find political and economic alternatives for a time in which the world would have no more wars, I was very naive and wrong.
Maurice Strong who was the secretary-general of the 1972 and 1992 environmental conferences made the following comments 10 years ago at the closing meeting:
Nothing less than the future of our planet as the home for our species and others has been the object of our work. The world will not be the same after this conference. The prospects for our Earth cannot, must not, be the same. We came here to alter those prospects and change to a more promising and sustainable future.
Each of the conventions on climate change and biodiversity has been signed by more than 150 nations. “Agenda 21” still stands as the most comprehensive, most far-reaching and if implemented, the most effective program of international action. It is not a final and complete action program, but one, which must continue to evolve.
On finance – we are a long way from meeting the needs for “Agenda 21.” We have established a new global partnership. We should consider new taxes, user charges, emission permits, citizen funding – all based on the polluter-pays principle.
Using what has been put in place in the last 10 years and the current program of action let me update you with his legacy.
The earth is not the same. We have been turned upside down and inside out. The reordering of God’s balance for earth and the demotion of man to being equal to a plant or animal is the first understanding. You and I are no longer valued the same as we were when God’s rules reigned in the hearts of government. We are now a species, or a class, instead of a human as in being, soul, individual, person or creature. We are more expendable now and, as you will see, can be herded like cows.
With regard to climate change – which basically says cows, human and plants give off too much carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases – it maintains that pollution and the burning of forests and coal must be reduced. Because we all share the atmosphere, climate warming became the “first global problem” that individual firms and countries could not solve on their own. The major transnational corporations have been working on a scheme of trading carbon permits as a way for us to transfer part of our carbon to lesser-developed countries that have less pollution.
At a World Bank Conference on sustainable development several years ago, when economist Joseph Stiglitz presented this concept, I asked him if he was basically “bringing a new company public or a stock to market” in creating this permit-trading system. He answered, “Yes,” and with a very large grin said, “And we will do very well!” Within the last year, a carbon-trading market was established in Chicago.
Interestingly enough, Maurice Strong is one of its directors. Furthermore, it has been suggested that if the price of energy went up, it would encourage people to change to more efficient technologies, thus reducing carbon in the air. Can you imagine the profit insiders and interested parties would make on another oil embargo, let alone the money they will make bartering the carbon trading permits?
“Agenda 21” is now the earth’s new gospel. I believe that in the future it just may replace “The Communist Manifesto.” Ever read it? Your children are being taught it in their elementary schools through college. Furthermore, there are high school environmental clubs that are being taught to protest. The follow up to “Agenda 21” is being put forth at this summit. It calls for a number of actions- especially in the areas of biodiversity, health, energy, water and agriculture. The more than 150 action items create a web of control, management and expense that will bring unbelieveable hardship for each of us. Furthermore, “Agenda 21” is changing and evolving. These geniuses are learning by trial and error. You and I and all of God’s creation have become a global labratory. …
…The world is not the same. We have been hijacked by a group of rogue kings, princes, presidents and prime ministers – not to mention corporate CEOs, insiders and international bankers. “Agenda 21” basically pits the proletariat against the serfs. The more I hear, the more I read, I believe that making the 21st century sustainable is nothing more than a time of 21st-century “feudalism.” This is Maurice Strong’s legacy to us.
Maurice Strong- No Better Place to Hide Than China – freedomadvocates.org http://bit.ly/4lCOGY
| Written by Judi McLeod |
| 31 October 2006 |
What we didn’t know, but read with relish in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, is that the smooth-talking architect of the Kyoto Protocol, has no choice but to remain in the Orient,
“Maurice must now remain in China (where he is very welcome) to avoid questioning by the FBI and Canadian investigators about the $1 million that Tongsun gave him and which Mo tried to hide in his son Fred’s nuclear power company, which now is bankrupt.” (Pittsburg Tribune-Review, July 30, 2006.)
Pointing out that Strong is “very welcome” in China is a polite way of saying that he’s right at home where overpaid environmental spin doctors have long claimed that Maurice Strong was the only man alive who could see that the United States of America is replaced by Communist China as world superpower.
That’s where Mo’s sidekick Mikhail Gorbachev–who was never really ever out–comes in.
Gorbachev is living La Dolce Vita in San Francisco at the Presidio, where in 1993, he had a three-star general present him the keys to his new digs.
International diplomats, no matter how anti-American, always arrive in the West with a soft landing.
