Tyranny by treaty

Every trade association in the United States is attempting to understand what carbon trading and taxation will mean for its constituents. And while some are standing by hoping to receive subsidies from the scheme, many are concerned we are heading in the wrong direction.

At the United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen last December, 40,000 protestors, 30,000 delegates and 100 world leaders slept in flophouses and four-star hotels. They rented 1,200 limousines and 140 private jets. The US delegation consisted of 200 people, not including President Obama’s massive entourage of 500.

In just 14 days, this one UN conference spewed 40,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere - more than that produced annually by 60 of the world’s smallest economies!

It is estimated that, over the last 20 years, climate change has sucked up $80 billion in US taxpayer funds. So one must ask, “Did they really all have to go?”

UN Project #1901

To mitigate all the hot air produced at this one UN meeting, a UN treaty and the EU law force Denmark’s citizens to buy 40,000 tons worth of UN-certified emission reductions (UNCERs) at a cost of $700,000. Annually, Denmark purchases another 115,000 tons worth of UNCERs for $2 million a year. All of Denmark’s UNCERs are bought from UN Project #1901.

Project #1901 is 100 acres of new brick-making businesses in Bangladesh. At current rates, over the 20-year lifespan of these brickfields, Denmark will transfer $40 million in mitigation fees to Project #1901. Bangladesh carbon marketers have announced that this price will double, bringing the total of this “developed to developing country” transfer to $80 million over 20 years.

It cost only $9 million to build Project #1901, with an $11 million World Bank credit line issued to a private finance company. So before making a single brick, the investors in Project #1901 have secured tens of millions in profits, all risk free.

Project #1901 is just one of thousands of such projects triggered by UN treaty and paid for by overburdened taxpayers in developed countries, with the US paying the largest share, fully 22 per cent of the bill.

You can track activity for some UN environmental treaties via the UN Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) database at gefonline.org. Searching by keyword “brick”, you’ll see Project #1901 is one of three such projects in Bangladesh, India and China; projects totaling $52 million, paid for by income taxed, then transferred, from developed countries to developing countries, with the UN and the World Bank acting as facilitators.

Each UN meeting requires carbon mitigation and more cash goes to more UN projects. Every protester equals more carbon equals more mitigation equals more cash. Never mind selling T-shirts to conventioneers anymore. There’s definitely more money in selling UNCERs.

Meet the UN

A generous people, every year US citizens personally donate $70 billion in charity to developing countries, plus another $23 billion via our government’s humanitarian arm, USAID.

Beyond this, we support various UN agency budgets. And we support the World Bank which, since 2008, has transferred more than $100 billion from 40 “rich” countries for financing and grants to 144 developing countries. At the World Bank, Communist China has just leapfrogged past Germany, France and the UK to become the third largest shareholder, just behind the US and Japan. And India’s not far behind.

The World Bank is now seeking Congressional approval to increase its grant/financing capacity from $90 billion to $280 billion a year.

Since the World Bank established the GEF in 1991, $16 billion in taxpayer funds, or $850 million a year, has flowed from 32 developed countries to projects mandated by just six of the 16 UN environmental treaties. 65 per cent of these funds are for biodiversity and climate change treaty projects such as Project #1901. GEF’s new budget is $2.5 billion a year, but this figure is dwarfed by the US government’s commitment to a transfer of $100 billion a year from developed countries to developing countries on the climate change treaty alone. At 22 per cent, the US’s share of this commitment will be $22 billion a year - for just this one UN treaty.

There are 822 GEF climate change projects slated for developing countries. Total value: $21 billion. GEF is granting $2.8 billion for these projects with the balance coming from “cofinancing” arrangements, primarily grants and lines of credit for more taxpayer dollars arranged by the World Bank to private finance companies.

But look closer. If one sorts the 822 GEF climate change projects by “enabling activity”, we find 280 such projects. What is “enabling activity”? It’s paperwork, paperwork valued at $200 million - with GEF grants supplying almost 90 per cent, while GEF retains a 10 per cent agency fee on every document.

Paperwork heaven

Every UN treaty triggers Secretariat costs, thousands of projects around the world, national legislation and litigation, and lots of paperwork.

For example, the Environmental Protection Agency spends $1.5~2 million to write up our annual US Inventory for Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions, as required by the UN’s climate change treaty.

A similar document, China’s Initial National Communication to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), is 102 pages and cost $3.84 million - almost $38,000 a page! China contributed only $240,000 to this total and we taxpayers in developed countries paid the balance. China’s Second National Communication carries a $6 million price tag with China contributing $650,000 and taxpayers paying the balance. GEF retains its standard 10 per cent agency fee on every document.

We taxpayers paid fully $59 million out of the $60 million doled out for UN-mandated “second national communications” for 130 countries on the climate change treaty, while GEF retained agency fees of $7.5 million.

And, in a glaring conflict of interest, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) also runs the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) where all the science supporting climate change is processed, regurgitated and disseminated to the world.

Add in thousands of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) receiving UN grants to further hype the scheme as “saving the Earth” and you can see where this is all heading.

