If Utopia last century was populated by Soviet Man, he has been superseded this century by Green Person with eerily similar yearnings – this time for a ‘sustainable’ world free of ‘inequity’. All the developed world needs to do is fill the pockets of the Third’s kleptocrats and sustainable joy will reign supreme .
To understand the impetus for last week’s ‘unique development in the U.S.-China relationship’ – and its implications for Australia – suspend disbelief, hold your nose, enter that rarefied repository of atmospheric alarmism, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and take a closer look at its most ambitious creation, the Green Climate Fund (GCF). In climate politics (and science), the devil is indeed in the detail – and dollars.
“The Green Climate Fund is to become the main instrument for multilateral climate finance in the future. It will channel a significant share of international climate finance needed to keep global temperature increases to below 2° Celsius.” – GCF statement, Bonn, September 9, 2014
Paragraph 19 of the G20 Brisbane Summit Communiqué reads:
“We support strong and effective action to address climate change. Consistent with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its agreed outcomes, our actions will support sustainable development, economic growth, and certainty for business and investment. We will work together to adopt successfully a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the UNFCCC that is applicable to all parties at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in 2015. We encourage parties that are ready to communicate their intended nationally determined contributions well in advance of COP21 (by the first quarter of 2015 for those parties ready to do so). We reaffirm our support for mobilising finance for adaptation and mitigation, such as the Green Climate Fund.”
Despite the media excitement, there was little new. UNFCCC’s search for ‘another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force’ for ‘mobilising’ developed world finance has been going on – with increasing urgency – since the 2009 Copenhagen debacle. How did we get to this point? The latest saga in the UN climate-protection racket began four years ago in Mexico, where we must revisit the Moon Palace Golf and Spa Resort, Cancun, and the 15,000+ delegates dancing to the COP-16 theme song, “Let’s put the CAN in Cancun!”
It was here that UNFCCC’s new Costa Rican executive secretary, Christian Figueres, first warned that “the environmental stakes are high, because we are quickly running out of time to safeguard our future.”