The Tribune-Review comes right out and throws sunlight on the business partnership Strong has with George Soros.
Like the bad guys in a spy movie, Strong and Soros teamed up on the Chery, a sort of poor man’s made-in-China vehicle, with which they hope to flood the U.S. market next year.
CFP thinks that it’s only natural that Strong would be dodging the authorities in China….
Canada’s Heir-Apparent Prime Minister Courts One-Worlder Maurice Strong for Advisor
Strong no fan of democracy, national sovereignty or any traditional religions
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/jul/03070703.html
OTTAWA, July 7, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As if population control guru and one-worlder Maurice Strong did not have enough to do as a top advisor to the United Nations and the World Bank, and running confabs for the world’s wealthiest and most powerful, he is now being courted as a top advisor to Paul Martin, the man set to become Canada’s next Prime Minister. The Ottawa Citizen reports that Strong’s new role will commence at the end of this year or early next, after the Nov. 15 Liberal leadership race.
Hanne Strong, Maurice’s wife, told the Citizen’s parent company CanWest that she and her husband have bought a condo in downtown Ottawa and intend to move back to Ottawa as early as November. Mrs. Strong runs a synchretic New Age centre on the couple’s 160,000-acre Baca ranch in Colorado.
Despite being an environmental extremist and admitted overpopulation doomsayer who has publicly endorsed legal limits on family size, Strong is nonetheless well regarded by world leaders. Touted as one of the most well connected men on the planet, Strong has used his extensive web of high level international connections to advance the demise of national sovereignty, democracy and traditional religion and other elements he believes are causing an over-populous and environmentally-irresponsible humanity to endanger the planet.
Beginning with the concept of fostering a new “global ethic”, Strong, along with fellow de-population advocates Mikhail Gorbachev and Stephen Rockefeller, co-produced the Earth Charter to be a New World Ten Commandments. Such nonsense would normally not be taken seriously except for the connections that Strong has at the U.N. and with many current and past world leaders.
For years, conservative intellectuals have derided those who voiced concerns about Strong’s Earth Charter and his plans for the demise of Christianity. However, earlier this year the Vatican warned against the “global ethics” which are the origin and core of the Earth Charter. In an article published in L’Osservatore Romano on February 11, Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragán, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers warned that the aim of the program was to supplant Christian values with a “global ethic.”
The Archbishop called the ‘global ethic’ movement an eco-religion which holds “sustainable development” as the highest good. He said it manifests itself “as a new spirituality that supplants all religions, because the latter have been unable to preserve the ecosystem.” In a word, this is “a new secular religion, a religion without God, or if you prefer, a new God that is the earth itself with the name GAIA,” he said. “The different religions existing in the world have been unable to generate this global ethic; therefore, they must be replaced by a new spirituality, which has as its end global well-being, within sustainable development,” explained Archbishop Barragán.
See the Citizen coverage:
http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/story.asp?id=927E5EEF-64A8-426A-A262-…
See previous LifeSite reports:
UN’S KOFI ANNAN SENDS ONE-WORLDER MAURICE STRONG TO KOREA
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/jan/03010703.html
Playing With the World’s Agenda
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/1999/sep/990903a.html
Master of Sustainable Development Deception
http://www.earstohear.net/Archives/maurice_strong.html
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW OCTOBER 11, 2008 Maurice Strong The U.N.’s Man of Mystery Is the godfather of the Kyoto treaty a public servant or a profiteer?By CLAUDIA ROSETT – Mr. Strong may have left the U.N. behind, but his current office is a penthouse suite in a building that houses at least three U.N. agencies (UNIDO, UNFPA and UNHCR), plus such diplomatic tenants as the embassies of Mozambique, Cyprus, and the Bahamas, as well as the Venezuelan defense attaché. He received me at his nearby apartment wearing a striped blue polo shirt, dark slacks and in his stocking feet. There were photos of Mr. Strong posing amid a multitude of world leaders at the Rio summit, and a close-up of Mr. Strong gazing into the camera beside a smiling Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The latter photo was taken in her office a few years ago, when “I went to brief her on a couple of things.”
