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UN Climate Summit: Shackling the Planet to “Save” It

Vol. 32, No. 01

January 4, 2016

UN Climate Summit: Shackling the Planet to “Save” It

Cover Story

Climate

Shackling the Planet to "Save" It

Alex Newman – Governments and dictators from around the world have agreed to a “climate” deal dubbed the “Paris Agreement.” This is what the governed can now look forward to.


Features


Climate
Shackling the Planet to “Save” It
AP Images

Shackling the Planet to “Save” It

Governments and dictators from around the world have agreed to a “climate” deal dubbed the “Paris Agreement.” This is what the governed can now look forward to. ...
Alex Newman
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

PARIS — For generations, advocates of global government, including the powerful Club of Rome, have worked to unite the world against a “global threat” so that a governing entity can deal with that “common enemy.” Any threat, real or imagined, would do, provided it justified empowering international institutions. As the globalist mantra goes, “Global problems require global solutions.” It had to be something that no country could handle on its own. So after various causes such as “overpopulation” imploded, they settled on “anthropogenic (man-made) global warming,” or AGW. “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill,” declared the globalist/communist council of the Club of Rome in its 1991 report The First Global Revolution. “All these dangers are caused by human intervention.... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

In December 2015, the United Nations and its members agreed to impose a global “climate” regime on humanity that will shackle the planet in the name of saving it. If Maurice Strong, a Club of Rome operative and a key architect behind the AGW hysteria, had lived to see it, he would have been pleased with the outcome. Strong, a self-declared socialist, reputed to be a billionaire, who literally lived a jet-setting lifestyle and made much of his money through oil, served as the first executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and chief of the 1992 UN Earth Summit. He died in obscurity days before the 21st UN Conference of the Parties (COP21) began in Paris, living out his final years in Communist China following an embezzlement scandal.

The Agreement

To tame and control man in the name of humanity, after two weeks of negotiations, governments and dictatorships from around the world agreed to a “climate” deal dubbed the “Paris Agreement.” Among other goals, the agreement aims to restructure the global economy, phase out cheap and abundant energy over the coming decades, redistribute the wealth of Western taxpayers to Third World regimes, and empower the UN to oversee a planetary “climate” regime. Imagining themselves to be Masters of the Universe, and despite the failure of every UN “climate” model (see page 27) being used as the rationale for the agreement, the parties even purported to decide that they would stop global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

Under the guise of saving humanity from CO2, which has been dubbed the “gas of life” by scientists, the agreement requires comprehensive monitoring and tracking of emissions across the West, as well as huge reductions in emissions. Western governments — deemed “developed countries” — will suffer the brunt of the regulations. The agreement mandates that Western economies “shall” undertake “economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets.” They also “shall” hand over their taxpayers’ wealth to Third World governments, which get bonus points for denying their subjects access to resources. And to reduce the West’s CO2 “footprint,” Western governments will be required to fund expensive and unreliable “green” energy projects that can’t find adequate private investors (likely because they are bad investments), such as Solyndra, which produced a supposedly innovative new type of solar cell using U.S. tax dollars before going bankrupt. (Solyndra’s owners were Obama’s cronies.) Ironically, just days before COP21 began, taxpayer-subsidized Spanish “green” energy giant Abengoa also went bust, though nobody mentioned it in Paris.

The agreement calls for governments to “include all categories of anthropogenic emissions” when they report to the UN. It was not clear whether human breath, also largely made up of CO2, would need to be monitored, regulated, reported, and reduced as well.

In Paris, virtually every outfit and government with a totalitarian idea sought to link its agenda to fighting AGW so that it would become part of the agreement. But of course, the UN and its member regimes — “Paris-ites,” as critics called them — did not get everything they wanted. The two main stumbling blocks for globalists, at least in the short term, were a global carbon tax and a cap-and-trade regime, to trade carbon allowances, for example. But at least the cap-and-trade regime will likely be a short time in coming, as the UN has already established a global Carbon Pricing Panel (see page 13). 

Instead of a top-down regime, which would likely have been too obvious to the world’s citizens as a new, authoritarian global government, the “Paris Agreement” enshrines a system in which governments make pledges — emissions reductions, handouts to cronies, central planning of economic activity, jihad against fossil fuels, and more — that will be enforced by national, state, and local authorities until the planned-for global institutions (and there is already a dizzying array of UN agencies in operation for the task) are scaled up to take over.

