The UN Game
The UN is a game with many players.
The UN makes money by convincing member nations that the costs of funding the UN are less than the costs of not funding it.
The UN wants to grow as large as possible, like any organization or organism or rear end.
The UN is already very large. Its last budget was $5.4 billion, and that represented a 2.9 percent reduction from the previous two years. Remember, organisms want to grow, not shrink.
So the UN’s purpose in the COP-21 anthropogenic global warming summit in Paris was quite simple: convince member nations to increase their payments to the UN by convincing them that not growing the UN would cost more.
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Other players, like China and India, had a different objective. They use the UN to hamstring other players.
What emerged was a voluntary agreement to increase funding to the UN and handicap mature economies like the US. Nothing more. The UN convinced all but two countries that growing the UN is in their best interest. Those two countries are China and India–the two leading producers of greenhouse gases in the world.
While China and India may have signed the agreement, they negotiated exemptions from the agreement. In other words, the agreement puts all of China’s and India’s rivals at a strategic disadvantage.
China and India expect their economies to grow faster than the rest of the world’s economies over the next 10 years. They can afford to pay protection money to the UN. Advanced economies, like the United States, enter into a strategic disadvantage. Our economy will be lucky to see 2 percent annual growth anytime in the next 50 years. The COP agreement was designed specifically to handicap advanced economies like ours to the benefit of growing economies like China’s.
The “science” of global warming is simply a convenient lever to pressure advanced economies to self-limit future growth. Pictures of polar bears on ice floes get the kiddies all worked up while pictures of Beijing blinded by smog do not.
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And that’s how the game is played. COP-21 was never about science or global warming or pollution. It was about funding the UN to rig the game to favor the world’s fastest-growing economies by handicapping the world’s largest but stagnant economies. It’s all about money.
The next administration and Congress will have an opportunity to walk away from this rigged game, and they should.