RUTHFULLY YOURS

“On this International Mother Earth Day,” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres proclaimed, “all eyes are on the COVID-19 pandemic – the biggest test the world has faced since the Second World War.” He issued this proclamation under the banner “Climate Action” in an attempt to link the devastating health and economic crisis wrought by the coronavirus pandemic to the UN’s radical climate change agenda. “We must act decisively to protect our planet from both the coronavirus and the existential threat of climate disruption. The current crisis is an unprecedented wake-up call.”

The UN Secretary General is following Rahm Emanuel’s advice to “never allow a crisis go to waste.” He is in sync with Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a leading champion of the Green New Deal. She tweeted recently that “it’s the right time for a worker-led, mass investment in green infrastructure to save our planet.”

The International Monetary Fund has predicted that the global lockdown will create an economic crisis not seen since the Great Depression. Job losses are already catastrophic, with far more job losses to come. With a combination of fiscal and monetary policies, governments are trying to rescue businesses that are willing to save the jobs of their workers. But as far as Secretary General Guterres is concerned, only “green jobs” are worth the expenditure of taxpayers’ money to support. He said that “as we spend huge amounts of money to recover from the coronavirus, we must deliver new jobs and businesses through a clean, green transition.”  He is pressing for an end to fossil fuel subsidies.

Mr. Guterres can afford to make such sweeping statements. Unlike President Trump and other government leaders, he is not accountable for the welfare of the millions of people in their countries at risk of losing their jobs today that are tied to fossil fuel energy. Fortunately, President Trump is not listening to the Secretary General.  “We will never let the great U.S. Oil & Gas Industry down,” President Trump said on Twitter. “I have instructed the Secretary of Energy and Secretary of the Treasury to formulate a plan which will make funds available so that these very important companies and jobs will be secured long into the future!” Thank goodness President Trump also dismisses the foolish opinions of former Secretary of State John Kerry, who said about COVID-19 and climate change that the “The parallels are screaming at us.”

As far as AOC is concerned, even after conditions are safe enough to reopen the country and Americans can go back to work (whether the jobs involve fossil fuels or not), Americans should “just say no.” That is even more irresponsible than Secretary General Guterres’ obsession with just preserving or creating “green” jobs.

In any event, the UN’s embrace of “Mother Earth” is in keeping with the goal of global governance of the environment, most recently exemplified by the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement. Globalists are looking far beyond the Paris agreement. They are busy concocting the idea that nature or Mother Earth have their own inherent legal rights worthy of protections from the acts of human beings.

The website of the  Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) declares: “Laws recognizing the Rights of Nature change the status of ecosystems and natural communities to being recognized as rights-bearing entities. As such, they have rights that can be enforced by people, governments, and communities on behalf of nature.” CELDF assisted in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, which was modeled on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “Mother Earth is a living being,” it says. “Mother Earth and all beings are entitled to all the inherent rights recognized in this Declaration without distinction of any kind, such as may be made between organic and inorganic beings, species, origin, use to human beings, or any other status.”

Who knew that a bat has the same legal rights as a human being? Is even the coronavirus entitled to the same legal protection because it is part of “Mother Earth?” As preposterous as this sounds, the United Nations General Assembly listened to a presentation about the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth and passed resolutions calling for interactive dialogues on the role of “Earth jurisprudence” in conjunction with International Mother Earth Day. The UN Secretary General’s 2018 report on Harmony with Nature defined Earth jurisprudence as “a philosophy of law and human governance in which humans are only one part of a wider community of beings.”

The 2020 “Interactive dialogue on Harmony with Nature” was cancelled by the General Assembly because of the coronavirus pandemic. Earth jurisprudence was on the agenda. Maybe next year, the participants can discuss a lawsuit against the coronavirus itself since the UN’s World Health Organization believes that China, where the virus originated, did nothing wrong.