Virtually all governments and dictators have already submitted pledges, more than half of which contain references to schemes such as “carbon pricing,” essentially setting up an embryonic carbon trading system. Some 63 jurisdictions already have such policies.

In areas of the world already ruled by regional regimes, the agreement also speaks of emission levels “allocated to each Party” by outfits such as the European Union. For now the Obama administration will decide U.S. CO2 allowances.

The deal calls for governments to re-assess their pledges, known as “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs), every five years, and to ratchet up the coercive controls down the line. The agreement mandates that each five-year plan be more draconian than the last.  Think of it as a straitjacket on the West that will get progressively tighter until finally, the victim dies of asphyxiation. Or, to use another analogy, imagine a frog in a pot of warm water, with the agreement providing for the temperature to be progressively elevated until finally the water is boiling. Humanity is the frog.

But even those radical pledges evidently are not considered enough to stop AGW. The agreement reads: “Much greater emission reduction efforts will be required than those associated with the intended nationally determined contributions.” In essence, the governments formally agreed to agree that they have not done enough and that more emissions reductions and coercive controls will be needed.

And while national governments will decide how much liberty and wealth to surrender for AGW in the beginning, the text also calls for “fostering global, regional, national and subnational cooperation” going forward. By “cooperation,” globalists mean surrendering decision-making authority to supranational bodies. In case there was any doubt about whether this “voluntary” agreement mandates action, it should be noted that the word “shall” appears more than 100 times.

To ensure that ratcheting up the totalitarianism does not inadvertently spook the frog, the agreement says governments “shall” cooperate “to enhance climate change education, training, [and] public awareness.” In other words, prepare for stepped-up government AGW propaganda worldwide, paid for with tax dollars.

What’s in It for Them

In contrast to the burdens placed on citizens of the developed world, the non-developed world wasn’t weighed down with new agendas. In fact, the agreement amounts to having the developed world pay the leaders of the Third World to maintain the status quo — or even to economically benefit a bit, depending on the country.

Third World regimes spoke with one voice at the summit. In exchange for going along with the UN “climate” agenda, the 134 UN members known as the G77 plus China — the world’s largest coalition of dictators and backward regimes — demanded “significantly” more than $100 billion per year in AGW reparations from Western taxpayers. They said “nothing” could be achieved without lots of “climate finance” flowing from freer nations to their largely autocratic regimes. Last year, they received over $62 billion in climate loot, according to an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study — practically none of which was used for “climate” issues. The autocrats use the funds to keep themselves in power, live the high life, or sock away in case of a coup d’etat. But in any case, past donations were not enough for the G77 plus China.

The alliance, which last year demanded global socialism and a “New World Order to Live Well,” sent its list of demands to journalists. “It is now time for all developed country Parties to convert their pledges to the GCF [UN Green Climate (slush) Fund] into contribution agreements, as well as scaling up commitments [bribe promises],” G77 spokesperson Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko of South Africa explained, saying it was for climate reparations, not “aid” or “charity.” She claimed the West is “obliged to provide financial resources, including technology transfer and [government] capacity building to all developing countries.” The agreement says that $100 billion annually is a “floor.” In other words, the sky is the limit — so prepare to be fleeced.

Many non-Western regimes will do little but sit back and collect the loot while oppressing people, now with the added benefit of the UN climate regime as an excuse. Communist China, for example, which has been opening a new coal-fired power plant on an average of once every seven to 10 days and emits nearly twice the amount of CO2 as the United States, will not even hit its “peak” emissions level until decades from now. (Authorities in India and China agreed to work over time to “peak” their emissions and then bring them down.) So much for worldwide sacrifice.

Though citizens in the Third World do not stand to see their liberty increased by the agreement — rather it will likely stay the same or decrease — at least a few of the countries will see some economic benefits, as manufacturing jobs in the Western world will become untenable as energy will likely become so expensive that Western companies will not be able to compete with companies based in Third World locales. “Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow,” emphasized Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi the day before COP21 began.

Just in the United States, according to analyses of Obama’s “climate” agenda by the Heritage Institute, by 2030, the damage would include an average annual employment shortfall of nearly 300,000 jobs, a peak employment shortfall of more than one million jobs, a loss of more than $2.5 trillion (inflation-adjusted) in aggregate gross domestic product (GDP), and a total income loss of more than $7,000 (inflation-adjusted) per person. 