Veteran U.N. bureaucrat Maurice Strong of Canada is being positioned as the next U.N. Secretary-General. He founded the U.N. Environmental Program, which has an “Environmental Sabbath” project that aims to set aside a day of the week as a day of rest for the earth, not God. The project encourages young people to sit around a tree and meditate. Strong, an associate of Vice President Albert Gore, has openly speculated about a collapse of Western industrial society being necessary to usher in a more environmentally-sustainable civilization. He is working with former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to develop an “Earth Charter,” another U.N. treaty, to save the planet and the earth spirit “Gaia” from plunder. Gore himself writes about “Gaia,” the earth spirit or Goddess, in his own book, Earth in the Balance. According to this religious worldview, the interests of plants, animals and things are put above the needs of human beings. The use of natural resources becomes blasphemy against the earth spirit “Gaia.” http://www.usasurvival.org/next-sg.html
Who is Global Warming Propagandist Maurice Strong?
How Can a Publically Unknown ‘Behind the Scenes’ Marxist Wield Such Incredible Western Influence?
http://www.ukapologetics.net/08/christianhawk27.htm
From Associated Press on February 1st, 2008 comes this report:
“PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Global warming issues took over lecture halls in colleges across the country (the United States) Thursday, with more than 1,500 universities participating in what was billed as the nation’s largest-ever “teach-in.”
Organizers said the goal of the event, dubbed “Focus the Nation,” was to move past preaching to the green choir, to reach a captive audience of students in many fields who might not otherwise tune in to climate change issues.
Faculty members from a wide spectrum of disciplines — from chemistry to costume design — agreed to incorporate climate change issues into their lectures on Thursday. Community colleges and some high schools also took part.
“It’s about infusing sustainability into the curriculum of higher education, so students can graduate prepared to deal with the world they have been handed,” said Lindsey Clark, 23, who organized events at the University of Utah.
The day’s activities were the brainchild of Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland who authored a widely used collegiate textbook on economics and the environment. Major funding came from Nike, Clif Bar and Stonyfield Farms, among other companies and foundations.
Goodstein, who has spent years training people to speak on climate change, said he issued a call to arms to fellow professors across the country a few years ago, as his certainty grew that time was running out to address global warming….”
Already television and other news media in Britain and the United States is filling with this ‘global warming’ propaganda and students on campus are clearly not being spared.
But the truth is that these ‘warming hysteriaists’ continue to enjoy an exposure which goes way beyond any truth or substance in their arguments; propaganda and influence is the name of their game. This Marxist-influenced movement wants nothing less than the destruction of the present world economic status quo. This is their real game, even though thousands who are being drawn into their insidious web have little knowledge of their true goals. At least Maurice Strong, one of the leaders of the 1992 ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro, was prepared to tell the truth when he stated,
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilisations collapse? Isn’t it part of our responsibility to bring that about?” …
UN studying Maurice Strong’s business ties http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1113961328740_9/?hub=World AP- UNITED NATIONS — The UN is studying whether it was appropriate for its envoy for North Korea to maintain business ties with a South Korean businessman accused of wrongdoing in the oil-for-food scandal, officials said Tuesday.
Secretary General Kofi Annan said he had not known about the ties between Canadian businessman Maurice Strong and Tongsun Park, a native of North Korea and citizen of South Korea who was also accused in the 1970s of trying to buy influence in Congress.
Strong is the UN pointman on stalled talks aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programs.
Maurice Frederick Strong – bio
http://www.pehi.eu/organisations/introduction/PEHI_Maurice_F_Strong_bio.htm
Strong was born in 1929, and educated in Manitoba, Canada. Son of Frederick Milton and Mary Fyfe Strong. Ran away from home in 1943, but his father retrieved him. Ran away again and became Arctic trading-post employee for the Hudson’s Bay Company 1944-1945. Went to New York in 1947 to take a job as assistant pass officer in the Identification Unit of the Security Section. He lived with Noah Monod, then treasurer of the United Nations. In 1947, at the age of only 18, he is listed as a member of the Secretariat of the United Nations in New York. Here, he (supposedly) first met David Rockefeller and learned that the UN’s funds were handled by Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. He also met the other Rockefeller brothers and other influential people as well. Although Strong kept his UN job only two months, he met very influential people through Noah Monod. According to the National Council for Science and the Environment: “He [Maurice] first worked with the United Nations as a junior officer in 1947, when he was just eighteen, and returned in 1970 to lead the Conference on the Human Environment in Geneva, after which he became the executive director of the UN’s environmental program…” …
Canada Free Press Maurice Strong Article Catalog
http://www.canadafreepress.com/maurice-strong.htm
A treasure trove of info here – good resource
Maurice Strong and the Collapse of Industrialized Civilizations
Posted by Duane Lester on Apr 30th, 2008
Journalist Elaine Dewar interviewed Strong and wrote about him in her book Cloak of Green. She writes, “He could raise his own money from whomever he liked, appoint anyone he wanted, control the agenda.” Also:
“He told me he had more unfettered power than a cabinet minister in Ottawa. He was right: He didn’t have to run for re-election, yet he could profoundly affect lives.”
