OPINION:
“Global warming” just isn’t as cool as it used to be. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference opens Monday for the 18th time to a world far less enthusiastic about grand wealth redistribution schemes meant to buy a chilled climate. When money is tight, smart folks sit on their wallets.
The conferees’ private jets have landed in Doha, Qatar, where expectations are subdued. For the past three years, purveyors of the global warming theory have urged the 194-nation body to hammer out a mechanism for establishing a $100 billion Green Climate Fund by 2020 so that “rich” countries can pay Third World nations to mitigate the supposed warming caused by carbon-dioxide emissions. However, a global economic slowdown has left the formerly wealthy United States and European Union strapped. The previous gatherings concluded with pledges but no cash. The current strategy seems to be to temper hopes and reach a funding agreement by 2015.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which laid the framework for a pact limiting man-made carbon dioxide expires at the end of this year with no new agreement signed to replace it. The United States as the world’s foremost industrialized nation never signed the original treaty, and newly emerging economic titans like China, India, South Africa and Brazil have rejected a new deal that would hamper their industrialization.
Still, the prophets of climatic doom are nothing if not resourceful. Three years ago, representatives chose frosty Copenhagen, Denmark, for the site of their annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Many were forced to flee from the talks over ways of preventing the earth from burning up as a snowstorm closed in. Since that debacle, conference organizers have wised up, choosing cities with balmly fall weather that reinforces their steamy storyline. In Doha, organizers of the 12-day conference have selected one of the world’s warmest spots, with an average daytime temperature in late November of 80 degrees Fahrenheit and a snowball’s chance for winter precipitation.
Confab attendees are gathering inside the Qatar National Convention Center, a gleaming edifice of glass and steel swathed in more than 37,000 square feet of solar panels, which Qatari hosts credit with offsetting more than 1,140 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions per year. Attendees at last year’s conference in Durban, South Africa, were encouraged to purchase $10 carbon credits to demonstrate their disdain for the gas that makes life on this planet possible. Thanks to the Doha conference location’s trendy features, this year’s guests won’t have to put those carbon credits on their expense accounts.
Further detracting from enthusiasm for green schemes is the fact that the global economic downturn is already reducing carbon-dioxide emissions among developed nations. In the United States where economic growth has been stalled for four years, output fell by 1.3 percent in 2011 to their lowest level in 20 years.
Sobering reality is an unwelcome guest wherever big-government ideologues gather at taxpayer expense to party while dreaming up methods for picking taxpayers’ pockets. Transferring wealth from producers to nonproducers will only impoverish both. Unless temperatures rise faster than economic growth, reality dictates that the U.N. Green Climate Fund be labeled unsustainable.
The Washington Times
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