See also this web site:-



http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/



http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/videos/



Beware the UN's Copenhagen plot,



Janet Albrechtsen



 October 28, 2009



SHAME on us all: on us in the media and on our politicians. Despite 
thousands of news reports, interviews, analyses, critiques and commentaries 
from journalists, what has the inquiring, intellectually sceptical media 
told us about the potential details of a Copenhagen treaty? And despite 
countless speeches, addresses, interviews, doorstops, moralising sermons 
from government ministers, pleas from Canberra for an outcome at Copenhagen, 
opposition criticism of government policy, what have our elected 
representatives told us about the potential details of a Copenhagen treaty?



With just over 40 days until more than 15,000 officials, advisers, 
diplomats, activists and journalists from more than 190 countries attend the 
UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, we know nothing. Nothing about a 
climate change treaty that the Rudd government is keen to sign and one that 
will bind this country for years to come.



Of course, there is no final treaty as yet. That is what they are hoping to 
finalise in Copenhagen. But there are 181 pages that make up the UN 
Framework Convention on Climate Change dated September 15, 2009: a rough 
draft of what could be signed in Copenhagen. And yet, not one member of the 
media or political class has bothered to inform us about its contents as an 
important clue to what may happen in Copenhagen. The shame of that state of 
affairs started to trickle in last week.





Emails started arriving telling me about a speech given by Christopher 
Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, at Bethel University in St 
Paul, Minnesota, on October 14. Monckton talked about something that no one 
has talked about in the lead-up to Copenhagen: the text of the draft 
Copenhagen treaty.



Even after Monckton's speech, most of the media has duly ignored the 
substance of what he said. You don't need me to find his St Paul address on 
YouTube. Interviewed on Monday morning by Alan Jones on Sydney radio station 
2GB, Monckton warned that the aim of the Copenhagen draft treaty was to set 
up a transnational government on a scale the world has never before seen. 
Listening to the interview, my teenage daughters asked me whether this was 
true.



So I read the draft treaty. The word government appears on page 18. Monckton 
says: "This is the first time I've ever seen any transnational treaty 
referring to a new body to be set up under that treaty as a government. But 
it's the powers that are going to be given to this entirely unelected 
government that are so frightening."



Monckton became aware of the extraordinary powers to be vested in this new 
world government only when a friend of his found an obscure UN website and 
hacked his way through several layers of complications before coming across 
a document that isn't even called the draft treaty. It's called a "note by 
the secretariat". The moment he saw it, he went public and said: "Look, this 
is an outrage ... they have kept the sheer scope of this treaty quiet."



Monckton says the aim of this new government is to have power to directly 
intervene in the financial, economic, tax and environmental affairs of all 
the nations that sign the Copenhagen treaty.



In a sense, countries that sign international treaties always cede powers to 
a UN body responsible for implementing the treaty obligations. But the 
difference is that we usually understand the details of the obligations and 
the power ceded.



Now read the 181-page draft treaty. It is impossible to fully understand the 
convoluted UN verbiage. Yet even those incomprehensible clauses point to 
some nasty surprises that no politician has told us about. For example, 
Monckton says the drafters want this new world government to have control 
over once free markets: the financial and trading markets of nation-states. 
"The sheer ambition of this new world government is enormous right from the 
start; that's even before it starts accreting powers to itself in the way 
that these entities inevitably always do," he says.



The reason for that power grab is clear enough from the draft treaty. Clause 
after complicated clause sets out the requirement that developed countries 
such as Australia pay their "adaptation debt" to developing countries. 
Clause 33 on page 39 says that by 2020 the scale of financial flows to 
support adaptation in developing countries must be at least $US67 billion 
($73bn), or in the range of $US70bn to $US140bn a year.



How developed countries will pay is far from clear. The draft text sets out 
various alternatives, including Option 7 on page 135, which provides for "a 
(global) levy of 2 per cent on international financial market (monetary) 
transactions to Annex I Parties". This means industrialised countries such 
as Australia, if we sign.



Monckton's warning to Americans that "in the next few weeks, unless you stop 
it, your President will sign your freedom, your democracy and your 
prosperity away forever" is colourful. But no more colourful than the 
language used by those who preach about the perils of climate change and the 
virtues of a hard-hitting Copenhagen treaty.



Put aside Monckton's comments. Ask yourself this: why has our government 
failed to explain the possible text of a treaty it wants Australia to sign? 
There has been no address from any Rudd minister to explain the draft 
treaty. No 3000-word essay from the thoughtful PM. No speech in parliament. 
No interview. No press release. Nothing.



Presumably the hard-working Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has read the 
181-page draft text. Presumably our central control and command PM has been 
briefed about the draft text. In Germany a few months ago, Kevin Rudd 
complained about the lack of "detailed programmatic specificity" going into 
the Copenhagen talks. Yet the draft text provides much detailed specificity 
about obligations on developed nations to transfer millions of dollars to 
developing countries under formulas to be set down by an unelected body. So 
why the silence? Are they hiding the details of this deal from us because 
most of the polls now suggest that action on climate change is becoming 
politically unpalatable?



And what explains the media's failure to report and analyse the only source 
document that offers any idea of what may happen in Copenhagen? Ignorance? 
Laziness? Stubborn adherence to the orthodox government line that a deal in 
Copenhagen is critical? An obsession with the politics of climate change 
rather than policy?



At least we have heard from Monckton. He told Jones there had already been a 
million hits on the link to his St Paul address. "So the message in America 
is now out ... Now you know about it and you need to spread the word."



Perhaps now our PM and our Climate Change Minister can spare a few moments 
to tell us about the details they know about but have so far chosen not to 
tell us about.