That “unfettered power” led to his role in creating the Kyoto Protocol.
In 1990, Maurice Strong gave an interview to WEST magazine, where he described how he envisioned the Earth being saved:
“Each year the World Economic Forum convenes in Davos, Switzerland. Hundreds of CEO’s, prime ministers, finance ministers, and leading academics gather each February to attend meetings and set the economic agendas for the year ahead.
“What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principle risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment? Will they do it? Will the rich countries agree to reduce their impact on the environment? Will they agree to save the earth?
“The group’s conclusions is ‘no.’ The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Two years after making that statement, Strong laid the foundation, and helped in the creation of the Kyoto Protocol. According to Wikipedia, “The Kyoto Protocol is a protocol to the international Framework Convention on Climate Change with the objective of reducing greenhouse gases that cause climate change.” Another way of saying that is “an agreement reducing their impact on the environment.” What has been the result of the agreement? “The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change.”
It seems the rich countries are up to their necks in fines, while the developing countries don’t have to worry about caps on emissions. Sound familiar?
If the United States were to sign the treaty, it is expected to have disastrous results:
…according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, [ratifying Kyoto] could cost the economy $400 billion per year, raise electric utility rates by 86 per cent, hike the cost of heating oil by 76 per cent, and impose a permanent “Kyoto gasoline tax” of 66 cents per gallon. In total, each U.S. household would have to spend an extra $1,740 per year on energy. WEFA, an economic information and consulting firm, reports that 2.4 million jobs would be lost and manufacturing wages cut by 2.1 per cent.
Dossier
A publication providing succinct biographical sketches of environmental scientists, economists, “experts,” and activists released by The National Center for Public Policy Research.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/DossierStrong.html
Where On Earth Are We Going?
http://www.iaed.org/books/strong.html
Strong takes us behind the scenes of several of the most important events in the international environmental movement over the last three decades, including the historic 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, for which he was the principal organizer. He speaks frankly about how little success there’s been in reversing the trends of environmental decline in the years since Rio. To combat the situation, Strong draws upon his years of experience as a corporate leader and political organizer and offers advice for saving Earth from ruin in the crucial decades ahead.
Starting with a grim scenario in which world hunger, global warming, environmental destruction, political turmoil and other ills are allowed to run unchecked, a worst-case illustration of his belief that “the environment is not just an issue but a symbol of the way industrial civilization has gone terribly wrong,” he presses the case for nations and corporations to adopt eco-friendly policies of sustainable development, offering several concrete methods for reversing the planet’s decline. He also discusses the crucial role the UN has to play in this movement-what it can do to help and, just as importantly, what it cannot.
Fight Kyoto Book Excerpt featured in the Calgary
Sun and Edmonton Sun http://www.taxtyranny.ca/images/HTML/Maurice-Strong/article1.html There has been no one like Maurice Strong before, except perhaps in fiction – Ernst Blofeld comes to mind, 007’s round-faced nemesis in You Only Live Twice. But Blofeld sought to attack the world order, to challenge it from some remote hideaway – not to co-opt it, and transform it from the inside as Strong does. Blofeld would threaten a meeting of the UN; Strong would chair the meeting and script its agenda. Strangely, Strong once indulged his inner Blofeld, musing to a stunned reporter about a violent plot to take over the world through one of his many super-organizations. In 1990, Strong told a reporter a fantasy scenario for the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland – where 1,000 diplomats, CEOs and politicians gather “to address global issues.” Strong, naturally, is on the board of the World Economic Forum. “What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?… In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?” That’s Strong talking, but those are Blofeld’s words coming out. But this is no fictitious Bond movie villain speaking – it is the man who chaired the Rio Earth Summit and who is Kofi Annan’s senior adviser. “This group of world leaders forms a secret society to bring about an economic collapse,” continued Strong, warming to his fantasy. “It’s February. They’re all at Davos. These aren’t terrorists. “They’re world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world’s commodities and stock markets. They’ve engineered, using their access to stock markets and computers and gold supplies, a panic. Then, they prevent the world’s stock markets from closing. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the leaders at Davos as hostage. The markets can’t close…” Strong catches himself. “I probably shouldn’t be saying things like this.” But is fantasizing about holding the world hostage, like Dr. Evil in an Austin Powers movie, any less strange than Strong’s other solutions to environmental problems?
