By Terence Corcoran: NATIONAL POST
Remember the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol? It landed in 1997 — amid alarming forecasts of rampant eco-disasters, rising sea levels, desertification, hell on earth — with commitments from leading nations to control their carbon emissions. And it crashed in 2012 — expired, they said.
Canada embraced Kyoto Protocol targets, deemed essential to help save the planet from environmental crises. During the first commitment period ending in 2012, Canada had signed on to carbon-emissions reductions of six-per-cent below 1990 levels. In 2012, Canada reported an emissions increase of 18-per-cent above 1990 levels. Canada got out of Kyoto in 2011.
Now let us remember the United Nations’ Paris agreement. It landed in 2015 — amid similar warnings of rampant environmental crises that surrounded Kyoto — with leading nations, including Canada, committed to tough emissions targets. On Thursday, the Paris agreement crashed as U.S. President Donald Trump, in his best policy speech so far as president, announced: “We are getting out.”
Canada embraced the Paris agreement in 2015, committing to a new carbon-emissions target of 30-per-cent below 2005 by 2030. The targets will not be met under current policies. Should Canada now join the United States by withdrawing from Paris — as it did from Kyoto — with a view to renegotiating a new global climate protocol?
Nobody in Canada will want to entertain such drastic action today. It would mean facing the wrath of the environmental organizations that now dominate the agenda-setting media reportage on climate issues. But it is clear that Trump has pulled the economic plug on an international climate agreement that has been a shambles from Day One and now has no basis for continued existence.
In his speech, Trump clearly and articulately spelled out the flaws of the Paris agreement — flaws that apply to Canada as well as the United States. Paris puts the U.S. at a disadvantage to its major trading nations. It requires a redistribution of wealth from the U.S. and Canada to other nations.
While Canada and the U.S. are required to reduce their reliance on coal and other fossil fuels, other nations — China, India and African countries — will be allowed to dramatically increase their use of fossil fuels. The expansion of coal use is already underway. China’s coal-fired capacity is forecast to jump 19 per cent over the next five years while Canada tries to eliminate coal to meet climate targets. Pakistan and South Africa are planning major coal-fired projects. India sits on vast coal reserves that it won’t likely leave in the ground.
Trump rejected Paris’s premise that western nations should give up sovereignty
The idea that the wealthy nations should curb their fossil-fuel-based growth while developing nations expand theirs is an idea embedded in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The theory has been that since developed nations are “principally responsible” for current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is incumbent on them to bear a “heavier burden” as developing nations pursue fossil-fuel-based growth.
Even if one accepts the UN science on climate change, the economic fundamentals behind the Kyoto and Paris protocols are flawed, unfair, damaging and — as has been shown since all this started back in Rio in 1992 — politically unworkable on any international scale.
It’s not the science that’s the problem (although the science might also be a problem). It’s the economics and the politics of attempting to shape an international global control regime. Trump got it just right as he outlined the unnecessary burdens to be imposed on America and the West while other nations are allowed to proceed with business as usual. He rightly decried “the massive redistribution of U.S. wealth to other countries.”
It will be best, in days and months ahead, to avoid getting drawn into the claims of those who portray America’s withdrawal from Paris as a betrayal of the environment or of the abandonment of some great international order of which the U.S. has been the leader.
What Trump has withdrawn from is the imposition of globalism — the idea that nations should give up their national sovereignty, sacrifice their independence, to some higher international power that would oversee the world.
Back in 1998, as the Kyoto climate-control wave swept Canada and most nations, theories of global governance were all the rage. If I may summarize from a column I wrote at the time, global governance theory — and the global governance movement — grew out of the UN via a 1995 propaganda document titled “Our Global Neighborhood: The Report of the Commission on Global Governance.” It called for a UN plan to “manage the world economy.”
The backers of globalism — global governance, a global commons, a global collective — included Al Gore, George Soros and the late Maurice Strong, one of the authors of Our Global Neighbourhood. The objectives were shared. Gore wanted to control population growth. Soros wanted to control international credit: “International credit movements need to be supervised and the allocation of credit regulated by an international authority,” said Soros. No need here to recap Strong’s authoritarian ideas.
The Paris agreement is a product of that globalist movement and agenda smuggled into being under the guise of science and saving the planet. Why would good people accept the idea that imposing global government would save the planet? It’s a question that now, thanks to Trump, hangs over Canada and the world.
How pathetic that Ex Gym teacher now PM Trudeau has signed the death warrrant to 500,000 jobs in the oil sands ,Mining and Forestry industries Trudeau’s Liberal party continues to Bring in record number of so called Syrian refugees that are really African refugees that heard about the $3100 a month Welfarechecks , Food stamps and a home to live in paid by the Canadian taxpayer
as trudeau would say ‘no photo op here, no gay parade to lead.’ let well alone and screeew the tax payers.