Our Flawed Psychology

What if we are doomed to fail to build peace, simply because humans aren't up to the job?

The human species evolved on the plains of Africa, probably in response to climate change. A basic principle of evolution is that organisms are not evolved to be good, they are evolved to be 'good enough'. Humans have to balance a comparatively gigantic head on top of a vertical spine: humans get a lot of back trouble. And who knows if woodpeckers get a lot of headaches?

I think there is a major defect in human psychology: we are not designed to effectively discover or believe truth if it goes against our community's social beliefs. That must have worked once. It makes no difference to evolution if once, on the African plains, our ancestors thought the tooth fairy creates lightning. They didn't have any means of making effective use of the truth, and the group cohesiveness must have had its own advantages. But today, that capacity for self-delusion is putting us and our planet at risk.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is the global warming scare. It can be proved, as near to conclusively as anything depending on observation and scientific hypotheses can ever be, that humans are not responsible for dangerous or unusual planetary warming, and yet it has become compulsory for mainstream media, government, etc., to pretend that we are in imminent danger and have only a few years to act (or sometimes, to say we are already too late). Major western governments are passing legislation that will cripple their economies, based on this fiction. When people are alone, such as when answering an anonymous survey, they now show only minority belief in this dangerous fallacy; but when they are put in front of a television camera, or asked to speak for an important organisation, or publish an academic paper, they typically include the compulsory nod to the group delusion. This is clear to those who, for whatever reason, failed to succumb to this particular mass belief - but then perhaps they have fallen prey to a different one? Are any of us immune?

And we have other problems: we are not perfectly altruistic, for one, and perhaps we shouldn't be.

The designers of the United States Constitution understood the fallibility of human nature very well, and deliberately spread power in the hope that, if one branch went bad, another branch would keep the rot in check. The legislature makes law, the judiciary can veto unconstitutional laws, but cannot pass positive laws themselves. The executive acts day to day, but cannot rule without law. And the people have specific rights reserved to themselves. At least that is the theory; like all human devices, it works somewhat, but has problems in practice.

On the other hand, the belief in human perfection is toxic. We are not infallible, not one of us, not any holy book, not any person, and whenever we act as if we are, or can be, we create misery. But to answer my starting question - are we doomed at the outset? - no, I do not believe we are, but I do think we have to keep our limits firmly in mind and act accordingly. In building a program for lasting peace, we must allow for our own inner defects. We need to call ourselves to account and call our collective beliefs to account. We cannot conduct 'business as usual'.

The False Religion

The insanity that is ruining our lives

As I write elsewhere [1], it is a sad fact about ourselves (the human species, that is) that we have some glaring problems in our ability to think clearly. One consequence of this for us today is that the world is in the power of a false religion, which is nullifying every attempt to generate peace, happiness, and even safety for life on Earth.

I need to be very clear what I am saying here. I am not saying that there is one true religion, that this or that religious group has the answers, that Satan is controlling the world, or any other such idea. I'll leave those discussions for others.

But whether I like it or not, there are certain groups of ideas that keep on re-emerging, that do untold damage, that more or less make the ones most enthralled by them incapable of rational thought or peaceful discussion, and which are secular.

By 'secular', I do not mean atheistic (although it often is). I mean that belief in a diety is not an inherent part of what makes the false religion false. Furthermore, plenty of religious people believe in the false religion, and the same ideas have religious versions; but by the phrase "The false religion", I mean a specific, relatively modern collection of beliefs. However, the ideas themselves can take many forms and they are just as dangerous wherever and however they take form.

The false religion has no formal book of scripture. It has no official priests, although certain people from time to time gain the unofficial recognition that priests obtain in a formal church. There is no membership list. What is more, all of us are in danger of accepting one or more of the false religion's doctrines without even being aware of it, because the false religion is now in charge and its doctrines are close to compulsory. "None may buy or sell without the mark of the beast." (I add that, not because I believe in the literalist religious idea that the bible is infallibly true - I do not - but because the pattern of emotional malfunctions leading to belief in the false religion is a psychological universal, and insightful souls throughout history have given us warnings about it.)

I describe the characteristics of the modern version of the false religion here. [2] It is fairly easy to see that I am describing a cloud of beliefs centred around political correctness, although it is not exactly that nor limited specifically to it.

