by Steve Bonta, The New American:
The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference — COP27 for short — is underway in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, and overheated rhetoric is already setting the tone. In his opening remarks, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the assembled delegates in no uncertain terms that “our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.” Man-made climate change is “the defining issue of our age,” Guterres thundered. “It is the central challenge of our century. It is unacceptable, outrageous and self-defeating to put it on the back burner.”
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More important than ruinous wars in Ukraine and Yemen, which have already cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and which, in the case of Ukraine, threatens to spiral into a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the West as positions harden and rhetoric becomes more and more heated? More important than the calamitous rise of Communist China and its aggressively nuclear Mini-me, North Korea, both of which are determined to conquer free countries they believe unswervingly to be theirs by right, and are readying their vast militaries for all-out war with the United States if we continue to stand in the way of their stated totalitarian goals? More important than looming global food and fuel shortages, ruinous inflation, and a Covid pandemic that our leaders refuse to let go of?
Well, yes, actually, climate change is more important than any of these or any other conceivable global crisis, because it is climate change, according to Guterres, that is the driving force for all of these calamities. “Many of today’s conflicts,” he assured his audience at Sharm El Sheikh, “are linked with growing climate chaos. The war in Ukraine has exposed the profound risks of our fossil fuel addiction. Today’s crises cannot be an excuse for backsliding or greenwashing. If anything, they are a reason for greater urgency, stronger action and effective accountability.”
Guterres also called for a so-called “Climate Solidarity Pact” between rich and poor nations, which would include a provision to phase out all coal power plants by 2040. Such a pact will doubtless also formalize requirements for “loss and damage” payments from rich to poor countries, whereby the former will atone for supposedly imposing climate hardships on the latter via unrestrained development. Guterres portrayed the pact in the starkest of terms, insisting that “It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact — or a Collective Suicide Pact. Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish.”
To be sure, the climate tributary payments from rich to poor countries have been flowing already for some years, but not in the quantities envisioned by Guterres and his allies. Instead of a few billion tucked away unnoticed in some gargantuan omnibus spending package, the movers and shakers at COP27 clearly expect rich nations such as the United States to begin ponying up tens of billions annually in climate reparations. And instead of endless “greenwashing,” Guterres and company expect the United States to begin shuttering its coal-powered plants now, while getting rid of petroleum-based energy and power as quickly as possible.
Many Americans persist in the illusion that, because the agreements reached at such events are not enforceable “hard” law, all such climate histrionics are nothing but empty posturing. Unfortunately, too few understand the concept of “soft law” that animates the architects of international confabs such as COP27 and its predecessors. The internationalists who plan UN-sponsored conferences and lay out agendas for treaties and protocols know they only have to convince the leaders of participating countries to submit; they do not have to sell anything to the electorates and taxpayers in those countries. In the case of the United States, even if — as is often the case — the Senate refuses to ratify a UN treaty, as required by the Constitution in order for it to become the law of the land, U.S. presidents typically issue directives to comply with any agreement they sign. This has been the case with the Paris Climate Accord, signed by President Obama and fervently supported by President Biden, in complete defiance of the will of Congress and the American electorate. Only President Trump has bucked the international system, when he withdrew from the Paris Accord and stopped the climate tributary payments during his administration. But with Trump ushered out of power by the American Deep State, the climate agenda is being fully implemented once again. It is the reason the Biden administration has shut down most of the petroleum industry, halted fracking and new exploration for petroleum and natural gas, and intends to completely end the coal industry as well. And every American is now suffering the consequences of several decades of gradually implemented “soft” climate law, which is treated as holy writ by the leftist establishment in control of the American government.
The climate crusade has come a long way since its sideshow beginnings at the Rio conference 30 years ago. At the time, most Americans following that event chuckled indulgently at the antics of the New Age activists and eccentric billionaires running the show. But three decades later, with the global climate regime literally throttling our economy and society, no one is laughing anymore.
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