UNEP Power Grab Planned For Copenhagen?

For those who have gotten used to watching the Internationalists pushing for limitless power to be vested in the United Nations, the following observation should not be much of a stunner: The upcoming Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is about power — and we’re not talking about the voltage.

A report at FoxNews.com (“Document Reveals U.N.’s Goal of Becoming Rule-Maker in Global Environmental Talks”) profiles a curious paper — "The UNEP That We Want" — which was drafted two years ago to offer guidance to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) following high-level discussions which included individuals who are highly placed within that organization.

According to FoxNews.com:

The purpose of the paper, put together after an unpublicized day-long session in Switzerland by some of the world's top environmental bureaucrats: to argue for a new and unprecedented effort to move environmental concerns to "the center of political and economic decision-making" around the world — and perhaps not coincidentally, expand the influence and reach of UNEP at the tables of world power, as a rule-maker and potential supervisor of the New Environmental Order.

The positions argued in that paper now appear to be much closer at hand; many of them are embedded in a four-year strategy document for UNEP taking effect next year, in the immediate wake of the much-touted, 11-day Copenhagen conference on "climate change," which starts on Dec. 7, and which is intended to push environmental concerns to a new crescendo.

The major difference is that the four-year UNEP plan expresses its aims in the carefully soporific language that U.N. organizations customarily use to swaddle their objectives. The Swiss document makes its case passionately — and more important, plainly — than any U.N. official document ever would.

In fact, it is hard to overstate the “passionate” nature of the document when it comes to pressing for an extremely radical UNEP agenda. To quote directly from “The UNEP That We Want”:

UNEP has an important—indeed a critical—message, but it is delivering it in the wrong language to the wrong audience. It is attached to the wrong narrative. It will never position itself to do what is needed until it finds the right language and narrative. The force of this message cannot be over-emphasized. UNEP’s success depends on getting this right.

The environment should compete with religion as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity. To do that, however, it will have to make itself relevant well beyond the world of those already concerned with the environment, including very prominently its own formal constituency. Indeed, unless UNEP succeeds in recasting the debate, it is highly likely that the economic community will do it—badly, and on its own terms. It is already happening in the field of climate change.

Thus, according to such recommendations, it would appear that the role envisioned for the UNEP is to become the priesthood of a cult of Gaia. “The environment should compete with religion as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity”? This sort of foolishness would appear to cast the UNEP in the role of waging war against competing faiths. Despite the silly use of buzzwords such as “narrative” (one of those ridiculous post-modern terms which implicitly proclaims that it’s not the facts that matter, but the story you make from them), it appears to this writer that what is being advocating is ‘spinning’ the UNEP message in pseudo-religious phraseology to mask an aggressive ideological agenda which in certain key elements can be reduced to a redistributionist agenda.

Again, to cite “The UNEP That We Want”:

Influencing economic policy means messaging in its language, and stating the case in terms that carry with the economic policy community and the business community that it serves. We believe that the environment argument should be recast in terms of its importance for and potential contribution to Prosperity, Stability and Equity. ...

And Equity is a precondition of both Stability and Prosperity. Unless we greatly increase equity, neither of the other two is an option. Equity is a better way to approach the North-South agenda, the poverty agenda, and the production/consumption agenda than the traditional one. Politically, it carries better than development. UNEP needs to restructure its narrative around these three objectives, relating each of these three goals back to its core areas of competence.

The change of ‘narrative’ identified by Halle has obviously been implemented throughout the push for the redistributionist scheme planned for Copenhagen. Call it “equity” because “Politically, it carries better than development”? The “development” spin has ‘played out’; time to switch codewords. But in the end, it all boils down to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s plans for a massive — at least $100 billion per year — redistribution of wealth from the First World to the Third World.

FoxNews.com reports that despite the high profile attendees at the meeting which preceded the writing of “The UNEP That We Want,” the author of the document is claiming sole responsibility for the text.

Another important attendee was John Scanlon, listed on UNEP's website as principal advisor to UNEP's Steiner. Among other things, Scanlon is credited in his UNEP biography with being the leader in developing UNEP's new medium-term strategy, "Environment for Development," covering the period from 2010 to 2013. The draft version of the strategy was presented to a UNEP's Governing Council and a meeting of the world's environmental minister's in February 2008, and subsequently approved.

The Swiss paper was written not by Scanlon but by Mark Halle, the Europe-based director of trade and investment for an influential environmental think-tank, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), which originated in Canada and now operates in some 30 countries. IISD, which still has heavy Canadian government support, bills itself as a research institute promoting policies that are "simultaneously beneficial to the global economy, the global environment and to social well-being."

Even though all of the Swiss participants took part in the brainstorming, the responsibility for the ideas in the paper are his own, Halle emphasized to Fox News, after he was contacted last week about the document. The paper itself says it offers "elements," not a "complete offering," of what UNEP should consider for its role in the years ahead.

Nevertheless, the “equity narrative” has certainly become an important element of the ideological framework leading up to the Copenhagen Conference. For example, at the twelfth conference of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) (“Global Governance for Sustainable Development”) Chengxin Chen of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in the People’s Republic of China presented a paper, “UNEP Institutional Reform With Its Impact on Developing Countries” setting forth the same “equity narrative” advocated by Halle.

The fact is that UNEP does not have and in all likelihood never will have the resources to make much of an impact on the ground through direct, country-level activities. There are better ways to serve its constituency of developing countries. One thing that can be done is to change the narrative, moving away from the “poverty” agenda with its negative connotations to a “prosperity and equity” agenda. This new approach would focus the agenda both on the environmental underpinnings of prosperity and the search for it, and on the patterns of consumption and production that underlie this prosperity. It would help focus the world community on the root causes of environmental stress, on the extraordinary, equity-denying affluence in some parts of the world, and on the consumption patterns on which that affluence depends and which make sustainability hard to reach.

The identification of so-called “developing countries” as the UNEP’s “constituency” is interesting; apparently, the United Nations Environment Programme’s “constituency” does not include the developed world despite the fact that it would claim authority over the whole world. What a surprise.

Thus we return to the point where we began: The Copenhagen Conference is about power — power to be given to the Internationalists which apparently may even use the trappings of Gaia worship if that’s what it takes to force out all competing world views.

Source: The John Birch Society