UN says agreement in Copenhagen unlikely

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Situation ‘worse than we thought’?

Only weeks to go before Copenhagen is due to reshape the political world as we know it, and now more signals that it will fail.

Although heads of government met in New York recently, we have been getting mixed signals on the likelihood of them reaching a meaningful agreement. As early as June this year, the UN’s top climate official, Mr Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said global emissions reduction targets are unlikely to be reached in Copenhagen. That was quite a pessimistic outlook from the man who’s supposed to be organising it.

In early September UN Development Chief, Miss Helen Clark (remember her?), was toning down expectations for Copenhagen, even suggesting there might be no deal at all. “I think the conference will be positive but it won’t dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’.”

Less than six weeks ago, the UK Foreign Secretary, Mr David Miliband, said that the Copenhagen conference would fail to produce an effective treaty on cutting greenhouse gases. We were daring to hope we could forget about Copenhagen committing us to any serious reduction in our energy use. Continue Reading →

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World government by stealth in Copenhagen?

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This is wild. The story is still developing, because the draft treaty seems to have been discovered by sceptics only a few weeks ago. The draft is difficult to read, as it contains alternative clauses and long sentences and is even ungrammatical in places. Clearly, it’s a work in progress. But it harbours such concepts as offend any freedom-loving thinker, so let’s get the word out and demand explanations of our government. I hope to have more analyses available over the next few days. Janet has kindly allowed us to re-post her article.

Guest post by Janet Albrechtsen (bio here)

SHAME on us all: on us in the media and on our politicians. Despite thousands of news reports, interviews, analyses, critiques and commentaries from journalists, what has the inquiring, intellectually sceptical media told us about the potential details of a Copenhagen treaty? And despite countless speeches, addresses, interviews, doorstops, moralising sermons from government ministers, pleas from Canberra for an outcome at Copenhagen, opposition criticism of government policy, what have our elected representatives told us about the potential details of a Copenhagen treaty?

With just over 40 days until more than 15,000 officials, advisers, diplomats, activists and journalists from more than 190 countries attend the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, we know nothing. Nothing about a climate change treaty that the Rudd government is keen to sign and one that will bind this country for years to come. Continue Reading →

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CCG mentioned on Climate Depot

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Marc Morano, well-known scourge of global warming alarmists at Climate Depot, in his latest roundup of news items, has kindly listed our nasty little plagiarism stoush with the ill-behaved Dave Hampton, a.k.a. Carbon Dave, British engineer and “social change advocate”. You can see it in the left-hand column—page down about three times and look for Claim: ‘Climate Alarmist plagiarises comments from skeptic’.

The link goes here to our original story. It’s good publicity for the CCG and the sceptical, realistic position on global warming that we represent here in New Zealand. Let’s hope it attracts more visitors to the site with an interest in reading about the climate news that we should be seeing in our national media.

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Pencil in one carbon footprint

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Published in 1958 by Leonard E. Read, this famous essay continues to delight young and old. It describes the natural system of collaboration, in which the mere insubstantial vapour of human desire recruits people, products and processes in a sublime, perfectly co-ordinated, yet undirected, dance of duty and productive effort leading to universal satisfaction.

“I, Pencil” [Milton Friedman says] illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith’s invisible hand—the possibility of cooperation without coercion—and Friedrich Hayek’s emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that “will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.”

Clearly, Leonard Read wrote this modern morality tale to teach economics, yet it succeeds on many levels and today provides useful instruction about the foolishness of calculating an item’s so-called “carbon footprint”. For who could possibly know everything done in every capacity contributing to the item’s eventual production? Such knowledge is literally impossible.

Yet such extensive knowledge is required, if we are to determine all of the “carbon” used in an item’s design, production and distribution.

Here is that story; it is a cautionary tale against the hubris that tempts us all with: “We know everything”. When it drifts away from production, read it simply as a guide to economic principle. Continue Reading →

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