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"Eric Gisin" wrote in message
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http://www.nationalpost.com/related/...tml?id=2305687

Peter Foster, Financial Post Published: Saturday, December 05, 2009

Even without the mounting scandal of Climategate,

lol.... the mounting of hot air atop conjecture... ;-)

the huge Copenhagen climate meeting that begins next week would represent
a festival of political hypocrisy, historical amnesia, economic lunacy and
cosmic irony.
Let's start with the irony. Barack Obama will be popping in on the way to
pick up his Nobel Peace Prize. Two years ago, that prize was won by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the research and policy
pinnacle for man-made global warming, and by Al Gore, climate alarmism's
most successful huckster. They won the accolade for promoting an
hysterical perspective that has set the nations of the world at each
other's throats.

The infighting is far from restricted to the international level. Take
Canada. Stephen Harper has, perhaps wisely, decided to attend an affair
that he, in his more frank pre-political days, described as, "A socialist
scheme to suck money out of wealth producing nations."

Although socialists take umbrage at being called socialists, nobody could
now deny the accuracy of Mr. Harper's observation. The draft treaty of
Copenhagen calls for up to $140-billion annually to be shipped to
developing nations for "clean development."

But Mr. Harper will also be in Copenhagen to counter the presence of
posturing provincial politicians. Representatives of Ontario and Quebec
are heading to Copenhagen to embarrass the Prime Minister by suggesting
that he should be "doing more." That is, doing more harm to the Canadian
economy.

The two provinces are also going to bolster the radical environmental
attack on the Alberta oil sands, on the basis that "relief " from
draconian emissions restrictions for Alberta will mean more "pain" for
themselves. And as if a sicker Alberta could somehow translate into a
healthier central Canada.

Copenhagen's much vaunted emission targets are hypocrisy on stilts. They
have been set, like those of the Kyoto agreement which Copenhagen is meant
to replace, by a process of fingers-crossed competitive fantasy.

A Canadian Liberal government ratified Canada's Kyoto commitment to reduce
emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2008-2012, mainly because the U.S.
had committed to a 5% reduction. More significantly, Canada did so without
any plan to achieve this target, which the country is above by perhaps
30%.

Mr. Harper and Environment Minister Jim Prentice have not announced how
they plan to achieve a cut in emissions by 20% by 2020 (3% below 1990
levels). That's because they have no way of reaching such a target without
huge, currently unimagined technological advances or economic depression.

Every developed nation is committing, yet again, to targets that are
unachievable. Meanwhile, China is promising a 40% reduction in carbon
intensity, a target it is already expected to meet under existing
conditions.

The developed nations' policy masoschists are hoping that capitalist
innovation will somehow bail them out. Or perhaps they are reflecting that
they will likely have shuffled off this mortal coil before their
irresponsibility and culpability becomes apparent.

From a strategic point of view, Canada's position is to coordinate its
climate policies with those of the U.S. to avoid green protectionism.
Which is where we get to the combination of policy lunacy and historical
amnesia.

The global economy remains in a precarious position. Analogies have been
drawn to the Great Depression, but if anything threatens a rerun of
collapsing output and rising unemployment it is the prospect of "carbon
tariffs" that could be every bit as damaging as the U.S. Smoot-Hawley
legislation of the 1930s.

Apart from the adverse effects of restricting trade, economic history
reveals other sure-fire policy failures, including "industrial strategy"
and, relatedly, trying to fund top-down Third World development by
redistributionist handouts. And yet these are the very policies at the
centre of the new global accord that would give unprecedented power to the
UN, one of the most corrupt and incompetent organizations on earth.

The UN's self-appointed "Eminent Persons," such as Maurice Strong and Gro
Harlem Brundtland, who put "sustainable development" on the map, have for
decades sought to link projections of environmental apocalypse to plans to
"help the poor."

But "robbing the rich" is not enough. They have to suffer too.

Slashing developed country emissions is to be achieved primarily by two
unworkable policies, one old and one relatively new. The first is
government promotion of "green" technologies, that is, "picking winners,"
a policy with a batting average of about zero. The second is a vast system
to "price" carbon by capping industrial emissions and then "trading"
permits to exceed those quotas. This will effectively criminalize economic
growth.

Cap and trade has been described as a "market-based" mechanism, but is in
fact a parody of a market, since it depends on credits created, divvied up
and handed out by UN bureaucrats. Think of oil-for-food to the power of
ten. Carbon trading in Europe has already proved an expensive and
pointless boondoggle.

The final example of suicidal hypocrisy in Copenhagen will be the presence
of so many corporate giants. One of the myths of the Climate Industry is
that there has been a huge program of scientific disinformation
masterminded by fossil fuel interests.

Recently, a tiny Calgary-based group called the Friends of Science
attracted the wrath of David Suzuki for daring to fund a radio campaign
calling for scientific debate on man-made global warming. Mr. Suzuki
claimed that Friends was a "front" for Big Oil. The claim is nonsense.

But while Green wrath is heaped on a group of Calgary Rotarians, last year
some of the world's biggest advertising companies and corporate
marketers -including Ogilvy & Mather and Coca Cola -- responded to a call
from UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to "grapple with the fate of the
planet."

The result has been a huge campaign spanning 50 countries and based on the
hokey catchword "Hopenhagen." Far from opposing the Copenhagen process and
the loss of wealth and freedom it implies, corporations, including many
big oil companies, have fallen meekly in line with the prevailing lunacy,
or been bullied into silence.

Climategate suggests that this inverse pyramid of activism and appeasement
has been based on a pinpoint of poisoned "science." The Danish capital
will be filled next week with those attempting to ignore that inconvenient
truth while committing earnestly to cripple the world's economy (later
rather than sooner) and promising to ship further hundreds of billions of
dollars to hold up the development of the world's poorest people.

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