We must also remember that this is only one manifestation of the psychology that seems to generate damaging mass movements. Previous ages have seen their share; almost every beautiful religion has had misformations that promote intolerance, hatred, and war instead of love, peace, happiness, and understanding. Similar basic psychological mechanisms are at work, no matter the form in which the belief system crystallises: for example the tendency to tell lies in a 'good cause'. Whereas the present-day environmental movement is telling huge whoppers to persuade us that dangerous man-made global warming is underway, one religious version of the false religion has put together an entire so-called 'science', a massive edifice of lies to persuade us that the world was created six thousand years ago instead of over four billion.

The deep motivation here is not evil (although some of the ringleaders of each of these ideologies are undoubted scoundrels). The motivation is an incomplete understanding of the good (naturally, because we humans are imperfect, limited beings like any other). The good, as it is imperfectly understood, seems to powerfully justify itself by any means. Who doesn't want everyone to be 'saved'? Or who doesn't want the world to be saved from overheating that would kill millions? So if we have to tell lies or play tricks or send people to jail or even burn them at the stake, surely the end justifies the means? Or so the reasoning (often unconscious) goes.

This is a slippery slope in the mind, slowly but surely leading one onwards to accepting ever greater evil in pursuit of the 'good' as it is envisaged by the believer. (I think the Principle of Goodness has a place here as an antidote to some of this trouble. If we accept that it is simply wrong to ever harm the innocent, for whatever reason, we will be less tempted to give in to committing a wrong in a good cause.)

I use the phrase 'the false religion' to refer to the modern 'politically-correct' pseudo-liberalism in particular, but also to refer to its psychological equivalents built around other specific belief systems. The false religion and other intolerant movements, religious, secular, atheistic, political, social, or whatever, unfortunately satisfy deep needs in our psychology:

• needs to belong and have a community of like-minded friends;
• to feel worthwhile ("I am doing something about the environment.");
• to defend ourselves against the knowledge that we are not all-powerful - it is a painful thing to admit that the planet Earth has such unimaginable power that oceans can rise and cities can be flooded no matter what we do - it is so much better to imagine that we can control it with sacrifices to the rain god, or sacrifices to cap and trade 'carbon pollution' legislation;
• in Jungian terms, there is an unhealthy phenomenon of expansion of the ego: one knows the truth, knows the true ideology or religion, and one is so sure of it that anyone who disagrees must be evil (one need look no further than Hollywood for a case study in absolute certitude in every one of the current politically correct beliefs).

The result is that there is overwhelming emotional power behind the false religion (in all its variants); the true believer is so committed that any non-believer is anathema. The leftist treatment of George W. Bush is a classic case-in-point. Yes, he is a flawed man - like all of us - who had a deeply flawed program; but I predict that future generations who are free of today's biases will be utterly perplexed by the sheer viciousness and hatred to which he is subjected by the left. This kind of hatred goes way beyond any normal emotional reaction to a scoundrel. A Google search for "George W Bush evil" produces more than twice the hits for "Stalin evil" and over three times the hits for "Hitler evil"!

This level of emotion is dangerous, for it is so extreme that rational thought is not possible; arguing with a believer is actually physically dangerous, and as our societies fall increasingly under their power, we can expect ever-greater encroachments upon our freedoms, our freedom, our livelihood, and even our lives. We teeter upon the precipice of a new dark age.

The Trouble with Ideologies

It may be that some of the most important aspects of peace are quite invisible.

I believe that one of them is the attitude of mind by which we approach the universe, the world, other humans, and animals and the environment. Do we have a pre-cooked 'solution', or 'answer' that will explain everything or fix everything, or which is responsible for all the evil in the world? That's putting it a bit strongly, maybe, and for sure lots of people take their ideologies with a large grain of salt, but in its core, that is the essence of an ideology. There are lots of them: communism, Marxism, extremist religions, socialism, feminism, nazism, racism, environmentalism, and so on.

The other approach is to just judge reality as best as we can with the mental tools available - and to get the best tools! Adopt the scientific attitude, test claims against evidence, incorporate caring and compassion so that our rationality doesn't get disconnected from real human beings, educate ourselves in the widest sense, not merely as in getting a piece of paper to hang on the wall (but do that too) - in other words, love truth and use it to better ourselves and others.

