Obama's new world order

Jeffrey T. Kuhner

President Obama is on a path toward establishing a one-world government. This is the warning of Christopher Monckton, a former major policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In December, world leaders will descend upon Copenhagen to sign a United Nations climate change treaty that will succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which is aimed at reducing greenhouse gases and set to expire in 2012. An agreement has been drafted.

The goal of the Copenhagen treaty is to erect an international cap-and-trade regime to curb carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, said to be responsible for man-made global warming. Recently, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned of a "climate catastrophe" - a rising wave of floods, droughts and shrinking food crops - unless the treaty is signed. Mr. Brown even said global warming would inflict more damage than both world wars and the Great Depression combined; the world has only several weeks to save itself from impending doom.

"If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice," he said. Mr. Brown has thus outdone former Vice President Al Gore in fear-mongering and inciting public hysteria.

Global-warming alarmists are using the myth of climate change to impose an embryonic socialist world government. Following the collapse of communism, the West's progressive elites desperately searched for a viable ideological alternative. They found it in environmentalism.

Although the Green movement wraps itself in the flag of empirical science, it represents the very opposite: a dogma that provides meaning and purpose to its rabid followers. The ideology justifies massive tax increases and government control of the economy; it seeks to cripple free enterprise and curtail market-driven growth. Many of today's Greens are yesterday's Reds.

Global warming is the greatest fraud of our time. The overwhelming scientific evidence shows that, rather than getting hotter, the Earth's temperatures are cooling. Increasing numbers of leading scientists are challenging the flawed computer models used by eco-alarmists.

Mr. Gore and his supporters cannot answer several simple questions. If the Earth's temperatures are no longer rising, then how can CO2 emissions be responsible for global warming? How could previous dramatic increases in global temperatures - such as the end of the Ice Age - have taken place without concentrations of CO2? The answer is obvious: Carbon emissions are not connected to fluctuations in global temperatures.

The mad drive for an international cap-and-trade system is really geared toward achieving the left's long-sought goal: the destruction of democratic capitalism and national sovereignty. The Greens are poised to succeed where the Reds failed.

The Copenhagen treaty must still be negotiated. Final agreement is far from certain, especially from emerging industrial powers like China, India and Brazil. Yet the draft version is clear about the treaty's essential elements.

It calls for a massive transfer of wealth from the developed world to the developing world. The United States would be forced to spend billions of dollars a year in foreign aid to pay for a so-called "climate debt" - a provision to punish wealthy countries for having historically emitted large amounts of CO2, while compensating poor ones for not contributing to greenhouse gases.

The Copenhagen treaty seeks to implement a bureaucratic redistributionist agenda; it is a way for Third World kleptocracies to extort enormous sums of money from America and other rich nations.

Moreover, Mr. Monckton points out that, in paragraph 38, Annex 1, the Copenhagen draft calls for a U.N.-created "government" responsible for taxation, enforcement and redistribution. In other words, the draft treaty explicitly demands that the world body erect an international mechanism with the power to impose emission-reduction targets for each country, determine acceptable levels of CO2 and levy global taxes.

The United States would lose control over its environmental policy. Also, it would sign its death warrant as a functioning democracy, enabling the United Nations to administer a fledgling world government possessing the authority to regulate and tax the American economy. The treaty is a sword aimed at the heart of our national sovereignty.

If Mr. Obama signs the Copenhagen treaty, he "will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your prosperity away forever," Mr. Monckton recently told an audience in Minnesota. "I read that treaty and what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created."

Yet the U.S. Senate can avoid this disastrous course. A supermajority of 67 votes is required to ratify the treaty. In 1997, the Senate in a 95-0 vote rejected the Kyoto Protocol, thereby preventing the United States from joining. Mr. Monckton believes that, in order to avoid defeat, Mr. Obama will try to circumvent the ratification process. If he does, he will spark a political revolt that will make the Tea Party protests look tame by comparison.

Mr. Obama has vowed to create a "green economy" based on "green-collar jobs" and "a green New Deal." The Copenhagen treaty would enable him to accomplish his revolutionary ambitions. It would mark his Cultural Revolution - the permanent transformation of America.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute..