RUSH: From the UK Guardian: ‘Copenhagen Climate Summit in Disarray After ‘Danish Text’ Leak — The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.’ Now, this is news. Rich countries are about to wrest control of all of this from the UN? Well, the three countries that are being mentioned here are the United States, the United Kingdom, and Denmark.
‘The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as ‘the circle of commitment’ — but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark — has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalized this week. The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol’s principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol — the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.
‘The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as ‘a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks.’ A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to: Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement; Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called ‘the most vulnerable’; Weaken the UN’s role in handling climate finance; Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.
‘Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations. ‘It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process,’ said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless. Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: ‘This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed.”
Now, I am going to have to defer to climatologist experts and others, ’cause this goes against the grain of everything we thought this Copenhagen thing was about. In fact, I’ve got a companion story here that’s from Investor’s Business Daily. It’s an editorial and there’s a great chart here that shows the share of world GDP by region in 2005 dollars by year starting in 1969 up until the present. And the lowest share of world GDP by region is the Middle East and Africa. Next is Latin America, then Asia and Oceania, then the United States and the EU 15, and pretty much tied at about 28% of world GDP. And the theory of the IDB editorial is: ‘The 16,000 delegates to the two-week-long orgy of self-flagellation known as the Copenhagen Climate Conference want to shrink global output of CO2 not because of hard science, but out of envy.’ Basically what they’re saying is that the real target of Copenhagen is the US economy, which I’ve always thought to be the case of the militant leftist environmental movement and the United Nations. The United Nations is out to fleece the United States, and that’s what the IBD, Investor’s Business Daily editorial, explains brilliantly, that the whole thing is a sham, it’s not about climate, it’s not about science, it is about stealing from the United States.
Now we have, in the UK Guardian: ‘Copenhagen Climate Summit in Disarray After ‘Danish Text’ Leak,’ which says that the UK, the US, and Denmark and some other countries are going to steal this whole process away from the UN, put it over at the World Bank, and put emissions controls on developing countries, which will forever keep them poor. So we’ve got two competing interests here as to what this is really all about. Fleecing the US or keeping the world’s poor poor. If the US is involved in this, to take all of this away from the… a-ha (clapping) See, as I speak, my brain works. That’s when my brain functions fastest, is when I speak. It’s still about fleecing the United States but keeping the money in the hands of the people who do the fleecing and not redistributing it to the world’s poor. The world bank is essentially controlled by who? Us. Who appoints the chairman of the World Bank? The president. He-he-he-he-he.
It’s even more insidious than I thought. We know that redistribution is happening in our own country, we know that keeping the poor poor is the objective here. In fact, not only keeping the poor poor but making more people poor is the objective here. In order to do that, you shrink the private sector, you take as much money out of it as possible, you put it in the public sector, the government, where Obama and his minions get to run it. Then you run up this climate crisis here. That’s why you don’t believe the leaked e-mails, you try to sweep those under the rug, you still act as though there is a big crisis, and you go out and you limit emissions but the first time you limit them on the poor so you don’t have to redistribute the money to them. You get to keep it. I think I’m pretty close here. I need to think about this a little more. But now we’ve got — this is fascinating — two competing theories as to what Copenhagen is really all about. And if the UK Guardian story is right, very few people really knew until they leaked the text to the UK Guardian.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I mean, look, we now have this report out of Copenhagen, it’s a leaked document here to the UK Guardian that really what’s going to happen here is a swindle, that the US and the UK and Denmark, and we don’t know who else, are going to wrest control of all things climate from the United Nations, and they are going to impose emissions limits on poor countries, which is designed to keep them poor. I mean, any country that’s experiencing economic growth will be expanding its carbon emissions, its carbon footprint, it’s the law of nature, and the poor countries have always been exempt, from Kyoto, from all of these things. But now all bets are off, now they’re going to have limits, they’re going to make sure they never grow, they’re going to always stay poor.
Now, when you’re talking about the UK and Denmark, you’re talking about, as Reverend Wright would say, ‘The white people of Europe!’ You might say, ‘But wait a minute, Rush, that doesn’t work because the guy running America is a black guy, to which Reverend Wright would say, ‘Who says? Goldman Sachs may be running America. And Goldman Sachs may be preparing to profit from being the middleman on the carbon trades engineered by the white Europeans who are taking over the world again.’ So maybe the viewpoint of the Reverend Wright will go a long way in explaining what’s happening here.