Bali-Hoo: U.N Still Pushing for Global Environmental Control

Bali-Hoo: U.N Still Pushing for Global Environmental Control

Despite the debacle of the failed Copenhagen climate change conference last December, the United Nations is pressing full speed ahead with a plan for a greatly expanded system of global environmental governance and for a multitrillion-dollar economic transfer scheme to ignite the creation of a “global green economy.” In other words: Copenhagen without the authority — yet — of Copenhagen.

The world body even has chosen a time and a place for the culmination of the process: a World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, the 20th anniversary of the famed “Earth Summit” that gave focus and urgency to the world environmentalist movement.

The 2012 summit date is significant for another reason: It marks the end of the legal term of agreement for the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, which includes carbon reduction targets, and provided the legal basis for an international cap-and-trade market for carbon, centered in Europe. The U.S. first signed then backed away from the Kyoto deal without ratifying it; until its apparent collapse, the comprehensive Copenhagen deal was intended to include the U.S. and supplant Kyoto with a new, legally binding regime.

The new Rio summit will end, according to U.N. documents obtained by Fox News, with a “focused political document” presumably laying out the framework and international commitments to a new Green World Order.

Just exactly what that environmental order will look like, and the extent of the immense financial commitments needed to produce it, are under discussion this week at a special session in Bali, Indonesia, of the United Nations Environment Program’s 58-nation “Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environmental Forum,” which oversees UNEP’s operations.

The GC/GMEF, as it is known, is made up of environmental ministers and top-level bureaucrats from a roster of supervising nations — the U.S. is one of them — and its meeting is surrounded by a galaxy of environmentalist non-government organizations (NGOs) and environmental journalists from around the world.

Idyllic Bali is a favored venue for U.N. environmental meetings, in part because of its seclusion from too many outside eyes, and because its Pacific location and small size make it a highly congenial hothouse for environmental enthusiasm. In 2007, it served as a launching pad for the Bali Action Plan, which laid the negotiating basis for the Copenhagen treaty process.

The latest Bali session runs from Feb. 24 to 26, and is accompanied by a welter of other UNEP activity ranging from sessions on international waste management and chemical disposal, to the start of a process aimed at a new international treaty covering the storage and disposal of environmental mercury.

But the major topics are a global system of governance and what amounts to the next stage of a radical transformation of the world economic and social order, in the name of saving the planet.

Alongside that, as always, are discussions of vast sums of money that should flow to developing nations to help them make the transition to the new, greener world. As one of the papers written in advance of the meeting to “stimulate discussion” puts it, “the situation … presents genuine opportunities for a dramatic shift from what can be termed ‘business as usual.’”

For the anonymous bureaucrats who wrote the discussion papers, “business as usual” apparently means the current world economy, which the anonymous authors disparagingly term the “brown economy,” or the “current dominant economic model.” It is, according to the UNEP documents, a model in crisis, “which currently consumes more biomass than the Earth produces on a sustainable basis,” and also “depletes natural capital” and “risks perpetuating and exacerbating persistent poverty and distributional disparities.”

The new green economy under discussion at Bali will be something very different: For starters, it is much more vague, and as far as the discussion paper authors are concerned, it will stay that way.

The paper paints the coming green order in nebulous and utopian terms. It “implies the decoupling of resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth.” It involves “substantially increased investment in green sectors, supported by enabling policy reforms.” The investments will “provide the mechanism for the reconfiguration of businesses, infrastructure and institutions, and for adoption of sustainable consumption and production processes.” It will lead to “more green and decent jobs, reduced energy and material intensities in production processes, less waste and pollution, and significantly reduced greenhouse-gas emissions.”

But when it comes to measuring the achievement of those goals, the paper says, “it is counter-productive to develop generic green economy indicators applicable to all countries given differences in natural, human and economic resources.” In the process of turning brown to green, “a green economy in one country may look quite dissimilar to a green economy in another country.”

All of which may make judging the value of investment in the ecological transformation difficult to evaluate, except for insiders. But then, the paper suggests that the world may have an additional governing structure composed of exactly those insiders. As the paper puts it:

“Moving towards a green economy would also provide an opportunity to re-examine national and global governance structures and consider whether such structures allow the international community to respond to current and future environmental and development challenges and to capitalize on emerging opportunities.”

The discussion paper, published — but not distributed — on Dec. 14, 2009, assumes that the goal of the green economic transformation is the same as that of the ill-fated Copenhagen conference: a 50 percent reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. That, the paper says, will require a staggering $45 trillion dollar to accomplish — much of it in transfers from rich nations to poorer ones.

The paper, however, paints that as a bargain — “an average yearly investment of just over $1 trillion.” About half of that would go for “replacing conventional technologies with low-carbon, environmentally sound alternatives.”

Much more HERE