“It is likely this is the most expensive treaty in the history of the world,” explained Danish Professor Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. “Using the best individual and collectively peer-reviewed economic models, the total cost of Paris — through slower GDP growth from higher energy costs — will reach $1-2 trillion every year from 2030.” Yes, that’s trillion, not billion. And that does not include the international wealth redistribution.

Two counter-COP21 summits were also held in Paris to debunk the alarmism, one organized by local realists and the other by the Heartland Institute. At both, scientists warned about the real agenda: Essentially, destroying industrial civilization, propping up kleptocrats with Western tax funds, and seizing control of the global economy. The co-founder of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore, told The New American that the goal appeared to be bringing down industrial civilization. Countless people will die if they get their wish, he explained. In an interview later with TNA, Lord Christopher Monckton, science advisor to former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a giant in the climate realist movement, said the agenda was a communist-fascist global regime to end self-government, prosperity, and liberty.

Another prominent scientist at the Heartland summit, University of Virginia environmental science Professor Emeritus Fred Singer, founder of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, slammed the whole UN effort. “This is about money and power,” he told TNA. “Science plays a small role, and mostly it’s being misused.” “It’s a matter of really trying to control things,” he said, noting that control of CO2 means control of economies and, ultimately, people. He also called the scheming a direct “subsidy” from the poor in the West to rich elites ruling the Third World.

At the French counter-COP21 summit, Chemistry Professor István Markó at the Universite Catholique de Louvain offered a sharp warning, too. “The first rule of thumb is never believe the United Nations,” he told TNA, comparing “climatism” to a religion. “Behind all this you have a huge army of technocrats, and these people are slowly eroding every one of your liberties.... Your individual liberty is at stake with COP21.” Americans in particular, he said, must fight back. 

Can We Toss the Agreement?

As the Paris Agreement is a contract between governments, it is by definition a treaty and must, under the U.S. Constitution, be ratified by the Senate before it can be implemented (it must also meet other constitutional restrictions, which it doesn’t). Since Obama knows that he will not get Senate approval, he plans to implement much of the plan via executive order and EPA administrative decrees.

A year before COP21 brought together some 40,000 attendees in Paris, Obama went to Beijing and inked a pseudo-treaty with dictator Xi Jinping purporting to commit America to draconian economic controls supposedly needed to reduce CO2 emissions. Alarmists were unanimous: It was a crucial step forward in getting a global “climate” regime approved in Paris because it signaled a commitment of the United States to such a plan. The White House later boasted about it.

Obama, appearing side by side with communist dictator Xi at the start of the UN summit, offered his administration’s full support for the broader agenda. “I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter, to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it,” Obama claimed at the conference, attended by some 150 dictators and heads of state. Speaking of his deal with Xi, Obama boasted that last year, “I set a new target: America will reduce our emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels within 10 years from now.” Obama also vowed to transfer U.S. wealth to Third World regimes to help with “climate.”

In August 2015, Obama’s EPA announced new regulations on CO2 emissions for power plants called the Clean Power Plan, regulations that were not authorized by Congress, as is required under the Constitution. According to the EPA’s own website, “By 2030, the Plan will reduce carbon emissions from power plants by 32% percent below 2005 levels.” Notice the date of 2030, which aligns with the UN’s Agenda 2030.

The Obama administration and others at the summit have taken several different tacks to justify the administration’s  actions. First, they claimed the UN agreement would not be a treaty, and therefore would not require ratification. Then, they claimed “treaty” has different meanings in the United States and in “international law.” Finally, when those lies flopped, the new false narrative became: The Senate ratified a UN scheme, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in 1992, so anything Obama and the UN agree to is automatically ratified and binding on the American people. That is, of course, ridiculous.

But the implementation of Obama’s plans go on, as will the consequences associated with it. Because wind and solar cannot reliably supply our country with amounts of electricity necessary to power manufacturing and supply homes — and nuclear power was pushed off the table years ago by government regulations — the only answer to stop brownouts and blackouts will be to jack up the cost of electricity to keep consumers from using as much as they had previously. This will cost jobs and the disposable income of Americans.

The Republican Party, which is in control of both the House and the Senate, does technically have the ability to stop the president’s unconstitutional actions, but it is doubtful it will have the gumption to fight — unless the American people almost literally accost Congressmen to do so.

