Eco-Diplomacy, The Chicago Way

IBD Editorials
Posted 12/06/2010

Leaked embassy dispatches show an America bribing some and threatening others to get support for a climate change accord, revealing just how weak the case for such a treaty really is.

Sometimes it is worth seeing how the sausage — or in the case of climate change, the baloney — is made. While the WikiLeaks focus has been on the leaking of classified documents, the content of some of them is revealing.

David Carrington in Britain's Guardian shows how the U.S., after failing to get a successor treaty to the failed Kyoto Protocol in Denmark, bribed, threatened and cajoled nations to get support for a "Copenhagen accord" under which nations would pledge to meet individual goals in the absence of a binding one-size-fits-all treaty.

In one instance, Hillary Clinton's State Department, acting on a request from the CIA, sent a secret cable on July 31, 2009, seeking "human intelligence" from U.N. diplomats on which nations were being naughty and which were being nice on climate change and which might be making deals to circumvent Copenhagen goals.

We were essentially seeking dirt on nations opposed to the administration's approach to fighting alleged global warming, and we were not above blackmail to get nations to comply with our position or threats that involved the cutting off of financial assistance promised to poorer nations said to be impacted by climate change.

The accord promised $30 billion in aid to these nations impacted by climate change. A Feb. 2, 2009, cable from Ethiopia reports that in a meeting between U.S. Undersecretary of State Marcia Otero and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, the U.S. threatened to cut off assistance unless Ethiopia loudly backed the accord.

Zenawi, who heads the African Union's climate-change negotiations, agrees to support the accord but wonders why the threat was made after receiving personal assurances from President Obama that the promised aid would be delivered.

A Feb. 23, 2010, cable shows the Maldive Islands' ambassador-designate to the U.S., Abdul Ghafoor Mohamed, telling the U.S. deputy climate change envoy, Jonathan Pershing, to essentially "show me the money," asking for "tangible assistance" in exchange for support for the accord and noting that other nations would then see "the advantages to be gained by compliance."

The linkage between financial aid and support for the accord appeared again Feb. 11, when Pershing met with Connie Hedeguard, EU climate action commissioner, in Brussels. A cable shows her telling Pershing "the Aosis (Alliance of Small Island States) countries 'could be our best allies' given their need for financing."

Once again we are confronted with the one thing that is missing from this picture — sound science. Climate change hysteria has been generated as a means to redistribute the world's wealth and to provide a rationale for expanding government control over every aspect of our lives. But this climate Kabuki theater has little to do with saving the Earth from a real and imminent threat.

Confronted with a demonstrably cooling planet and a corrupt and fraudulent global climate-change bureaucracy, our government is reduced to bribes and coercion to cobble together a new agreement. In the absence of sound science and a rationale for committing global economic suicide, we are quite simply trying to make the world an offer it can't refuse.