Maurice Strong: The new guy in your future! By Henry Lamb January, 1997
http://www.sovereignty.net/p/sd/strong.html
Strong’s first exposure to the U.N. came in 1947 when, at 18, he went to New York to take a job as assistant pass officer in the Identification Unit of the Security Section. He lived with Noah Monod, then treasurer of the U.N.. Here, he first met David Rockefeller and learned that the U.N.’s funds were handled by Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. He also met the other Rockefeller brothers and other influential people as well.
The idea of global governance emerged during this era. John J. McCloy was a member of the law firm that represented the Rockefeller’s business interests. McCloy helped set up the World Bank and became its first president. He also became an assistant to Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Henry Stimson. McCloy had been with Truman, Andrei Gromyko and Stalin at Potsdam in 1945, and it was McCloy who first received word that the atomic bomb test at Almagordo had been successful. He was appointed to a presidential commission to respond to a Soviet proposal that the United Nations control future development of atomic power. McCloy recommended that the U.S. turn over all information about the atomic bomb, including where to find uranium, to the U.N.. This idea of allowing the U.N. to become a supranational agency was also promoted by the Rockefellers and the Rockefeller-funded Council on Foreign Relations.
Strong has worked diligently and effectively to bring his ideas to fruition. He is now in a position to implement them. His speeches and writings provide a clear picture of what to expect. In 1991, Strong wrote the introduction to a book published by the Trilateral Commission, called Beyond Interdependence: The Meshing of the World’s Economy and the Earth’s Ecology, by Jim MacNeil. (David Rockefeller wrote the foreword). Strong said this:
- “This interlocking…is the new reality of the century, with profound implications for the shape of our institutions of governance, national and international. By the year 2012, these changes must be fully integrated into our economic and political life.”
He told the opening session of the Rio Conference (Earth Summit II) in 1992, that industrialized countries have:
- “developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma. It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.”
In an essay by Strong entitled Stockholm to Rio: A Journey Down a Generation, he says:
- “Strengthening the role the United Nations can play…will require serious examination of the need to extend into the international arena the rule of law and the principle of taxation to finance agreed actions which provide the basis for governance at the national level. But this will not come about easily. Resistance to such changes is deeply entrenched. They will come about not through the embrace of full blown world government, but as a careful and pragmatic response to compelling imperatives and the inadequacies of alternatives.”
“The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. What is needed is recognition of the reality that in so many fields, and this is particularly true of environmental issues, it is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.”
Maurice Strong has demonstrated an uncanny ability to manipulate people, institutions, governments, and events to achieve the outcome he desires. Through his published writings and public presentations he has declared his desire to empower the U.N. as the global authority to manage a new era of global governance. He has positioned his NGO triumvirite, the IUCN, WWF, and the WRI, to varnish U.N. activity with the perception of “civil society” respectability. And now he has been appointed Senior Advisor to the U.N. Secretary General and assigned the responsibility of reforming the United Nations bureaucracy. The fox has been given the assignment, and all the tools necessary, to repair the henhouse to his liking.
Maurice Strong Politics 101
BY Dr. Tim Ball Monday, June 23, 2008 http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3618 Rather than summarize how Maurice Strong used the United Nations and specifically the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to achieve his goal of getting rid of the industrialized nations this final article examines the devastation it has already brought. Reports of the IPCC, falsely presented as based on science, were used to scare the world, initially about global warming and then climate change. Politicians caught up with the need to appear green grasped at the output of the IPCC. They were thus vulnerable and easily fooled because they didn’t understand and the entire objective of the IPCC was to mislead, misdirect and distort.
Instead of helping poor countries and poor people the machinations of Strong, Gore and the IPCC are reaping the rewards of their activities while the people pay the price. The people are paying in other ways as governments use IPCC reports to justify carbon taxes and other restrictive, punitive and expensive regulations. A huge industry has erupted as the UK newspaper the Telegraph reported. “Investing in climate change is proving to be profitable for governments, corporations, and investors from many sectors. Governments recent subsidies towards energy-efficient programs is bringing in newfound wealth for investors. In addition, the rising price of oil have been influential in pushing investments towards alternative energy sources. CEO’s are taking charge in ways that were unforeseen.” So, the very people and industries the environmentalists and socialists despise are doing what they do best – make money.