Republicans are talking a good game, but they must be convinced to have the backbone to fight the climate agenda.

U.S. lawmakers made clear that the Senate will not ratify a new treaty out of Paris. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, appeared in Paris via video to emphasize that position. “We already rejected his power plan, that’s done,” Inhofe said, speaking of the centerpiece of Obama’s “climate charade.” “We’re going to win this thing together.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) slammed the pact and its agenda as “unattainable.” “The President is making promises he can’t keep, writing checks he can’t cash, and stepping over the middle class to take credit for an ‘agreement’ that is subject to being shredded in 13 months,” McConnell said.

But with Obama acting unilaterally, without the consent of Congress, Republicans are not going to be asked to vote for or against the treaty/agreement. To cut off Obama’s plans, Republicans would need to resolve to cut off funding for every climate plan that the Obama administration puts into place, regardless of a sure Obama veto and the sure drubbing they will get from the liberal mainstream media over accusations of shutting down the government.

But with just 40 percent of Americans even believing in the AGW theory underpinning Obama’s actions, according to a Pew survey last year, public support for the deal is likely to be isolated to the fringe of the U.S. Left, and Republicans could benefit from such a fight, if they do a good job of presenting their points.

As the AGW narrative crumbles (see pages 21 and 27), the task facing the Republicans becomes easier and easier, especially with some high-ranked UN functionaries letting the cat out of the bag as to the true purpose of the Paris Agreement.
UNFCCC chief Christiana Figueres, who ran the COP21 summit in Paris with her French Socialist Party colleague Laurent Fabius, already admitted years ago, at a 2012 UN climate summit in Qatar, “It must be understood that what is occurring here … in the whole climate change process is a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.”

And two years after that admission, she offered additional insight into the “complete transformation” she envisioned, telling Bloomberg that the Communist Chinese dictatorship was “doing it right” on AGW. The UN climate boss said that, among other benefits of a Chinese system, the mass-murdering regime is better able to implement its policies without “legislative hurdles” such as those in the United States, which have delayed “climate action” in the U.S. Congress and been “very detrimental.”

Unless Americans want to experience the Chinese lifestyle, they must convince Republicans — and even Democrats — that pseudo-climate remediation is not in the best interest of America or the world.


UN Climate Summit: Shackling the Planet to “Save” It

Vol. 32, No. 01

January 4, 2016

UN Climate Summit: Shackling the Planet to “Save” It

Cover Story


Features


Climate
UN Climate Summit: Shackling the Planet to “Save” It

UN Climate Summit: Shackling the Planet to “Save” It

Governments and dictators from around the world have agreed to a “climate” deal dubbed the “Paris Agreement.” This is what the governed can now look forward to. ...
Alex Newman
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

PARIS — For generations, advocates of global government, including the powerful Club of Rome, have worked to unite the world against a “global threat” so that a governing entity can deal with that “common enemy.” Any threat, real or imagined, would do, provided it justified empowering international institutions. As the globalist mantra goes, “Global problems require global solutions.” It had to be something that no country could handle on its own. So after various causes such as “overpopulation” imploded, they settled on “anthropogenic (man-made) global warming,” or AGW. “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill,” declared the globalist/communist council of the Club of Rome in its 1991 report The First Global Revolution. “All these dangers are caused by human intervention.... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

In December 2015, the United Nations and its members agreed to impose a global “climate” regime on humanity that will shackle the planet in the name of saving it. If Maurice Strong, a Club of Rome operative and a key architect behind the AGW hysteria, had lived to see it, he would have been pleased with the outcome. Strong, a self-declared socialist, reputed to be a billionaire, who literally lived a jet-setting lifestyle and made much of his money through oil, served as the first executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and chief of the 1992 UN Earth Summit. He died in obscurity days before the 21st UN Conference of the Parties (COP21) began in Paris, living out his final years in Communist China following an embezzlement scandal.

The Agreement

To tame and control man in the name of humanity, after two weeks of negotiations, governments and dictatorships from around the world agreed to a “climate” deal dubbed the “Paris Agreement.” Among other goals, the agreement aims to restructure the global economy, phase out cheap and abundant energy over the coming decades, redistribute the wealth of Western taxpayers to Third World regimes, and empower the UN to oversee a planetary “climate” regime. Imagining themselves to be Masters of the Universe, and despite the failure of every UN “climate” model being used as the rationale for the agreement, the parties even purported to decide that they would stop global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.


