Lorrie Goldstein has heard it once too often. From the Toronto Sun:
This December, world leaders will gather in Denmark to draft a successor agreement to the Kyoto Accord.
This means you’ll be hearing increasing hysteria this fall — hard to imagine, I know — from all the usual “green” suspects about how we have only months left to save the planet from man-made global warming.
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon warned last week we have just “four months” — until Copenhagen — “to secure the future of our planet” from runaway climate change, or face environmental Armageddon.
Leading up to Copenhagen, “environmental” journalists will breathlessly report the latest doomsday predictions and how the Earth’s only hope lies with a post-Kyoto accord, the UN and U. S. President Barack Obama.
In Canada, there will be predictable outrage about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s lack of concern, even though his commitment to lower greenhouse-gas emissions is essentially the same as Obama’s.
In any event, we’ll all be warned to prepare for the worst.
Then, assuming this Kyoto meeting resembles past ones, at the eleventh hour, there will suddenly be reports of renewed hope in Copenhagen, of tense, round-the-clock negotiations, of a new spirt of urgency as world leaders, spurred on by noble environmentalists, realize the enormity of what’s at stake.
Finally, after several extended (and artificial) deadlines, there will, miraculously, emerge a successor deal to Kyoto that, according to the hype, “may well save the planet,” as Canadian Green Party Leader Elizabeth May announced at the end of a similar, now-forgotten meeting in Montreal in 2005 chaired by Stephane Dion.
The thing to remember about all this is that it will be nonsense. A fantasy.
“Success” in Copenhagen won’t be defined by lowering greenhouse-gas emissions. It will be defined by whether the developed world — including Canada — bribes the developing world — led by China and India — with sufficient billions of our money, to purportedly reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions emissions, so that participants emerge declaring that a deal to “save the planet” has been reached.
But it won’t lower emissions. All it will do is make the world safer for hedge fund managers and energy companies as they rake in undeserved profits in the global “cap and trade” market about to be unleashed on us all.
Read the rest here.