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Maurice Strong, Agenda 21 and more from Lord Moncton
Even if the annual flow of carbon emissions were to immediately stabilize at today’s rate (40 gigatons), the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be double the pre-industrial level by 2050, resulting in a high probability of dangerous temperature rises, serious economic damage and potentially destabilizing political consequences… It is the cumulative stock of emissions produced by the currently developed industrialized countries that are the root cause of dangerous rise in greenhouse gas concentrations. Since 1840, three quarters of the cumulative total has been generated by Annex I countries with the United States alone accounting for close to 30 per cent. Th e picture is even starker if per capita emissions are used.
Equity is an essential ingredient of an eff ective global climate change policy, as refl ected in the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”, set forth in the UNFCCC. Not only have today’s high-income economies generated about 80 per cent of past fossil fuel-based emissions, but those same emissions have helped carry them to high levels of social and economic well-being. Th ese countries carry the responsibility for the bulk of climate damage but they also have the capacity to repair it. Th is will require additional multilateral fi nancing, on an adequate and predictable scale, comprising grants, concessional loans and compensatory payments. In the context of the ongoing UNFCCC negotiations, developing countries have insisted on the fact that Annex II countries have a clear-cut responsibility for providing new and additional fi nancial resources to meet the agreed full costs incurred by developing-country parties in complying with their obligations. Translating such responsibilities into tangible resources is still a major stumbling block. Th e Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR) methodology provides one possible way of sharing the burden of emissions reductions among countries according to their capacity to pay for reductions and their responsibility for past and current emissions. Each of these criteria is defi ned with respect to a development threshold so as to explicitly safeguard the right of lowincome countries to economic growth (such as a PPP per-capita income level of $9,000, beyond which human and economic development approaches “advanced” levels); only individuals with incomes above this threshold have a responsibility to pay for emissions abatement. Each country is assigned an emissions allocation based on per capita rights. In addition, each country is assigned an obligation to pay for abatement—whether at home or abroad— based on its share of cumulative emissions starting from a base year (such as 1990) and the cumulative income of its population with incomes above the development threshold.1 Following these criteria, at this point, the EU, for example, would need to contribute $32.9 billion for every $100 billion of climate fi nancing, while the contribution of the United States would be $47.7 billion and that of Japan $11.2 billion.
Placing this challenge in the context of an evolving investment programme is to recognize that developing countries will themselves be responsible for mobilizing resources on an increasing scale over time, as well as for insisting on the responsibility of developed countries for meeting the additional costs of undertaking such investments in the initial stages of the transition. Developed countries need to live up to the responsibility they took on themselves under UNFCCC regarding climate change related assistance to developing countries.
Policy Brief #13 The Trillion Dollar Plan
http://www.un.org/esa/policy/policybriefs/policybrief13.pdf
The rapidly unfolding global fi nancial and economic crisis will severely disrupt economic growth worldwide, affect the livelihoods of billions around the world and endanger progress toward the poverty reduction and other millennium development goals (MDGs). Major industrialized countries and some developing countries have put together massive fi nancial sector rescue packages and large fi scal stimulus packages. Since the outbreak of the crisis up to March 2009, the total support is estimated at a staggering $20.8 trillion or 33.5 per cent of the estimated World Gross Product (WGP) for 2008. Th e vast majority of these resources comprise government guarantees of toxic assets held by the banking sectors in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.
The fiscal stimulus plans total about $2.6 trillion or 4 per cent of WGP to be spent, roughly, over the three-year period between 2009 and 2011. Many observers, including analysts at the IMF and the United Nations, consider this amount of fi scal stimulusto be insufficient.
Developing countries are particularly exposed to this crisis. They have less resilient economies and with fewer resources they are more typically forced to pursue pro-cyclical monetary and fiscal policies, imposing greater variability in their economic performance to the detriment of long-term growth. Global responses should urgently redress this asymmetry.
In the first place, this would require providing sufficient financial resources to developing countries to engage in counter-cyclical measures. If spent eff ectively, this could not only put the global economy on a more sustainable growth path but also help to meet poverty targets and development goals set by the international community.
