$76 trillion should just about cover the cost of going green

July 18, 2011

LONDON, UK, July 18, 2011/ Troy Media/ – Last time I was there, UN HQ was still based on New York’s east-side. As of July 5, when it published its innocuous sounding World Economic and Social Survey 2011, it seems there is increasing evidence it may have floated away on the East River, took a left at Spielberg’s Dreamworks studios and is now circling Florida Disneyworld.

According to the UN’s report and press release (these actually published by their Geneva Office), “humankind” needs to stump up around $76 trillion – that’s trillion – over the next 40 years if the world is to achieve the Global Bureaucracy-led “great green technological transformation”.

A tripling in cost in just two years

Just two years ago the “going green” global cost could be achieved for around $600 billion a year over the next decade. That cost appears to have more than tripled. According to the report, what the world urgently needs is a “scaling up of clean energy technologies” to, among other things, achieve a “technological overhaul . . . on the scale of the first industrial revolution”. Not one led by individual capitalistic innovation and brilliance mind you: this one will be led by strategic UN planning. Now there’s a good reason we never see strategic” and “UN planning” in the same sentence, as we can see from a closer look at assertions in the survey.

When you get to the nitty-gritty of the report, the full panoply UN-speak comes into its own. What the authors mean by “going green” is not just more investment in “clean energy”. The move will, it claims, help put an “end to poverty” (what, all of it?), world hunger, the “catastrophic impacts of climate change” (which are?) and “environmental degradation” (whatever that is). Eradicating world hunger and poverty have been rolled into the fight against climate change. We learn that “about 40 per cent of humanity, or 2.7 billion people, rely on traditional biomass, such as wood, dung and charcoal, for their energy needs. And 20 per cent have no electricity, mainly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.” The report’s authors demand, “much greater economic progress” in the war on climate change which, it is asserted, will cure these historic ills.

But just as you can’t keep a good man down, neither can you keep a bad socialist bureaucracy from trying to spend a whole lotta someone else’s money. What the UN report does is set the agenda for the UN’s 2012 ‘jet-fest’ Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. Rob Vos, lead author of the report, states, “Business as usual is not an option.” Vos isn’t referring to a wealth of UN and political dignitaries flying down to Rio for a spot of R ‘n R at the five-star hotels, you understand. Vos means that the rest of the world just can’t go on jetting around emitting tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere and taking vacations, especially to long haul destinations such as, well, Rio, for instance.

Though the report demands a push towards the “green economy,” it acknowledges there is no actual agreed definition as to what it is. Even so, the “green economy” is billed grandiosely as “the new paradigm” “based on the conviction that the benefits of investing in environmental sustainability outweigh the cost of not doing so.” De-coded: there ought to be no ‘debt ceiling’ consideration here, just hand over the greenbacks and we’ll get the job done. Who’s going to pick up the tab? “One half,” says the report “would have to be realized in developing countries.” In case you forgot, that’s a mere $38 trillion in donations to go to the developing world.

And, just for good measure, if emissions targets cannot be met, then “caps on energy consumption . . . may be necessary” which, the report admits, “may not be very appealing”. True enough. Especially to the millions condemned to fuel poverty and likely to die of cold as a direct result.

Oh, the irony

There is a major irony here. If eradicating world hunger and poverty were genuine UN’s goals, then the same coal-fired, cheap-electricity-generating first industrial revolution would do for “South Asia” and “sub-Saharan Africa” what it did for the rest of the world. But that solution would require the UN’s unelected oligarchy to butt out, something we all know is not gonna happen.

Not when the UN perceives a unique opportunity to ride the populist “clean-energy” wave and collect a cool $76 trillion+ to fund its enhanced status as a one world ‘wind-assisted’ government, which is something the UN’s Agenda 21 – founded at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also held in Rio – which states that, no matter what the real science on climate change is, we should spend the cash to fight it ‘just in case’.

Just like the Eurocrat plan to force non-European airlines to submit to regulatory EU carbon emission penalties, the UN’s green masterplan won’t fly either.

Troy Media correspondent Peter Glover is based in the UK, covering the issues from a European perspective.