The problem is that this program is just too pedestrian, too boring. It is much more exciting to think that one is 'subverting' all the cozy but misguided preconceptions of 'The Establishment', to believe in a daring 'solution' to all the world's troubles, so much more fun to proudly cheer the Great Leader who sees beyond the mundane world. But real people, and the real animals who share our planet, live lives filled with ordinary concerns - finding a soulmate, bringing up children, making a decent and happy life. The heroic 'grand experiment', the deconstruction, the subversion, the great leader, the grand plan, these things poison the ordinary decent lives most of us want to lead.

And great ideologies clash - with each other, and with folk who merely wish to be left alone - and they prevent all of us finding peace.

The Warmist Cult

Piers Corbin is the UK weather man who correctly forecasted this year's horrendous winter in the UK, whilst the official MET office simply added one more 'warm' failed prediction to their long list of embarrassments. He has had some incisive thoughts [3] on the phenomenon of climate change as a bad religion, while his success where others have failed gives him the credibility to say it. From the linked article:

The really disturbing thing is the Warmists (aka Climate Changers) are totally arrogant, deluded and self righteous; and have become a dangerous cult that propagates falsity and anti-science.

I think what we have is a kind of warmist religious cult which doesn't exactly have a cult leader (like various past cults in the 70s and 80s, or Stalin or Hitler or Mao) - although Monbiot would make quite a good 'little Stalin' and James Lovelock probably believes he is 'it' - but in the same way as a cult the followers turn reality on its head to justify their ends.

Their ends in this case being reducing CO2 and various often very seriously misguided somehow linked do-gooding projects taken from a sort of a la carte menu of whatever you like ranging from using old tin cans (no prob but I don't need a religion to do that), burning food (biofuels), Carbon trading and so on to paying Chinese ex peasants to build prayer wheel avenues (wind farms) on our lands and seas at our expense.

The modern climate change cult is no less of a cult because there is not a single leader but in fact it's nature enables many self-appointed 'community' leaders to emerge ranging from little dictators of the Maldives to well-heeled worthless articulate trash who scale the walls of Power stations and Parliament at the bec and call of the BBC but can't back up their eloquence with a jot of science. Note that Islam - which has no single leader but loads of sect leaders - is no less effective at motivating fanatics than the Catholic Church with its ONE leader.

If you have ever followed what happens in cults - good one day becomes bad the next and vice versa AND THE FOLLOWERS BLINDLY FOLLOW - recall Mao's cultural revolution or Stalin's pact with Hitler or the splits and expulsions in various weird cults and Revolutionary groups in the 70's and 80s.

In the Climate-Change/Green/Warmist cult we have seen astounding U-turns but still they continue (because it's political, a cult and money talks) but look:-

• Nuclear Power changed from Bad to Good
• Global Warming changed to Climate Change which now means cooling.
• The application of scientific observations changed to data fraud on a world scale.
• Feeding the world changed to burning food to save the planet.
• "You will see no more snow in the UK by the end of this decade" changed to "Cooling is warming".
• 'Tax The rich' changed to 'let the rich get richer through carbon trading' and TAX the poor through trebling of energy prices.
• Proper experimental demonstration of scientific principles (involving CO2) changed into pseudo-scientific conjuring tricks to propagate falsity.
• Let children learn 'all sides' in schools changed to brainwashing them to death with Al Gores lies and exhort them to make their parents 'go green' (horrifically like the role played by the Hitler Youth and the Young Pioneers in the USSR where children turned in 'evidence' against their parents).

And so it goes on and on and on (like this winter).

But what to do? We have to relentlessly expose the GWers lies at every level. However no cults end until: internal contradictions become explosive and taxes/costs become unacceptably high and people die unnecessarily as a direct consequence of cult ideology.

ALL these factors together were apparent in the ending of the cults listed above and all are now boiling up in the GWers-Climate-Change cult including people being killed as a consequence of cult ideology - eg food shortages from food burning - biofuels, and deaths on unsalted roads as a direct result of the religious adherence to warmist failed forecasts (which for back testing relied on University of East Anglia fraudulent data) in the UK and indeed the whole of Europe.

