Calgary Herald
written by Lee Morrison
Thursday December 16, 2010
It's over. The 15,000 delegates from 193 countries plus 10,000 hangers have packed their bags and left the Cancun luxury hotels where they were saving the Earth for two weeks. The purveyors of bad tequila (for technophobic young demonstrators) and fine wines (for delegates) are counting their money, and hotel employees are busily cleaning up the mess in preparation for the influx of Christmas tourists.
In the spirit of Copenhagen, civilization has again dodged the bullet of mass hysteria. A new dark age of deindustrialization has been evaded, and another nail has been driven into the coffin of the Kyoto accord. There was never any real possibility that major developing nations such as China and Brazil would line up to commit economic suicide, and agree to hobble their burgeoning industries by firmly limiting carbon dioxide emissions, while less developed countries would be free to do whatever they wish.
To justify the two-week waste of time and money, agreement was reached to establish a Green Climate Fund, projected to rise to $100 billion annually by 2020, for countries threatened by altered weather patterns. It's unclear who will contribute to the fund, how it will be administered or who (other than Third World tyrants) would be the beneficiaries. It looks like a classic shell game in which affluent countries will pledge funds but actually make no significant contributions. If money really does end up in the pot, what a carnival of graft, corruption and international conflict over the spoils that will be!
The Cancun meetings, from their inception, had less to do with saving the Earth than with the redistribution of wealth from industrialized countries to the Third World, on a much larger scale than has ever been accomplished through conventional foreign aid. Third World delegates were exemplified by Bolivian President Eva Morales who, for years, has been campaigning for international compensation for poor countries that agree to protect their own forests. The final declaration from Cancun indicates that this campaign was successful but, again, honeyed words don't necessarily produce hard cash. Ironically, Bolivia refused to sign the final agreement because it didn't contain mandatory (and crippling) emission caps for wealthy countries.
Delegates, living large in one of the world's most luxurious and ecologically unfriendly venues, seriously considered weakening the industrialized world with an international system of energy rationing.
Two weeks before the conference opened, Ottmar Edenhoffer, a senior official in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said, "But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore . . ."
Morales went a step further by stating flatly that the principal objective of the conference would be to "save the planet from capitalism."
Mother nature clearly has a sense of humour. With Great Britain and all of northern Europe staggering under the earliest, coldest and snowiest winter weather since the 18th century, the delegates were probably looking forward to warming their bones. Oh, frabjous irony. Daily low temperatures in Cancun were between 10° and 12°C ever since the conference opened and included six consecutive days with all-time record lows. Of course, true climate catastrophists will be quick to point out that sustained record cold over half the planet is only "weather." Conversely, if you've been paying attention for the past 15 years, you know that, to warmists, a two-day heat wave anywhere on Earth is "climate" and proof positive that the atmosphere is warming and evil humanity is to blame.
The delegates seem to have agreed that any future increase in global temperature should be not more than 2°C. How the Earth's thermostat will be adjusted is unclear. However, since there's been no measurable warming for 12 years, staying within the two degree window seems like a safe bet.
Meanwhile, back in Sydney, N.S., Stephen Harper pledged that Canada will uphold any binding international agreement to reduce CO2 emissions -- a safe assurance given the prudent intransigence of China, Japan, Russia and the U.S.
Whatever one may think of Harper's politics or his performance as prime minister, his intellect isn't open to question.
I don't believe for a moment that he loses sleep fretting about a coming climate catastrophe. Just as medieval princes secured their power by pledging fealty to Rome, modern heads of state, of whatever political stripe, sometimes find it convenient to bow to the apostles of human induced climate change. Harper agreed to respect a deal that obviously wasn't going to happen, and Canada is off the hook.
Next year, there will be another giant gathering producing another useless communique. Hopefully, with scientific and public opposition to computer-assisted astrology growing ever stronger, that will be the end of the global warming mania.
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