Rio Summit: Enviros Want $100 Billion from US for Climate Fund

I walk through the deliberations to date as I learned of them through similar documents and details provided me by someone on the inside in my current piece for the Federalist Society’s Engage magazine.

I’m now going through this deathless tract, which generally reads like it could have been obtained at a fraction of the cost by throwing a bag of weed and ream of paper into most college dorms on a Friday night, if with more Dorito stains on the pages and of course a much smaller carbon footprint (these negotiating sessions have been going on several times a year all over the world).

Then I got down past the global warming and sustainability cant, past the “gender equality and women’s empowerment” — you may have to remind yourself, when reading your copy, that this is about addressing an apparently (as always) urgent environmental crisis — to the global governance and financing sections (beginning on p. 71 of 81).

There’s this call on p. 72 for agreement that the richest developed countries (ummm….Germany?) “to achieve the target of 0.7 percent of gross national product for official development assistance to developing countries by 2015.”

My desktop calculator says that 0.7% of a $14.64 trillion GNP (2010) is $102,480,000,000. From the U.S. Every year. Going up if we ever grow the economy again. That’s a hundred billion, plus.

A page later they clear their throats and get around to asking for debt cancellation too. I mean, while we’re on the subject. Oh, and the next page reminds us that the “UN development system” is going to wet its beak, too, you know, to manage the funds (they certainly wouldn’t be skimming a taste off the top!)

Then there’s this bit about recipient countries having a difficult go of things what with the uncertainty of the timing and quantities of commitments so, really, do please try and firm things up, and early. 

Just wait til they sit in the big-boy chair, to see what sort of uncertainties come when you have to make your own way.

If you’ve read my Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, this won’t be that much of a surprise — heck, they used to demand 1% — but this conference is considered the real deal, the Big Kahuna, the Ayatollah of Wealth Transferola. It is to follow on our prior “politically binding commitment” to be the main sugar daddy for a $100 billion annual climate fund. Now they’ve upped things a bit.

That’s a bold call in the face of serial scandals by the UN and the environmentalist industry, and under somewhat changed circumstances than past demands for massive wealth transfers. As I noted in Red Hot Lies, “reparations” have increasingly been put on the table as the rationale for this outrageous global grab at socializing the world’s haves to give to kleptocrats among the have-nots (who, despite all the the Rio-style rhetoric, are not poor because of us, but because of their own failures to impose the rule of law, ensure a transparent judiciary, respect property rights and other basics of a free and prosperous society).

But President Obama has decided against attending this 20th anniversary celebration of something that the media were apoplectic about President George H. W. Bush possibly not attending. The press are a little more forgiving right now, knowing that the “Solyndra Summit” is not what their guy needs at the moment.

But, still, how do they avoid discussions of an agreement whereby we commit to give away more than one hundred beeellion dollars? We’ll see.