Will the Governments of Scotland and UK put the need to reduce misery and save lives before this cult ideology?
It could happen, but only if WE stand up to them.

Thanks, Piers

Your Freedom and Welfare at Risk at Cancun

The following message is from Viscount Monckton about the evil doings at the pretend 'climate' conference at Cancun. Every person on Earth who values his or her freedom, safety, and economic well-being needs to take this message firmly on board.

I have previously written [4] about a new dark age that might soon engulf us. Germans in the early 1930s wrote terrible predictions about the future if Hitler came to power, and they were roundly and soundly ridiculed by the 'smart thinkers' in Germany at the time - many of whom lived (or didn't live!) to regret their carelessness in ignoring the warnings. Such an evil time is upon us now. Here is Christopher Monckton's opinion, from WUWT [5]:

The abdication of the West

From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, Cancun, Mexico, Dec 9th, 2010

I usually add some gentle humor to these reports. Not today. Read this and weep. Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West. The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself. No one in the mainstream media will tell you this, not so much because they do not see as because they do not bl**dy care.

The 33-page Note (FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/CRP.2) by the Chairman of the “Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Co-operative Action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”, entitled Possible elements of the outcome, reveals all. Or, rather, it reveals nothing, unless one understands what the complex, obscure jargon means. All UNFCCC documents at the Cancun conference, specifically including Possible elements of the outcome, are drafted with what is called “transparent impenetrability”. The intention is that the documents should not be understood, but that later we shall be told they were in the public domain all the time, so what are we complaining about?

Since the Chairman’s note is very long, I shall summarize the main points:

Finance: Western countries will jointly provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to an unnamed new UN Fund. To keep this sum up with GDP growth, the West may commit itself to pay 1.5% of GDP to the UN each year. That is more than twice the 0.7% of GDP that the UN has recommended the West to pay in foreign aid for the past half century. Several hundred of the provisions in the Chairman’s note will impose huge financial costs on the nations of the West.

The world-government Secretariat: In all but name, the UN Convention’s Secretariat will become a world government directly controlling hundreds of global, supranational, regional, national and sub-national bureaucracies. It will receive the vast sum of taxpayers’ money ostensibly paid by the West to the Third World for adaptation to the supposed adverse consequences of imagined (and imaginary) “global warming”.

Bureaucracy: Hundreds of new interlocking bureaucracies answerable to the world-government Secretariat will vastly extend its power and reach. In an explicit mirroring of the European Union’s method of enforcing the will of its unelected Kommissars on the groaning peoples of that benighted continent, the civil servants of nation states will come to see themselves as servants of the greater empire of the Secretariat, carrying out its ukases and diktats whatever the will of the nation states’ governments.

Many of the new bureaucracies are disguised as “capacity-building in developing countries”. This has nothing to do with growing the economies or industries of poorer nations. It turns out to mean the installation of hundreds of bureaucratic offices answerable to the Secretariat in numerous countries around the world. Who pays? You do, gentle taxpayer.

Babylon, Byzantium, the later Ottoman Empire, the formidable bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, the vast empire of 27,000 paper-shufflers at the European Union: add all of these together and multiply by 100 and you still do not reach the sheer size, cost, power and reach of these new subsidiaries of the Secretariat.

