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The weirdest thing about John Kerry’s weekend speech on
climate-change—other than the fact that this is the same guy who in 1997 voted
to forbid the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol—is that it begins by quoting
something Maurice Strong said at the U.N.’s 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro:
“Every bit of evidence I’ve seen persuades me that we are on a course leading to
tragedy.”
Maurice who?
Mr. Strong, a former oil executive from Canada (he was Pierre Trudeau’s
pick to run state-owned Petro-Canada in the mid-1970s), was for many years the
U.N.’s ultimate mandarin. He organized many of its environmental mega-confabs,
including the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the 1992 Rio summit, before rising
to become Kofi Annan’s right-hand man. At various times Mr. Strong has served as
director at the World Economic Forum, chairman of the Earth Council and the
World Resources Institute, vice chairman of the Chicago Climate Exchange and
chairman of the China Carbon Corporation, to name just a few of his many
prominent affiliations.
In 2005 it emerged that Mr. Strong, who was the chairman of the U.N.
panel that created the Office of the Iraq Program, had accepted a check for
close to $1 million from a South Korean businessman named Tongsun Park, who in
the 1970s had been involved in an effort to bribe U.S. politicians. Mr. Strong
claimed that the check, from a Jordanian bank, was meant as an investment in a
family company that later went bankrupt. Mr. Park (who also sublet office space
from Mr. Strong) later went to prison for trying to bribe U.N. officials
overseeing the Oil-for-Food program that was propping up Saddam Hussein’s regime
in Iraq. Mr. Strong was accused of no wrongdoing and has denied involvement in
Oil-for-Food. He left the U.N. that year and moved to
Beijing.
