Tyranny by treaty

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”?