In addition to multiple new bureaucracies in every one of the 193 states parties to the Convention, there will be an Adaptation Framework Body, a Least Developed Countries’ Adaptation Planning Body, an Adaptation Committee, Regional Network Centers, an International Center to Enhance Adaptation Research, National Adaptation Institutions, a Body to Clarify Assumptins and Conditions in National Greenhouse-Gas Emission Reductions Pledges, a Negotiating Body for an Overall Level of Ambition for Aggregate Emission Reductions and Individual Targets, an Office to Revise Guidelines for National Communications, a Multilateral Communications Process Office, a Body for the Process to Develop Modalities and Guidelines for the Compliance Process, a Registry of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions by Developed Countries, a Body to Supervise the Process for Understanding Diversity of Mitigation Actions Submitted and Support Needed, a Body to Develop Modalities for the Registry of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions, an Office of International Consultation and Analysis; an Office to Conduct a Work Program for Development of Various Modalities and Guidelines; a network of Developing Countries’ National Forest Strategy Action Plan Offices; a network of National Forest Reference Emission Level And/Or Forest Reference Level Bodies; a network of National Forest Monitoring Systems; an Office of the Work Program on Agriculture to Enhance the Implementation of Article 4, Paragraph 1(c) of the Convention Taking Into Account Paragraph 31; one or more Mechanisms to Establish a Market-Based Approach to Enhance the Cost-Effectiveness Of And To Promote Mitigation Actions; a Forum on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures; a Work Program Office to Address the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures; a Body to Review the Needs of Developing Countries for Financial Resources to Address Climate Change and Identify Options for Mobilization of Those Resources; a Fund in Addition to the Copenhagen Green Fund; an Interim Secretariat for the Design Phase of the New Fund; a New Body to Assist the Conference of the Parties in Exercising its Functions with respect to the Financial Mechanism; a Body to Launch a Process to Further Define the Roles and Functions of the New Body to Assist the Conference of the Parties in Exercising its Functions with respect to the Financial Mechanism; a Technology Executive Committee; a Climate Technology Center and Network; a Network of National, Regional, Sectoral and International Technology Centers, Networks, Organization and Initiatives; Twinning Centers for Promotion of North-South, South-South and Triangular Partnerships with a View to Encouraging Co-operative Research and Development; an Expert Workshop on the Operational Modalities of the Technology Mechanism; an International Insurance Facility; a Work Program Body for Policy Approaches and Positive Incentives on Issues Relating to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries; a Body to Implement a Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures; and a Body to Develop Modalities for the Operationalization of the Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures.

The world government’s powers: The Secretariat will have the power not merely to invite nation states to perform their obligations under the climate-change Convention, but to compel them to do so. Nation states are to be ordered to collect, compile and submit vast quantities of information, in a manner and form to be specified by the secretariat and its growing army of subsidiary bodies. Between them, they will be given new powers to verify the information, to review it and, on the basis of that review, to tell nation states what they can and cannot do.

Continuous expansion: The verb “enhance”, in its various forms, occurs at least 28 times in the Chairman’s note, Similar verbs, such as “strengthen” and “extend”, and adjectives such as “scaled-up”, “new” and “additional”, are also frequently deployed, particularly in relation to funding at the expense of Western taxpayers. If all of the “enhancements” proposed in the note were carried out, the cost would comfortably exceed the annual $100 billion (or, for that matter, the 1.5% of GDP) that the note mentions as the cost to the West over the coming decade.

Intellectual property in inventions: Holders of patents, particularly in fields related to “global warming” and its mitigation, will be obliged to transfer the benefits of their inventiveness to developing countries without payment of royalties. This is nowhere explicitly stated in the Chairman’s note, but the transfer of technology is mentioned about 20 times in the draft, suggesting that the intention is still to carry out the explicit provision in the defunct Copenhagen Treaty draft of 15 September 2009 to this effect.

Insurance: The Secretariat proposes, in effect, to interfere so greatly in the operation of the worldwide insurance market that it will cease to be a free market, with the usual severely adverse consequences to everyone in that market.

The free market: The failed Copenhagen Treaty draft stipulated that the “government” that would be established would have the power to set the rules of all formerly free markets. There would be no such thing as free markets any more. In Cancun, the Chairman’s note merely says that various “market mechanisms” may be exploited by the Secretariat and by the parties to the Convention: but references to these “market mechanisms” are frequent enough to suggest that the intention remains to stamp out free markets worldwide.

Knowledge is power: The Chairman’s note contains numerous references to a multitude of new as well as existing obligations on nation states to provide information to the Secretariat, in a form and manner which it will dictate. The hand of the EU is very visible here.

It grabbed power from the member-states in four stages: first, acting merely as a secretariat to ensure stable supplies of coal and steel to rebuild Europe after the Second World War; then as a registry requiring member states to supply it with ever more information; then as a review body determining on the basis of the information supplied by the member states whether they were complying with their obligations on the ever-lengthier and more complex body of European treaties; and finally as the ultimate law-making authority, to which all elected parliaments, explicitly including the European “Parliament”, were and are subject. Under the Cancun propsoals, the Secretariat is following the path that the plague of EU officials here have no doubt eagerly advised it to follow. It is now taking numerous powers not merely to require information from nation states but to hold them to account for their supposed international obligations under the climate-change Convention on the basis of the information the nations are now to be compelled to supply.

