by Mark Silva
As if the White House does not already have enough on its plate, President Barack Obama is signaling to the world that he is ready to start talking about climate change.
The Obama White House has invited the leaders of 16 major economies - and major emitters of greenhouse gases, like the United States - to a forum on energy and climate in Washington. The United Nations leader also is invited. And today at U.N. talks in Germany, the U.S. rolled out its climate-change negotiating team.
The April 27-28 forum in Washington is designed to "generate the political leadership necessary" for a successful outcome at U.N. climate change negotiation in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December, the White House said in a statement Saturday.
The conference will "advance the exploration of concrete initiatives and joint ventures that increase the supply of clean energy while cutting greenhouse gas emissions,'' the White House said.
In addition to the U.S., the other parties are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
Although the Bush administration ultimately accepted the notion that human enterprise is contributing to global warming and was starting to engage in a global conversation after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, the United States has been slow to recognize what European leaders in particular have been saying about cliimate change.
Obama says the nation has "known the right choice for a generation... The time has come to make that choice."
"We can allow climate change to wreak unnatural havoc or we can create jobs preventing its worse effects," he said last week. ""We can hand over the jobs of the 21st century to our competitors, or we can create those jobs right here in America."
Obama's climate change team made its international debut this weekend at a U.N. conference in Germany. The two-week meeting of 175 nations is part of the effort to craft a global agreement to govern the emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that scientists say are dangerously warming the planet.
In a symbolic move embraced around the world, lights dimmed Saturday night for one hour in nearly 4,000 cities and famous sites -- from the Sydney opera house to the Egyptian pyramids, from the Eiffel Tower in Paris to Times Square in New York -- to highlight concern over global warming.
The climate change agreement planned for December in Copenhagen is meant to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires 37 industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent from 1990 levels by 2012 when it expires. The U.S. was instrumental in negotiating Kyoto, but could not win enough support in Congress. And Bush rejected the protocol.
Bush dispatched his top negotiator to Bonn, Todd Stern, to deliver the message today: "We're back."
Wire services contributed to this report.
Comments
This is perhaps the biggest scam ever. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists deny that CO2 has any important role in affecting the climate; the UN Panel (IPCC) has made assertions contradicting its own scientists, and has spent billions developing computer models which have never made predictions which are even relevant. There is a terrible record of bad science, incompetence, horrifying predictions from those who are not qualified to say anything, and fraud. See Senator Inhofe's web site http://epw.senate.gov, minority report.
It remains clear that schemes like cap and trade have not worked as part of the Kyoto Protocol (international carbon emission permit and market trading system for permits -- called cap and trade system put in place in 2005) because the economic costs of unemployment, corporate bankruptcies, and shrinking economies are politically unsustainable. This is true because "green energy" is not economic or even available to replace hydrocarbon energy in the time frame of the regulations. This is not the first time this cap and trade scheme has been tried and all it does is produce tax-like income to the UN and Governments. And, raising the objective of CO2 and other greenhouse gas reductions in the follow-on climate conference, in Copenhagen later this year is even less likely to work. So, is the world going to accept a reduction in economic performance and the deaths of millions of poor in the third world because bureaucrats want more money, control, and abandonment of capitalist free markets for a Soviet-style dictatorship?
The cap and trade is a scheme which will permit President Obama to bankrupt the coal industry for ideological, not economic, reasons. And, if the proposals presented in Copenhagen are passed, the UN would be a true world government and would add another layer of unelected bureaucrats at the top level. This is not a desirable result.
The reason politicians want to do this is for the money raised, and the political power to control local economies, not for the climate. If the Copenhagen Conference were truly about the climate, there would be none of this UN taxation, and other unrelated nonsense.
The UN has been trying to levy a world-wide tax for years, and this is part of the proposal to be discussed in this year's climate conference in Copenhagen. And, President Obama has said he agrees that there should be a world-wide tax of 0.7% of the GNP. So, somehow we are supposed to believe that this money would flow to the third world for a host of projects benefiting poor people. But, it is not encouraging that money sent to third world countries in the past has been stolen, and the UN managed to conceal the money stolen from the Oil for Food project. So, how can we trust these people to act honestly?
It seems naïve in the extreme to think this is anything other than the largest theft in the world. And, we are abandoning our capitalist system which has produced American wealth, for a system where the Government controls everything in a political environment where success is punished and economic benefit accrues to the politically influential – in other words to those who give the best bribes to the most powerful politicians, a sort of American version of the Soviet Nomenklura of political elites.
Be sure, the climate is not the reason for the Copenhagen Conference – the real reason is power, money, and control. It is a fraud, dishonest, untrue, and a despicable theft of the world’s freedoms and money. No thank you.
Posted by: Arthur LEMAY | March 29, 2009 9:33 AM
The AP has a set of photos of Times Square in NYC before, and during, the so-called "earth hour". The DNC Swamp doesn't dare show the photos, because they prove that even the Mecca of Liberalism, downtown NYC, ignored the call to action by God's Prophet, Al Gore. See http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Earth-Hour/ss/events/sc/032809earthhour/im:/090329/480/52ed3458e17e4893bb163abf3e8faf53/
for the "other side".
In fact, since many people lit candles to make up for the lights they turned off, the whole event actually INCREASED air pollution.
Posted by: Dissent is Patriotic | March 29, 2009 9:34 AM
I'm all for conservation. But I think that global warming still has not been proven to me and many others, including a great number of scientists. Remember back about 20 years or so ago we were going to have an encroaching ice age. What would have happened if we spent great amounts of our resources and wealth on something that never materialized?. And lets look at the possibility that there is global warming, is the American taxpayer going to foot that bill too, and what about all the other countries, like India and China that are not going along with the program.
Posted by: Paul | March 29, 2009 9:47 AM
Several days ago on Tom Skilling's weather page he had a chart about sunspot activity and Earth's temperatures. Funny, the more sunspot activity, the warmer the planet's temps; less sunspot activity, cooler the planet's temps. For much of the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a lot of sunspot activity and the temps were up. The last couple of years, the sunspot activity waned and guess what? The planet's temps have fallen! Coincidence? I think not!
Posted by: John D | March 30, 2009 6:01 AM