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Under the guise of saving humanity from CO2, which has been dubbed the “gas of life” by scientists, the agreement requires comprehensive monitoring and tracking of emissions across the West, as well as huge reductions in emissions. Western governments — deemed “developed countries” — will suffer the brunt of the regulations. The agreement mandates that Western economies “shall” undertake “economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets.” They also “shall” hand over their taxpayers’ wealth to Third World governments, which get bonus points for denying their subjects access to resources. And to reduce the West’s CO2 “footprint,” Western governments will be required to fund expensive and unreliable “green” energy projects that can’t find adequate private investors (likely because they are bad investments), such as Solyndra, which produced a supposedly innovative new type of solar cell using U.S. tax dollars before going bankrupt. (Solyndra’s owners were Obama’s cronies.) Ironically, just days before COP21 began, taxpayer-subsidized Spanish “green” energy giant Abengoa also went bust, though nobody mentioned it in Paris.

The agreement calls for governments to “include all categories of anthropogenic emissions” when they report to the UN. It was not clear whether human breath, also largely made up of CO2, would need to be monitored, regulated, reported, and reduced as well.

In Paris, virtually every outfit and government with a totalitarian idea sought to link its agenda to fighting AGW so that it would become part of the agreement. But of course, the UN and its member regimes — “Paris-ites,” as critics called them — did not get everything they wanted. The two main stumbling blocks for globalists, at least in the short term, were a global carbon tax and a cap-and-trade regime, to trade carbon allowances, for example. But at least the cap-and-trade regime will likely be a short time in coming, as the UN has already established a global Carbon Pricing Panel (see our article "The Global Warming Climate Regime").

Instead of a top-down regime, which would likely have been too obvious to the world’s citizens as a new, authoritarian global government, the “Paris Agreement” enshrines a system in which governments make pledges — emissions reductions, handouts to cronies, central planning of economic activity, jihad against fossil fuels, and more — that will be enforced by national, state, and local authorities until the planned-for global institutions (and there is already a dizzying array of UN agencies in operation for the task) are scaled up to take over.

Virtually all governments and dictators have already submitted pledges, more than half of which contain references to schemes such as “carbon pricing,” essentially setting up an embryonic carbon trading system. Some 63 jurisdictions already have such policies.

In areas of the world already ruled by regional regimes, the agreement also speaks of emission levels “allocated to each Party” by outfits such as the European Union. For now the Obama administration will decide U.S. CO2 allowances.

The deal calls for governments to re-assess their pledges, known as “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs), every five years, and to ratchet up the coercive controls down the line. The agreement mandates that each five-year plan be more draconian than the last.  Think of it as a straitjacket on the West that will get progressively tighter until finally, the victim dies of asphyxiation. Or, to use another analogy, imagine a frog in a pot of warm water, with the agreement providing for the temperature to be progressively elevated until finally the water is boiling. Humanity is the frog.

But even those radical pledges evidently are not considered enough to stop AGW. The agreement reads: “Much greater emission reduction efforts will be required than those associated with the intended nationally determined contributions.” In essence, the governments formally agreed to agree that they have not done enough and that more emissions reductions and coercive controls will be needed.

And while national governments will decide how much liberty and wealth to surrender for AGW in the beginning, the text also calls for “fostering global, regional, national and subnational cooperation” going forward. By “cooperation,” globalists mean surrendering decision-making authority to supranational bodies. In case there was any doubt about whether this “voluntary” agreement mandates action, it should be noted that the word “shall” appears more than 100 times.

To ensure that ratcheting up the totalitarianism does not inadvertently spook the frog, the agreement says governments “shall” cooperate “to enhance climate change education, training, [and] public awareness.” In other words, prepare for stepped-up government AGW propaganda worldwide, paid for with tax dollars.

What’s in It for Them

In contrast to the burdens placed on citizens of the developed world, the non-developed world wasn’t weighed down with new agendas. In fact, the agreement amounts to having the developed world pay the leaders of the Third World to maintain the status quo — or even to economically benefit a bit, depending on the country.

Third World regimes spoke with one voice at the summit. In exchange for going along with the UN “climate” agenda, the 134 UN members known as the G77 plus China — the world’s largest coalition of dictators and backward regimes — demanded “significantly” more than $100 billion per year in AGW reparations from Western taxpayers. They said “nothing” could be achieved without lots of “climate finance” flowing from freer nations to their largely autocratic regimes. Last year, they received over $62 billion in climate loot, according to an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study — practically none of which was used for “climate” issues. The autocrats use the funds to keep themselves in power, live the high life, or sock away in case of a coup d’etat. But in any case, past donations were not enough for the G77 plus China.

The alliance, which last year demanded global socialism and a “New World Order to Live Well,” sent its list of demands to journalists. “It is now time for all developed country Parties to convert their pledges to the GCF [UN Green Climate (slush) Fund] into contribution agreements, as well as scaling up commitments [bribe promises],” G77 spokesperson Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko of South Africa explained, saying it was for climate reparations, not “aid” or “charity.” She claimed the West is “obliged to provide financial resources, including technology transfer and [government] capacity building to all developing countries.” The agreement says that $100 billion annually is a “floor.” In other words, the sky is the limit — so prepare to be fleeced.

Many non-Western regimes will do little but sit back and collect the loot while oppressing people, now with the added benefit of the UN climate regime as an excuse. Communist China, for example, which has been opening a new coal-fired power plant on an average of once every seven to 10 days and emits nearly twice the amount of CO2 as the United States, will not even hit its “peak” emissions level until decades from now. (Authorities in India and China agreed to work over time to “peak” their emissions and then bring them down.) So much for worldwide sacrifice.

Though citizens in the Third World do not stand to see their liberty increased by the agreement — rather it will likely stay the same or decrease — at least a few of the countries will see some economic benefits, as manufacturing jobs in the Western world will become untenable as energy will likely become so expensive that Western companies will not be able to compete with companies based in Third World locales. “Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow,” emphasized Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi the day before COP21 began.

Just in the United States, according to analyses of Obama’s “climate” agenda by the Heritage Institute, by 2030, the damage would include an average annual employment shortfall of nearly 300,000 jobs, a peak employment shortfall of more than one million jobs, a loss of more than $2.5 trillion (inflation-adjusted) in aggregate gross domestic product (GDP), and a total income loss of more than $7,000 (inflation-adjusted) per person.

“It is likely this is the most expensive treaty in the history of the world,” explained Danish Professor Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. “Using the best individual and collectively peer-reviewed economic models, the total cost of Paris — through slower GDP growth from higher energy costs — will reach $1-2 trillion every year from 2030.” Yes, that’s trillion, not billion. And that does not include the international wealth redistribution.

Two counter-COP21 summits were also held in Paris to debunk the alarmism, one organized by local realists and the other by the Heartland Institute. At both, scientists warned about the real agenda: Essentially, destroying industrial civilization, propping up kleptocrats with Western tax funds, and seizing control of the global economy. The co-founder of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore, told The New American that the goal appeared to be bringing down industrial civilization. Countless people will die if they get their wish, he explained. In an interview later with TNA, Lord Christopher Monckton, science advisor to former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a giant in the climate realist movement, said the agenda was a communist-fascist global regime to end self-government, prosperity, and liberty.

Another prominent scientist at the Heartland summit, University of Virginia environmental science Professor Emeritus Fred Singer, founder of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, slammed the whole UN effort. “This is about money and power,” he told TNA. “Science plays a small role, and mostly it’s being misused.” “It’s a matter of really trying to control things,” he said, noting that control of CO2 means control of economies and, ultimately, people. He also called the scheming a direct “subsidy” from the poor in the West to rich elites ruling the Third World.

At the French counter-COP21 summit, Chemistry Professor István Markó at the Universite Catholique de Louvain offered a sharp warning, too. “The first rule of thumb is never believe the United Nations,” he told TNA, comparing “climatism” to a religion. “Behind all this you have a huge army of technocrats, and these people are slowly eroding every one of your liberties.... Your individual liberty is at stake with COP21.” Americans in particular, he said, must fight back.

Can We Toss the Agreement?

As the Paris Agreement is a contract between governments, it is by definition a treaty and must, under the U.S. Constitution, be ratified by the Senate before it can be implemented (it must also meet other constitutional restrictions, which it doesn’t). Since Obama knows that he will not get Senate approval, he plans to implement much of the plan via executive order and EPA administrative decrees.

