Obama’s September trip to Copenhagen to plead with the International Olympic Committee to consider Chicago as host city for the 2016 Summer Games did not work out very well for the United States — and his next scheduled trip to Denmark promises to leave our nation’s score at 0–2.
In a post entitled “Combating Climate Change at Home and Around the World,” the White House Blog, with typical presidential puffery, announced today:
Some exciting announcements today from the White House on our efforts to combat climate change and lay the foundation for a clean energy economy! The President will be attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP 15) next month, and he will take with him an emissions reduction target to drive progress toward a comprehensive and operational Copenhagen accord.
Over the last 10 months, the Administration, under the President’s active leadership, has made remarkable progress in addressing climate change and accelerating a clean energy renaissance domestically and abroad…. These aggressive initiatives have laid the foundation for a meaningful agreement in Copenhagen and longer term for a new, sustainable and prosperous clean energy future.
The international climate summit will bring together delegations from 192 nations and will be visited by approximately 15,000 people. For the first time in the series of these conferences, the U.S. delegation will have a U.S. Center, providing a unique and interactive forum to share our story with the world. The Center will host over 70 events during the two-week conference that will highlight the strong actions the U.S. is taking at home as well as the leadership role the U.S. is pursuing internationally to combat global climate change.
In the midst of all the dozens of events and proclamations of “remarkable progress” at the "U.S. Center," what the President will not be able to deliver is the fiasco called “cap and trade.” Despite the shenanigans of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the Democrat majority has not managed to force the legislation through in time for the President to sign it into law prior to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
Cap and trade is crucial to the plans of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other internationalists because it would commit the United States to schemes to redistribute hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming years — in fact, perhaps a much as $300 billion a year — from the industrialized nations to the Third World. This massive redistribution of wealth is purportedly aimed at promoting the development of "green" technologies in the developing world.
After taking a pummeling from IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri, the vacillating American President seemed to be distancing himself from the upcoming conference, only to suddenly announce that he will be personally be traveling to Denmark. (Presumably, White House staff will bring the appropriate power converters and plugs for Obama’s teleprompter.)
Apparently no longer willing to wait for the constitutional legislative process to run its course, President Obama seized the opportunity of his first official state visit with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to sign a Memorandum of Understanding that commits the United States to the course of action proposed in the cap-and-trade legislation.
According to the report at VOANews.com:
President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have launched what the White House is calling a green partnership, affirming the countries’ commitment to combating climate change and ensuring energy security and clean energy.
India and the United States have agreed on a Memorandum of Understanding to increase cooperation on energy security, clean energy, and climate change.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, on a state visit to Washington, said both countries will work together to make the environment cleaner.
"We welcome the president’s commitment to a major program for promotion of renewable energy, and I drew his attention to India’s own ambitious national action plan on climate change which has eight national missions covering both mitigation and adaptation," Mr. Singh said.
What is the President’s commitment? To give the Indians enormous sums of money, along the lines of the model to be proposed at Copenhagen. Again, according to the VOANews.com story:
The US and India have agreed that the Copenhagen climate conference, in early December, should involve targets for emission cuts for developed countries but only mitigation actions — such as improving energy efficiency — for developing countries.
Recently, India announced it would produce 20 Gigawatts of solar power by 2022.
Bo Kong, directs the Global Energy and Climate Initiative at Johns Hopkins University. He says that target is impossible for India. "Within such a short time frame — we are talking about building about … 20 gigawatts of power plants which translates into at least over 10,000 solar power plants between 2009 to 2020 — in less than 10 years, so I am very suspicious," Kong said.
Experts say India can only make inroads into green technology if it has financial and technological support from rich countries.
Prime Minister Singh and President Obama agreed to support public and private initiatives that will invest in clean energy projects in India.
In other words, the United States will be funding a program that an expert in alternative energy calls “impossible” and “very suspicious” — an auspicious start for the cornucopia of Western financing to be unleashed in Copenhagen, if Ban Ki-moon has his way.
In yet another triumph of feel-good politics over fiscal sanity, the President is apparently attempting to force the hand of his fellow Democrats and back them into a corner on cap and trade — if they fail to follow through on his recklessness, then he can simply sit back and let the environmental extremists and their media allies savage the Senate, with Ban Ki-moon and the internationalists joining in. Most likely, they will cave in to the President’s machinations — it is, after all, only the financial future of the American Republic which is at stake — and the tactics of the "community organizer in chief" will have won the field once again.