It’s all barely “transparent”. It’s all without oversight. There’s no accountability. There’s no way to vote those pushing such bad policy out of office. Shielded by the UN, they’re a world away from the reach of your vote. But it’s all as close as your wallet.

So how big is it? The UN International Civil Service Commission now handles personnel for 40 UN agencies, agencies where corruption is an ongoing issue. Oh, and by the way, the UN pension fund is also broke and needs a bailout!

How many treaties?

The biodiversity and climate change treaties are just two of hundreds of UN treaties. From 1947 to 2006 the UN increased its treaty tally from 33 to 333.

While it takes two-thirds of our Senate to ratify most treaties and give them the force of federal law, the UN has 192 member countries. The EU has 27 votes and a group of developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere, the Group of 77, has aligned with China. Together they control the votes needed to activate treaties globally, rendering our single US vote irrelevant. With little on the table and nothing to lose, the developing countries are heavily invested in treaty development.

If you still think treaties don’t impact on you, think again. Article VI, clause two of the Constitution renders treaties the supreme law of the land, on the same footing with federal law.

Consider the American Power Act, a carbon cap and trade bill currently under consideration in Congress. Think about the Supreme Court ruling that triggered an EPA finding that CO2 - yes, that gas you exhale - is a pollutant. These actions are direct results of the FCCC.

And remember the spotted owl fiasco? All those jobs lost and sawmills closed for a bird the Fish and Wildlife Service later stated was never under any threat! The spotted owl issue was triggered by the Federal Endangered Species Act, which in turn, was spawned by a UN treaty, its Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Back to Copenhagen

So, let’s return to Denmark and look more closely at the UNCERs that Denmark bought as mitigation of atmospheric pollution as mandated by the UN climate change treaty.

An $11 million World Bank credit line built $9 million worth of brickfields in Bangladesh, Project #1901, covering 100 acres and employing 1,800 people. The credit line was issued to the Industrial and Infrastructure Development Finance Company, which is 80 per cent privately owned. Over 20 years, Project #1901 will provide as much as $80 million worth of UNCERs to be sold to Denmark, generating tens of millions in profit - in Bangladesh, where the average per capita income is $1,500 a year.

But look closer still. It is estimated there are currently 4,000 small privately owned kilns making bricks in Bangladesh while generating 3~6 tons of CO2 annually. To secure the credit line, these figures were inflated to 6,000 kilns producing 9 tons of CO2. So, even before ground was broken on Project #1901, it had “saved”, on paper, as much as 6 tons of CO2 a year!

What is not noted, however, in any report, is that, based on basic economic principles, to save energy and labour while increasing the bottom line, over a 20-year period, the thousands of small, privately owned kilns would be upgraded with more efficient kilns and fuel usage, and therefore emissions, would decline.

But Project #1901 makes no mention of training or resettlement costs for what could easily be 10,000 small kiln workers and their families displaced by these large, subsidised, centralised brickfields. There is no mention of the costs, financial and environmental, of transporting bricks from the large brickfields back to the areas where demand is located - where the small kilns, individually owned and operated, are today. And there is no plan for decommissioning these monstrous Soviet-era style brickfields at the end of their 20-year lifespan.

So, in addition to making a profit from making bricks - if these large brickfields ever actually make any bricks - Project #1901’s investment consortium will clear tens of millions of dollars while replacing an entire private industry, an industry that would have slowly and organically modernised over time, just in response to the normal pressures of the free market system.

Whatever happened to “small is beautiful”?

Bad policy or grand theft?

Project #1901 was not built in response to free market principles. It was built in response to a nonsensical global political policy. The UN climate change treaty created this top-down “mitigation” policy. It’s bad policy, bad global “governance”. And, if the UN gets its dream of taxes on international travel and trade, it will officially be a global government, without any accountability whatsoever - a corrupt politician’s dream world.

In President Obama’s speech to the climate change meeting in Copenhagen, he pushed for: “Mitigation. Transparency. And financing.”

“Mitigation”: tax dollars will be transferred to projects no one wants with UN technocrats charging fees certifying companies providing nonsensical mitigation for trumped up issues hyped by propaganda campaigns.

“Transparency”: online databases will bury agency fees and outrageous paperwork costs - $38,000 a page! - for tons of UN treaty-mandated reports that no one will ever read.

“And financing”: the UN and World Bank will transfer your taxes to opportunists around the globe.

All this socialism is simply not sustainable. All this “green” for all these “green” jobs comes at the expense of blue and purple and orange jobs. Our government institutions are building an elaborate Potemkin village with money taxed out of the pockets of waitresses and truck drivers, farmers, fishermen and office workers.

“Mitigation. Transparency. And financing.”

Fraud.

As the line from The Godfather goes, “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns”. It’s obvious that, if you throw in a few PhD’s and a treaty or two, it’s possible to raid the treasuries of the developed world without ever firing a shot.

So, about that 2009 UN climate change meeting in Copenhagen, let’s ask that question again: “Did they really all have to go?”

In Bangladesh, China and India, at the World Bank and the UN, the answer is, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”