Propaganda: The Chairman’s note contains several mentions of the notion that the peoples of the world need to be told more about climate change. Here, too, there is a parallel with the EU, which administers a propaganda fund of some $250 million a year purely to advertise its own wonderfulness to an increasingly sceptical population. The IPCC already spends millions every year with PR agencies, asking them to find new ways of making its blood-curdling message more widely understood and feared among ordinary people. The Secretariat already has the advantage of an uncritical, acquiescent, scientifically illiterate, economically innumerate and just plain dumb news media: now it will have a propaganda fund to play with as well.

Damage caused by The Process: At the insistence of sensible nation states such as the United States, the Czech Republic, Japan, Canada, and Italy, the Cancun outcome acknowledges that The Process is causing, and will cause, considerable economic damage, delicately described in the Chairman’s note as “unintended side-effects of implementing climate-change response measures”. The solution? Consideration of the catastrophic economic consequences of the Secretariat’s heroically lunatic decisions will fall under the control of – yup – the Secretariat. Admire its sheer gall.

Damage to world trade: As the power, wealth and reach of the Secretariat grow, it finds itself rubbing uncomfortably up against other supranational organizations. In particular, the World Trade Organization has been getting antsy about the numerous aspects of the Secretariat’s proposals that constitute restrictions on international trade. At several points, the Chairman’s note expresses the “decision” – in fact, no more than an opinion and a questionable one at that – that the Secretariat’s policies are not restrictive of trade.

The Canute provision: The conference will reaffirm the decision of its predecessor in Copenhagen this time last year “to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”, just like that. In fact, temperature in central England, and by implication globally, rose 2.2 Celsius in the 40 years 1695-1735, as the Sun began to recover from its 11,400-year activity minimum, and rose again by 0.74 C in the 20^th century. There has been no warming in the 21^st century, but we are already well over 2 Celsius degrees above pre-industrial levels. The Canute provision, as some delegates have dubbed it (after the Danish king of early England who famously taught his courtiers the limitations of his power and, a fortiori, theirs when he set up his throne on the beach and commanded sea level not to rise, whereupon the tide came in as usual and wet the royal feet), shows the disconnect between The Process and reality.

Omissions: There are several highly-significant omissions, which jointly and severally establish that the central intent of The Process no longer has anything to do with the climate, if it ever had. The objective is greatly to empower and still more greatly to enrich the international classe politique at the expense of the peoples of the West, using the climate as a pretext, so as to copy the European Union by installing in perpetuity what some delegates here are calling “transnational perma-Socialism” beyond the reach or recall of any electorate. Here are the key omissions:

• The science: The question whether any of this vast expansion of supranational power is scientifically necessary is not addressed. Instead, there is merely a pietistic affirmation of superstitious faith in the IPCC, where the conference will “recognize that deep cuts in global [greenhouse-gas] emissions are required according to science, and as documented in the [IPCC’s] Fourth Assessment Report.”
• The economics: There is no assessment of the extent to which any of the proposed actions to mitigate “global warming” by cutting emissions of carbon dioxide or to adapt the world to its consequences will be cost-effective. Nor, tellingly, is there any direct comparison between mitigation and adaptation in their cost-effectiveness: indeed, the IPCC was carefully structured so that mitigation and adaptation are considered by entirely separate bureaucracies producing separate reports, making any meaningful comparison difficult. Though every economic analysis of this central economic question, other than that of the now-discredited Lord Stern, shows that mitigation is a pointless fatuity and that focused adaptation to the consequences of any “global warming” that may occur would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective, the Cancun conference outcome will continue to treat mitigation as being of equal economic utility with adaptation.
• Termination: Contracts have termination clauses to say what happens when the agreement ends. Nothing better illustrates the intent to create a permanent world-government structure than the absence of any termination provisions whatsoever in the Cancun outcome. The Process, like diamonds, is forever.
• Democracy: Forget government of the people, by the people, for the people. Forget the principle of “no taxation without representation” that led to the very foundation of the United States. The provisions for the democratic election of the new, all-powerful, legislating, tax-raising world-government Secretariat by the peoples of the world may be summarized in a single word: None.

