Politico has found an unlikely hero to thank for the Paris COP21 climate talks: that legendary global warming crusader George W Bush.
Top trolling, Politico!
Well, nearly.
Unfortunately, Politico’s snickering reporters can’t resist giving the game away with gleeful asides like: “That may come as a shock considering modern-day Republicans are bent on derailing the Paris negotiations and overturning pretty much all of Obama’s green agenda.”
No, actually it doesn’t come a shock. The shock would be if, for the first time since January 2001, the progressives finally found something for which George W Bush wasn’t to blame.
Anyway, according to Politico’s laboured, convoluted theory, George W Bush is to blame/thank for next week’s Paris talks because of what his negotiators agreed at an earlier UN climate conference in Bali in 2007. WARNING: the following “explanatory” paragraph is so boring and worthless I seriously don’t recommend you read it because you’ll want to gouge your own eyeballs out with a fork.
For the first time ever, countries of all shapes, sizes and economic means pledged to pony up commitments to address global warming. The agreement came with a very wonky sounding name — the Bali Action Plan — and it provided only a very rough outline of where future negotiations would need to go. But what the Bush administration helped create in Bali stands to this day because it eliminated perhaps the biggest political albatross blocking major action in the United States and around the world on international climate policy: Finally, fast-growing developing countries like China, Brazil, India and South Africa were on record saying they would submit cleanup plans of their own.
Pathetic. Here’s what actually happened at that Bali conference in 2007.
It was attended by 15,000 politicians and activists from 180 countries, most of whom — led by Al Gore, fresh from picking up his Nobel peace prize in Norway — saw it as their main purpose to jeer and whine at the US for having failed to ratify the Kyoto protocol ten years before.
In Bali, the US position remained much as it had been at Kyoto — that the US would not sign an agreement to cut its emissions unless fast-growing economies like India and China agreed to do likewise.
Eventually, under enormous pressure, the US negotiators reached a classic fudge: no mandatory cuts would be agreed — but there would be more conferences in the future.
In other words, with a gun held to their head by 179 UN member states, the US negotiators — not George W Bush, who didn’t turn up — reluctantly took the line of least resistance and agreed to kick the can down the road.
Even though nothing was agreed, the environmentalists still claimed Bali as a tremendous victory.
As Christopher Booker reports in his book The Real Global Warming Disaster, here is how the leader of the EU negotiating team, Humberto Rosa, responded.
“It is exactly what we wanted. We are very pleased,” Rosa said. “We will now have two tremendously demanding years, starting in January. Many meetings, many discussions, many people passing hours doing many things.”
If you want to understand the real meaning of the COP21 talks in Paris, all you have to do is read that sentence over and over again.
It is not about climate. It is not about the environment. It is not about global justice.
What the Paris climate talks are about is what all the previous climate talks in locations like Rio, Cancun and Copenhagen have been about:
Rent-seeking crony capitalists in private jets, shyster politicians in limos, world-government bureaucrats in five-star hotels, climate activists on all expenses jaunts lavishly funded by their campaigning NGOs — all conspiring to ensure that the gravy train keeps trundling on and on via a succession of glamorous resorts and expensive capital cities all over the world.
Oh, and guess where the next climate summit is going to be held in 2016.
Marrakesh, arguably the prettiest tourist destination, in sunny Morocco, of course!
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