The three-ring circus known as the Copenhagen Summit is now history – and not a moment too soon. And the good news is, it seems to have been a dismal failure – at least on the organisers’ own terms. All the machinations to bring about “global governance” have frozen over, just like the Danish landscape.
But no serious observer expected too much of this gabfest. After all, serious negotiations are not the stuff of reality television. But if it makes messianic pretenders feel better on the world stage, and result in a few photo ops, then I guess it achieved something.
As Frank Furedi rightly notes in today’s Australian, “What so many of the commentaries overlook is that international conferences have a solid track record of achieving next to nothing. Global jamborees are essentially talking shops that provide political leaders with an opportunity to strike a statesman-like pose. These are essentially photo opportunities for politicians who want to be seen to be doing something. As for the ever growing industry of international non-governmental organisations, summits are important public relations events that help demonstrate their importance.
“That is why both political leaders and the protesters have a common interest in maintaining the illusion that something really important may occur in Copenhagen. And if not here and now, then there will be a chance at Copenhagen + 5, and Copenhagen + 10. If the organisers and sponsors are really lucky The Copenhagen Conference will run to as many series as the Beijing franchise on ‘the status of women’.
“Throughout history serious negotiations that yield significant results take place in private. In a different era the idea that 15,000 people hanging out in the Bella Centre could make history and cobble together an agreement that could save the planet would have been dismissed as naive if not ludicrous. Whatever the problems with old-fashioned secret diplomacy, reality negotiations are far worse. Negotiations carried out in public invariably turn into a routine of play-acting and posturing. The adoption of the reality TV format for an apparently momentous international proceeding guaranteed that the Copenhagen conference would have little substantive meaning. After all, it was meant to work as a spectacle rather than as a venue for the conduct of global diplomacy.”
And as usual, Lord Monckton offers some sanity on the insanity which prevailed in the Danish capital. He rightly states that despite all the post-conference hype, we have largely been spared the worst, and we can all go back to work, at least for the time-being:
“Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a ‘Copenhagen Accord’.”
He provides a brief outline of just what the main points are:
“In the Copenhagen Accord, which is operational immediately, the parties ‘underline that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time’; emphasize their ‘strong political will to urgently combat climate change’; recognize ‘the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 C°’ and perhaps below 1.5 C°; aspire to ‘cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible’; acknowledge that eradicating poverty is the ‘overriding priority of developing countries’; and accept the need to help vulnerable countries – especially the least developed nations, small-island states, and Africa – to adapt to climate change.
“Self-imposed emissions targets: All parties will set for themselves, and comply with, emissions targets for 2020, to be submitted to the secretariat by 31 January 2010. Where developing countries are paid to cut their emissions, their compliance will be monitored. Developed countries will financially support less-developed countries to prevent deforestation.
“Carbon trading may be used. New bureaucracies and funding: Under the supervision of a ‘High-Level Panel’, developed countries will give up to $30 billion for 2010-12, aiming for $100 billion by 2020, in ‘scaled up, new and additional, predictable and adequate funding’ to developing countries via a ‘Copenhagen Green Fund’. A ‘Technology Mechanism’ will ‘accelerate technology development and transfer’ to developing countries.
“And that’s it. Expensive, yes. Unnecessary, yes. But earth-shaking? No.”
And he notes how after the MSM cover-up about Climategate, people no longer trust the media. “And that is bad news for a governing class that has come to develop a far-too-cosy relationship with the mainstream media. It is also very bad news for the mainstream media themselves, which are now rapidly losing circulation and ad revenue as the people rightly desert them for the Internet, where – notwithstanding various expensive attempts by the over-funded international Left to interfere with Google and Yahoo searches – the truth is still available if you know where to look.”
He concludes, “Copenhagen was the last-chance saloon not for the planet, which does not need saving, but for the UN’s world-government wannabes. They blew it, big-time, by believing their own overspun propaganda about planetary peril and thinking they had ‘world leaders’ where they wanted them. They overreached themselves, and have paid the price.
“Even though next year is an el Nino year accompanied by fast-recovering solar activity, 2010 may not, after all, set a new global-temperature record to overtop that which was set in 1998, the year of the Great el Nino. By the time the next yackfest takes place in Mexico City in December 2010, the steam will have gone out of the ‘global warming’ scare. We should not let our guard down, but Copenhagen is more than the end of the beginning for Green fascism: it is the beginning of the end. The eco-Nazis’ attempt at global bureaucratic coup d’etat has failed, and no such attempt is likely to succeed again. Too many of you are watching.”
Yes indeed, thanks to people like Lord Monckton, and thanks to the alternative media, it is a lot harder for our ruling elites to pull a fast one over us. Sadly, however, this will not be the end of the matter, and therefore as usual, eternal vigilance must continue to be the price of liberty.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/much-ado-about-nothing-in-denmark/story-e6frg6zo-1225812230751
http://sppiblog.org/news/parturient-montes-nascetur-ridiculus-mus
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