The Plot to ‘Steal the Deal’ in Copenhagen

William R. Hawkins

Thousands of protestors from around the world have flocked to the United Nations Climate Change Conference that opened December 7th in Copenhagen, Most think they are rebelling against the Establishment, posing as the common folk resisting a corrupt system, and advancing progressive notions. But they are wrong on all counts. The main demonstrations have been organized by left-wingers who are the willing shills of foreign governments leading naïve “useful idiots” (to use Lenin’s term for bourgeois idealists) in support of a realpolitik agenda that is anything but utopian. They are part of the UN process, not opponents of it; they are in the arena, not outside it.

The UN bureaucracy has been promoting “grass roots” movements among the international left with its “seal the deal” campaign. The effort has focused on a petition drive which asserts, "We the Peoples of the World urge political leaders to Seal the Deal…on a climate agreement that is definitive, equitable and effective.” The deal is to “Set binding targets to cut greenhouses gases by 2020” and “Support developing countries' adaptation efforts and secure climate justice for all.” The key term here is “climate justice,” meant to dupe activists into thinking there is some higher moral imperative at work. But the UN agenda is really about the desire of some countries to gain advantages over others within the very contentious negotiations. Long before the exposure of the false science behind the climate change issue, it was clear that Copenhagen had nothing to do with the weather.

The UN climate talks have been dominated from the start by the “G77 and China” bloc of developing countries. The G77 has as its chair Sudan, the blood-soaked ally of China, whose president is an indicted war criminal. The climate issue has just been the most recent, and successful, ploy used by the Beijing-led movement to create a “new international economic order,” which would transfer wealth and power from the West to the Third World (or more specifically, from the United States to the People’s Republic of China). The “binding targets” for emission reductions are to only apply to the “developed” economies (i.e. the U.S. Europe, Australia, and Japan) slowing if not halting their growth. Meanwhile China, the world’s largest emitter, and the G77 states are left free to do whatever they want in the pursuit of continued economic expansion. Furthermore, the developing countries are to be “supported” by the transfer of money and technology from the West, perhaps financed by precedent-setting UN taxes.

Kumi Naidoo, the executive director of Greenpeace, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last Thursday, “Will the treaty be fair? That would require rich, industrialized nations to accept their carbon debt and historic responsibility. It would mean providing funding to help the developing world to both adapt to and mitigate the already inevitable impacts of a warming world.” The South African activist also argued that the UN should produce a “legally binding” deal “with industrialized countries agreeing 40 percent emissions [cuts] by 2020.” Such a reduction in economic activity is double what is called for in the already ruinous “cap and trade” legislation pending in Congress. In contrast, not a word was said about any non-Western country obligations.

On November 29th, officials from South Africa, India, Brazil and Sudan met in Beijing to map out the common front they would present against the West in Copenhagen. And when a Danish draft proposal surfaced at the start of the conference, calling on the developing countries to set targets for the control of their emissions, the G77 went ballistic, rejecting the idea as a threat to their sovereignty. Thus, when the first official draft from the UN Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action was released at the end of the week, it explicitly endorsed the Kyoto framework of applying mandates only to the developed countries.

In the United States, this foreign “steal the deal” power grab is being promoted by the usual gaggle of anti-American leftists. Just as the environmental movement was spawned by the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s from the ”anti-war” movement, the current Green Left still wants to see the U.S. defeated and humiliated. They have tried to turn a patriotic movement reflecting American rejection of the World Trade Organization as a threat to the sovereign control of national policy into a movement that now embraces both the WTO and UN agendas against the economic needs of the United States.

Democracy Now is a leading left-wing media service broadcast on the Pacifica and National Public Radio networks, college radio stations; and the Internet. It’s “War and Peace Report” postures as an alternative to “U.S. corporate-sponsored media” to represent “ordinary people from around the world who are directly affected by U.S. foreign policy, grassroots leaders and peace activists, artists, academics and independent analysts.” On a recent show, two organizers for the Mobilization for Climate Justice, Ananda Tan and David Solnit, tried to equate what they are doing in Copenhagen with what they did in demonstrations “against” the WTO in Seattle 10 years ago. “We have an opportunity to tackle the same corporations who were trying to liberalize international trade and their access to community resources around the world and are now trying to do the same, using this opportunity of the climate crisis to create markets for trading in carbon derivatives and using their existing control of energy resources to finance their development agenda in the Third world,” said Tan.

Solmit claimed, “It was very public that thousands of people were going to try and non-violently shutdown the World Trade Organization [in Seattle]. I think what the surprise to the world was, and we’re in a very similar moment this week in the lead up to Copenhagen, is that Americans broke ranks from their government and actually stood up for democracy, for human rights, and for the things we need in our lives.”

But this interpretation of what happened in Seattle in 1999 is at odds with the truth. In Seattle, the WTO tried to launch a new round of negotiations. President Bill Clinton had signed the agreement creating the WTO and went to Seattle hoping for success. His aim was to open overseas markets to American exports, but he ran into a buzz saw of conflicting national interests.

The developing countries wanted to limit their imports of agricultural and manufactured goods to foster their own industries. They wanted the United States and other developed countries to open their markets on a non-reciprocal basis to support their export-led growth strategies. The conference took on such an anti-American tone that President Clinton walked out of the talks in disgust.

Conservative columnist William Safire described the president in Seattle: “Flat on his back, dumped on by dumping nations and object of catcalls of the undeveloped world, a frustrated Clinton did not abandon our interests. In aligning himself with street people and bowing to AFL CIO pressure, Clinton became a trade realist: he allowed the talks to collapse and made Seattle his Reykjavik.” This last is a reference to President Ronald Reagan walking out of the October, 1986 Reykjavik summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Safire then went on to say that “A trade Realist is a multilateralist who has been mugged by the underdeveloped world.”

The Copenhagen conference is based on the same anti-American agenda and should be dealt with in the same Realist manner. The founding document of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change went into effect in 1994, the same year as the WTO. The UNFCCC document asserts, “The largest share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases has originated in developed countries, that per capita emissions in developing countries are still relatively low and that the share of global emissions originating in developing countries will grow to meet their social and development needs.” This set in motion the two-track system that has pitted the West against the rest over control of future economic growth. In 2001, the WTO launched the Doha negotiations as a “development round” with the opening statement, "The majority of WTO Members are developing countries. We seek to place their needs and interests at the heart of the Work Programme adopted in this Declaration." The Doha Round has stalled over the same issues that are now at the center of the Copenhagen talks.

If Copenhagen is to be another Seattle, President Obama should walk out as President Clinton did in the name of protecting American interests. But this is not what the Left wants. The Left wants a UN agreement that places “legally binding” restrictions on the United States and the “Repayment of ecological debts owed by northern governments and resource extracting corporations to peoples in the Global South,” according to the Mobilization for Climate Justice. This is the global redistribution of wealth that is at the heart of both the WTO trade and UN climate negotiations. Indeed, what the MCJ wants are even more stringent measures to cripple the American economy. Its “Open Letter to the Grassroots” calls for “Drastically reducing emissions without resorting to carbon trading and offsetting or other false solutions such as nuclear energy, agrofuels, or clean coal.” There can be no alternative for America other than to go into rapid decline.

What could better serve the geopolitical ambitions of China and the other states and movements around the world who are just waiting for such a change in the balance of power to advance their interests? President Obama is walking into a trap in Copenhagen. How he responds will reveal the character of his administration. In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Obama said “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.” Foreign interests are openly posing a threat in Copenhagen. Obama must not accept terms that put the United States at a disadvantage.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor William R. Hawkins is a consultant specializing in international economic and national security issues. He is a former economics professor and Republican Congressional staff member.