How did this monstrous transfer of power from once-proud, once-sovereign, once-democratic nations to the corrupt, unelected Secretariat come about? The story begins with Sir Maurice Strong, an immensely wealthy UN bureaucrat from Canada who, a quarter of a century ago, established the IPCC as an intergovernmental, political body rather than as a scientific body precisely so that it could be maneuvered into assisting in the UN’s long-term aim, reiterated at a summit of senior UN officials this May by Ban Ki-Moon himself, of extinguishing national sovereignty and establishing a world government.

The Process began in earnest in 1988, when the IPCC was established. Shortly thereafter, on a June day in Washington DC deliberately chosen by Al Gore because it was unusually hot, his political ally and financial benefactor James Hansen appeared before a Congressional committee and put before it a wildly-exaggerated graph predicting global warming over the coming 20 or 30 years. Yet June 2008, the 20^th anniversary of his testimony, was cooler globally than June 1988, and worldwide warming has happened at less than half the rate he predicted.

The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 allowed environmental groups and world “leaders” to grandstand together. From that summit emerged the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which began holding annual conferences on “global warming”.

The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 committed its signatories to cut back their national CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. Most are not going to make it. The US Senate, with Al Gore as its president, voted 95-0 to reject any treaty such as Kyoto, which bound only the West while leaving developing nations such as China to emit carbon dioxide without constraint.

Very little progress had been made by the time of the Bali conference in 2007: but at that conference a “road-map” was constructed that was to lead to a binding international treaty in Copenhagen in 2009.

Just one problem with that. The US Constitution provides that, even if the President has signed a treaty, his signature is meaningless unless the treaty has been debated in the Senate, which must ratify it by the votes of at least 67 of the 100 Senators. It became clear to everyone, after the Obama administration failed to cajole or bully even 60 Senators into passing the Waxman/Markey cap-and-tax Bill, that no climate treaty would pass the Senate.

Worse, the Secretariat grossly overreached itself. Believing its own propaganda to the effect that none but a few vexatious, fossil-funded sceptics believed that “global warming” would be small enough to be harmless, it drafted and posted up on its website a 186-page draft Treaty of Copenhagen, proposing to turn itself into an unelected world government with unlimited powers to impose direct taxation on member nations without representation, recourse or recall, to interfere directly in the environmental policies of individual nations, and to sweep away all free markets worldwide, replacing them with itself as the sole rulemaker in every marketplace (treaty draft, annex 1, articles 36-38). Some quotations from the draft reveal the sheer ambition of the UN:

“The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism. … The government will be ruled by the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies.” (Copenhagen Treaty draft of September 15, 2009, para. 38).

The three central powers that the UN had hoped to grant itself under the guise of Saving The Planet from alleged climate catastrophe were as follows:

“Government”: This use of the word “government” is the first use of the term to describe a world government in any international treaty draft.

“Financial mechanism”: The “financial mechanism” was a delicate phrase to describe a new power of the UN to levy unlimited taxation directly on the peoples of its member states: taxation without representation, and on a global scale.

“Facilitative mechanism”: This mechanism would, for the first time, have given the UN he power directly to coerce and compel compliance on the part of its member states, by force if necessary. The Treaty draft describes it as –

“… a facilitative mechanism drawn up to facilitate the design, adoption and carrying out of public policies, as the prevailing instrument, to which the market rules and related dynamics should be subordinate.”

In short, there was to be a New World Order, with a “government” having at its command a “financial mechanism” in the form of unlimited rights to tax the world’s citizen’s directly, and a “facilitative mechanism” that would bring the rules of all formerly free markets under the direct control of the new UN “government”, aided by an already-expanding series of bureaucracies.

At no point anywhere in the 186 pages of the Treaty draft do the words “democracy”, “election”, “ballot”, or “vote” appear. As the EU has already demonstrated, the transfer of powers from sovereign democracies to supranational entities brings those democracies to an end. At the supranational level, in the UN, in the EU and in the proposed world government, decisions are not made by anyone whom we, the voters, have elected to make such decisions.