A year before COP21 brought together some 40,000 attendees in Paris, Obama went to Beijing and inked a pseudo-treaty with dictator Xi Jinping purporting to commit America to draconian economic controls supposedly needed to reduce CO2 emissions. Alarmists were unanimous: It was a crucial step forward in getting a global “climate” regime approved in Paris because it signaled a commitment of the United States to such a plan. The White House later boasted about it.

Obama, appearing side by side with communist dictator Xi at the start of the UN summit, offered his administration’s full support for the broader agenda. “I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter, to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it,” Obama claimed at the conference, attended by some 150 dictators and heads of state. Speaking of his deal with Xi, Obama boasted that last year, “I set a new target: America will reduce our emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels within 10 years from now.” Obama also vowed to transfer U.S. wealth to Third World regimes to help with “climate.”

In August 2015, Obama’s EPA announced new regulations on CO2 emissions for power plants called the Clean Power Plan, regulations that were not authorized by Congress, as is required under the Constitution. According to the EPA’s own website, “By 2030, the Plan will reduce carbon emissions from power plants by 32% percent below 2005 levels.” Notice the date of 2030, which aligns with the UN’s Agenda 2030.

The Obama administration and others at the summit have taken several different tacks to justify the administration’s  actions. First, they claimed the UN agreement would not be a treaty, and therefore would not require ratification. Then, they claimed “treaty” has different meanings in the United States and in “international law.” Finally, when those lies flopped, the new false narrative became: The Senate ratified a UN scheme, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in 1992, so anything Obama and the UN agree to is automatically ratified and binding on the American people. That is, of course, ridiculous.

But the implementation of Obama’s plans go on, as will the consequences associated with it. Because wind and solar cannot reliably supply our country with amounts of electricity necessary to power manufacturing and supply homes — and nuclear power was pushed off the table years ago by government regulations — the only answer to stop brownouts and blackouts will be to jack up the cost of electricity to keep consumers from using as much as they had previously. This will cost jobs and the disposable income of Americans.

The Republican Party, which is in control of both the House and the Senate, does technically have the ability to stop the president’s unconstitutional actions, but it is doubtful it will have the gumption to fight — unless the American people almost literally accost Congressmen to do so.

Republicans are talking a good game, but they must be convinced to have the backbone to fight the climate agenda.

U.S. lawmakers made clear that the Senate will not ratify a new treaty out of Paris. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, appeared in Paris via video to emphasize that position. “We already rejected his power plan, that’s done,” Inhofe said, speaking of the centerpiece of Obama’s “climate charade.” “We’re going to win this thing together.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) slammed the pact and its agenda as “unattainable.” “The President is making promises he can’t keep, writing checks he can’t cash, and stepping over the middle class to take credit for an ‘agreement’ that is subject to being shredded in 13 months,” McConnell said.

But with Obama acting unilaterally, without the consent of Congress, Republicans are not going to be asked to vote for or against the treaty/agreement. To cut off Obama’s plans, Republicans would need to resolve to cut off funding for every climate plan that the Obama administration puts into place, regardless of a sure Obama veto and the sure drubbing they will get from the liberal mainstream media over accusations of shutting down the government.

But with just 40 percent of Americans even believing in the AGW theory underpinning Obama’s actions, according to a Pew survey last year, public support for the deal is likely to be isolated to the fringe of the U.S. Left, and Republicans could benefit from such a fight, if they do a good job of presenting their points.

As the AGW narrative crumbles (see here and here), the task facing the Republicans becomes easier and easier, especially with some high-ranked UN functionaries letting the cat out of the bag as to the true purpose of the Paris Agreement. UNFCCC chief Christiana Figueres, who ran the COP21 summit in Paris with her French Socialist Party colleague Laurent Fabius, already admitted years ago, at a 2012 UN climate summit in Qatar, “It must be understood that what is occurring here … in the whole climate change process is a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.”

And two years after that admission, she offered additional insight into the “complete transformation” she envisioned, telling Bloomberg that the Communist Chinese dictatorship was “doing it right” on AGW. The UN climate boss said that, among other benefits of a Chinese system, the mass-murdering regime is better able to implement its policies without “legislative hurdles” such as those in the United States, which have delayed “climate action” in the U.S. Congress and been “very detrimental.”

Unless Americans want to experience the Chinese lifestyle, they must convince Republicans — and even Democrats — that pseudo-climate remediation is not in the best interest of America or the world.

Photo: at top AP Images