For this, the United Nations has estimated that developing countries would need around $1 trillion for 2009 and 2010, half of which would be used for covering short-term fi nancing needs, with the other half required for long-term development lendingand assistance. While this seems like large sum of money, it can be feasibly delivered through existing mechanisms and within existing commitments. Moreover, it would send a strong signal of solidarity to developing countries that they will be supported through the crisis.
Meeting short-term liquidity needs ($500 billion)
According to the World Bank and the Institute for International Finance, private capital fl ows to developing countries declined by about $500 billion in 2008 from 2007 levels and a further decline by about $630 billion is forecast for 2009. The decline has been the result of, inter alia, a severe squeeze of trade credits, which is aff ecting trade and growth of developing countries directly.
Well over $1 trillion in corporate, external debt in emerging markets and other developing countries will mature in 2009 and will need to be rolled over. As commodity prices and exports decline and income from worker remittances subsides, most developing countries will experience severe balance of payment problems. Th e World Bank estimates that 98 of 104 developing countries are expected to fall short of covering external fi nancing needs, with an estimated gap which could be as high as $700 billion. For low-income countries alone, the IMF estimates that the balance-of-payments shock could amount to $140 billion in 2009.
The G20 already seems to have neared an agreement on doubling (as proposed by the EU) or tripling proposed by the United States) the IMF’s existing lending capacity of $250 billion. New SDR issuance could amount to $250 billion as has been proposed in the past, but failed to gain the backing of the United States government. Now this seems more acceptable. The Japanese government has already lent $100 billion of its reserves to increase the IMF’s lending capacity. Countries with vast amounts of reserves, such as China or some of the major oil exporters, could contribute similarly, though this likely will require making suffi cient progress towards governance reform of the IMF to make this politically more acceptable for these countries. Mobilizing resources through regional reserve funds should also be considered. For instance, Asian countries have already agreed to increase resources for liquidity provisioning through the Chiang Mai Initiative, their main mechanism of regional fi nancial cooperation. Both international (IMF) and regional channels should be used, requiring closer collaboration between the IMF and regional institutions of financial cooperation.
What about conditionality?
Adequate oversight of the usage of resources will also need to be established, ensuring in particular that the compensatory financing is not subject to the kind of pro-cyclical policy conditionality which is typically attached to existing mechanisms. Financing needs for fiscal stimulus ($500 billion) In addition, another $500 billion in enhanced long-term official fi nancing will be needed to cover fiscal revenue gaps in 2009 and 2010 (due to falling export revenues and slower growth) and provide developing countries with the necessary resources to protect social spending and finance fiscal stimulus packages. Spread over two years, these resources would provide the means for a stimulus of about 3 per cent per year of the combined GDP of developing countries (excluding China and major oil-exporting countries), which—assuming a multiplier eff ect of about 1.7 from well-designed and internationally coordinated fi scal packages— would support adequate growth recovery. Half of the required resources could be mobilized by enhancing the lending capacity of multilateral development banks and the remainder through increased offi cial development assistance through accelerated delivery on existing donor commitments.
How to finance $250 billion for increased development lending?
The increase in development lending could be mobilized through the multilateral development banks. This could be achieved as follows:
• By optimizing use of available capital, the World Bank could make new development financing commitments for about $100 billion.
• With a $60 billion replenishment of their capital and maintaining solid leverage ratios, regional development banks could expand development lending by about $150 billion. This should be feasible. The World Bank would be using existing lending space and has already announced increased lending capacity in this way. The Asian Development Bank has already requested a replenishment of its capital. Surplus countries with vast amounts of reserves and sovereign wealth funds could similarly allocate some of its resources to regional development banks in order to expand their lending capacity.
How to mobilize and additional $250 billion in offi cial development assistance for the poorest countries?
The increase in ODA could be mobilized as follows:
• $50 billion
• $200 billion would need to be mobilized through an acceleration of the delivery on existing ODA commitments.
The required resources can be provided on the basis of available resources and existing commitments. The World Bank’s concessional window (IDA) was already replenished by $30 billion in 2008 to cover three years of credits and grants. This could be frontloaded to make these resources available during 2009 and 2010. Equally concessional lending windows of regional development banks (ADB, AfDB, IDB and others) could be frontloaded to provide the additional $20 billion.