The exposure of the draft treaty in major international news media panicked the UN into abandoning the draft before the Copenhagen conference even began. Instead, the UN is now legislating crabwise, as the European Union does, with a series of successive annual agreements, the last of which was the Copenhagen Accord, each transferring more power and wealth from individual nations to its supranational bureaucracy. The latest of these agreements is being finalized here in Cancun.

The European Union, which has stealthily stamped out democracy over the past half-century by a series of treaties each transferring a little more power and wealth from elected hands in the member states to unelected hands in Brussels, has been advising the Secretariat on how to do the same on a global scale.

After the spectacular bloody nose the Secretariat got in Copenhagen, it was most anxious not to endure a second failure in Cancun. To this end, it obtained the agreement of the German government to host a monthly series of conferences in Bonn in the early part of 2010, some of which were open to outside observers and some were behind closed doors in a comfortable suburban palace, where the new way of legislating for the world – in secret – first came into use.

The Chinese regime, anxious to get a piece of the action, agreed to host an additional session in Tientsin a few weeks ago. The purpose of this near-perpetual international junketing – which the national delegates have greatly enjoyed at our expense – was to make sure that nearly all of the elements in the Cancun agreement were firmly in draft and agreed well before Cancun, so as to avoid what too many journalists have tediously and obviously described as a “Mexican stand-off”.

It is precisely because of all this massive and expensive preparation that the note by the Chairman, whose main points are summarized above, may well reflect what is finally decided and announced here in a couple of days’ time. The Chairman is not simply guessing: this Note reflects what the Secretariat now confidently expects to get away with.

However, following the Copenhagen disaster, our grim future New Masters are taking no chances. They persuaded their friends in the mainstream news media, who cannot now easily back out of their original declarations of blind faith in the Church of “Global Warming” and are as anxious not to lose face as the Secretariat is, to put it about that at Cancun this year and even at Durban next year very little of substance will occur.

The intention is that, after not one but two international climate conferences, the second of them in Rio in 2012 on the 20^th anniversary of the Earth Summit that began it all, the Secretariat will have become so wealthy and will have accreted so much power to itself that no one – not even the US Senate – will dare to resist ratifying the Treaty of Rio that brings democracy to an end worldwide and fulfils Lord Mandelson’s recent statement that “we are now living in a post-democratic age.”

Over my dead body. The people know best what is best for the people. The governing class no doubt knows what is best for the governing class, but does not necessarily know what is best for the people, and must always be kept in check by the ballot-box.

If we are to have a world government at all (and, as the science of “global warming” alarm continues to collapse, the current pretext for world domination by a privileged few is wearing more than a little thin), then it is essential that the world government should be an elected government, and that, as Article 1, Section 1 of the US Constitution makes plain when it grants “All legislative power” to the elected Congress and to the now-elected Senate, none shall make laws for the world or impose taxes upon the world except those whom the people of the world have elected by universal secret ballot.

How can we, the people, defeat the Secretariat and keep the democracy we love? Simply by informing our elected representatives of the scope, ambition, and detail of what is in the Cancun agreement. The agreement will not be called a “Treaty”, because the Senate, particularly after the mid-term elections, will not pass it. But it can still be imposed upon us by the heavily Left-leaning Supreme Court, which no longer makes any pretense at judicial impartiality and may well decide, even if Congress does not, that the Cancun agreement shall stand part of US law on the ground that it is “customary international law”.

What to do? Send this blog posting to your legislators. It is their power, as well as yours, that is being taken away; their democracy, as well as yours, that will perish from the Earth unless this burgeoning nonsense is stopped.

Every really successful evil gets away with things for a time before people wake up. This one, using 'climate change' as an excuse for an unelected world dictatorship, has gotten away with its tricks for far too long. Whilst I don't necessarily think it has to be taken in a religious context, I am nonetheless surprised by the accuracy of the biblical prophecy that the first world government would be an evil one. If you don't like religion, think of it as someone long ago in fine tune with the dynamics of human development. But one way or another, it will come true unless we stop it. I don't believe prophecies are inevitable - unless we ignore them.