“Cancun can.”
That’s the catchphrase of this year’s United Nations’ “global warming” conference – a costly taxpayer-funded boondoggle being held at the tropical Yucatan vacation destination. Last December U.S. taxpayers shelled out more than $1 million to send a 106-person delegation to the UN climate conference in Copenhagen – where President Barack Obama pledged billions of American tax dollars toward a radical global wealth redistribution scheme.
How much will this latest junket cost us? Aside from the exorbitant travel costs, American “climate ambassador” Jonathan Pershing has already pledged $1.7 billion of your tax money to the effort – and that’s just to cover the scheme’s “fast-start” funding.
According to the agreement reached in Copenhagen, this wealth redistribution fund would siphon as much as $100 billion annually from developed nations like the U.S. beginning in 2020.
Fortunately last year’s non-binding “Copenhagen Accord” – much like Obama’s “cap and trade” energy tax hike – has stumbled upon a steely resistance in Washington. Even members of Obama’s party who went along with his multiple domestic bailouts and socialized medicine proposal want nothing to do with his climate crusade. Emissions targets agreed upon in Copenhagen have been dismissed by many of the administration’s key Democratic allies as economically impractical, and before Obama even departed for last year’s conference a sitting Democratic Senator blasted him for presuming to have the “unilateral power” to commit America to any of Copenhagen’s controversial provisions.
During the 2010 campaign, one Democratic Senate candidate went so far as to fire a bullet through Obama’s “cap and trade” bill to demonstrate his opposition to the president’s environmental policies.
As these political battles waged, the so-called “science” behind global warming was also dealt a string of setbacks. This process started (publicly, at least) with the November 2009 release of thousands of emails from a British University – documents which showed that “scientists” had manipulated and even destroyed data in an effort to trick the world into accepting the climate change myth. This University’s findings were among the central planks of the UN’s case for climate change – along with similarly-debunked claims about an impending glacier meltdown in the Himalayas.
In light of these political and scientific setbacks, the wealth redistributors have been forced to start from scratch with a new PR angle. In this recession-ravaged economy, it’s now all about dollars and cents. According to Danish bureaucrat Connie Hedegaard – the European Union’s “climate commissioner” – the fight against global warming is no longer a moral imperative or a prerequisite for the continued survival of the human race. Now it has conveniently become a “bottom line” issue.
“Those in the end who improve energy efficiency and improve innovation, they will save money,” Hedegaard said at a recent conference. At another recent event, Hedegaard encouraged several of the world’s largest corporations to assist her by spreading “the good example that [climate policy] is also good for the bottom line.”
Based on the current sovereign debt crisis that is confronting the Eurozone, Hedegaard and her peers are probably not the best people to consult for financial advice. Also, based on the results of last month’s election it is doubtful U.S. taxpayers would view it as “good for (their) bottom line” to pump billions of dollars each year into a global wealth redistribution scheme cloaked in fuzzy science and misleading rhetoric.
Unfortunately, Obama has made it clear in the past that he supports policies which “spread the wealth around,” and the UN is making no bones about its true intentions with respect to the climate issue. Last month, Ottmar Edenhofer – a German economist and one of the UN’s top climate leaders, told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that “climate policy is redistributing the world’s wealth,” adding that “it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization.”
Sounds like an economist after Obama’s own heart, doesn’t it? Armed with their new “pro-business” public relations spin, the forces pushing this debate are once again attempting to give your money away – the only difference is that this time they are concealing their socialist designs beneath “business-friendly” rhetoric.
Cancun can’t be permitted to get away with such a costly deception.