Donors have repeatedly pledged to deliver on existing aid commitments, including at the Doha Follow-up Conference on Financing for Development of November-December 2008. At the 2005 Gleneagles Summit, the G8 committed to raise ODA to at least $160 billion per year (at 2008 prices) by 20101 (up from $103.7 billion in 2007). Meeting this commitment should increase existing aid fl ows by a total of about $115 billion over 2009-2010. Further delivery towards the agreed UN target of 0.7 per cent of their annual GNI could provide the remaining $85 billion needed over 2009-2010, which would bring ODA to about 0.4 per cent of GNI of OECD/DAC members.
The World Bank’s proposal for a “Vulnerability Fund” of the size of 0.7 per cent of the developed countries’ stimulus packages (amounting to about $15 billion) might form a part of this broader proposal.
UN-DESA Policy Brief #17 Reaching a Climate Deal in Copenhagen
http://www.un.org/esa/policy/policybriefs/policybrief17.pdf
There is a growing awareness that action is urgently needed to seriously address the climate change problem. Th e multilateral process that began with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 resulted in the Bali Action Plan (BAP) in 2007. Th e BAP calls for enhanced action on adaptation, mitigation, technology development and transfer, and fi nance, which should be specifi ed in an international agreement by the end of 2009 in Copenhagen. This brief addresses some key development and burden sharing aspects related to mitigation and adaptation which need due consideration to ensure a successful and sustainable outcome of the negotiations.
Crisis as opportunity
The current financial crisis provides an opportunity to make a fundamental change in the patterns of international cooperation, investment and production. New sustainable development trajectories are to be sought, based on low-carbon, clean technologies, with a large component of renewable energy sources. In fact, there are important synergies to be expected from integrating climate and energy related investments into strategies addressing the economic downturn, for example the employment gains of shifting towards renewable energy. A ‘shared vision’ based on the essential premise of the UNFCCC convention—common but diff erentiated responsibilities and capabilities will be the basis of any new international agreement agreed in Copenhagen. Negotiating parties must ensure that this shared vision show a clearand strong commitment to the overall objective of sustainable development and catch-up growth in developing countries. It should also include equity considerations such as poverty reduction and convergence in terms of income distribution and emissions per capita.
..Towards a new climate finance architecture
In order to enhance predictability, funding must not be voluntary but tied to agreed long-term commitments, based e.g. on pro rata mechanisms (such as levied percentages of financial flows, mandatory contributions in relation to GDP). Wider ranging options which include taxes on capital flows or on international transport, energy use or emissions, or volumes of transactions in carbon markets, permit-auctioning, and others can generate considerable additional annual fl ows on the order of tens of billions of dollars. Revenue sources, like auctioning of emissions permits and carbon or energy taxation imply carbon-pricing, which in itself may stimulate the shift towards sustainable, low-carbon development. Yet, carbon pricing may generate adverse (regressive) income eff ects which will need to be addressed. Th e future fi nancial ‘architecture’ should enable the mobilization of adequate, additional and predictable funding. It would need to be built on, and handle, fl ows of fi nance mobilized according to objective criteria refl ecting responsibilities and capabilities to contribute to climate related policies. Disbursements to eligible recipient countries should also be based on agreed criteria which should indicate priorities of resource allocation towards the most vulnerable countries. The overall governance in a new architecture should ensure policy coherence and a focus on sustainable development.
Conclusion
Effective mitigation will require lead and aggressive action in the North as well as mitigation actions in developing countries in the future, supported by full and eff ective assistance by the North, as articulated in the convention and reaffirmed in BAP. Development has to be central to the climate change agreement —both mitigation and adaptation have to be an integrated part of development agendas and the global process must strengthen the appropriate links with global and national efforts in this connection. Th is requires an urgent scaling up of funding and technology available to developing countries for mitigation as well as adaptation and support for an investment “push” and catch-up growth in developing countries. Th is remains the only sustainable option to deal with future developing country emissions and climate change challenges.
could be mobilized by front-loading resources in the already replenished International Development Assistance (IDA) window of the World Bank and those in the concessional windows of the regional development banks.
Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.
Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the Statement of principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests were adopted by more than 178 Governments at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, 3 to 14 June 1992.
The Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) was created in December 1992 to ensure effective follow-up of UNCED, to monitor and report on implementation of the agreements at the local, national, regional and international levels. It was agreed that a five year review of Earth Summit progress would be made in 1997 by the United Nations General Assembly meeting in special session.
The full implementation of Agenda 21, the Programme for Further Implementation of Agenda 21 and the Commitments to the Rio principles, were strongly reaffirmed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg, South Africa from 26 August to 4 September 2002.
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