"Smart" grids, "smart" cities, "smart" growth - "subversive, or dumb or both"

Peter Foster:

... “smart” has ... become a ubiquitous weasel word that, like “social” and “sustainable,” conceals a multitude of political dangers. 

When it comes to smart grids, smart cities and smart growth, we are dealing with concepts that are potentially subversive, or dumb, or both.  

... Technology will obviously continue to shape the city, but the dangers of “over-specification,” that is inflexible top-down design, are highlighted in a recent pamphlet, “Against the smart city”, by New York based urban designer Adam Greenfield. 

... Mr. Greenfield does a wonderful job of explaining the manifest shortcomings and dangers of the overdesigned smart city, but his critique ultimately flies off the rapid transit rails because he sees these urban monstrosities as an offshoot of the “neoliberal agenda,” a Chomskyan phrase that speaks volumes about anybody who uses it. 

... The smart city may be a cover for the moralistic city, and moralism is often a cover for power-seeking.  Indeed, the overweening ambition of “seamlessly coordinating everything” is the very model of sustainable development as conceived by the likes of Canada’s former UN mastermind Maurice Strong.

In fact, the "smart" concept reeks of U.N. Agenda 21, the sustainable development mantra, which a whole lot of "smart" bureaucrats and politicians in a whole lot of cities round the world have enthusiastically signed on to.  Subversive indeed!

UN Agenda 21 - global, totalitarian “sustainability”

A Democrat speaks to a Tea Party meeting about how UN Agenda 21 is being foisted on a largely unsuspecting public and subverting individual rights:



From the UN web page for Agenda 21:

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment. ... [Agenda 21 originated from the 1992 Rio Conference, thanks to Maurice Strong.]

Canada and Agenda 21:

Canada has signed or ratified at least 45 multilateral environmental conventions and agreements and is signatory to numerous agendas for action (e.g., Agenda 21, the Habitat Agenda, the World Summit on Sustainable Development [WSSD] Plan of Implementation, and the Kyoto Protocol) ...

Local community involvement:

Originally known as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), today the group simply calls itself “ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability.”

In 1992, ICLEI was one of the groups instrumental in creating Agenda 21. The group’s mission is to push local communities to regulate the environment—and it’s having tremendous success. [Note that 30 Canadian member communities are listed]

British Columbia is using its carbon tax to bribe communities to get on its "Climate Action" programme:

“The Climate Action Revenue Incentive program will be a new conditional grant equal to what local governments pay in the carbon tax, with only one string attached – to be eligible, communities must sign onto the Climate Action Charter and commit to becoming carbon-neutral by 2012,” said Premier Campbell. “If communities do that, and publicly report on their plan and progress in meeting that goal, they will be eligible to receive a grant equal to 100 per cent of their carbon tax costs.” [Big surprise: all 176 BC communities signed on.]

Jeremy Rifkin - Maurice Strong on stilts

Peter Foster:

... Mr. Rifkin is the archetype of that creature known as the policy entrepreneur. He is a consistent generator of bad ideas, and it is bad ideas, more than anything, that help governments grow.

... For decades, he has been exploiting technophobia, junk science, postmodern psychobabble and folk economics to peddle a long list of anti-capitalist, anti-corporate scares, along with matching Big Government “solutions.”

... Mr. Rifkin, like his predecessors since Karl Marx, is very keen to “retire Adam Smith,” which in fact amounts to the continued rejection of a bunch of ideas that Smith never promoted, such as an alleged “conventional, top-down, centralized approach to organizing economic activity.”

... He teaches in the executive education program at the Wharton School of Business, and is an advisor not just to Chancellor Merkel but to the whole European Union. He is likely to get an enthusiastic hearing tomorrow from all those Queen’s Parkers supervising Ontario’s Green Energy Act.

Rifkin sounds like Maurice ("Mo") Strong on stilts, big stilts. Given that list of "buyers" he's unquestionably a master "visionary" snake-oil salesman.

Canada's answer to George Soros ...

... Maurice Strong.

Peter Foster on the green totalitarians:

... when the march of Communism suffered a local setback, a representative of the Comintern, the organization set up by Lenin to spread global revolution, would turn up to rally the non-uniformed troops. This week, Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Program, UNEP, turned up in Toronto to put some backbone into the cadres down at the editorial boards of The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.

... Mr. Steiner has become a prominent source of green alarmism and a leading shill for rent-seeking green energy companies, who were already in mourning at Mr. Harper’s victory.

... UNEP was set up by Canada’s own Maurice Strong — perhaps the leading figure in trying to save socialism from the dustbin of history by painting both socialism and the dustbin green. He created it after his first great UN environmental doomfest in Stockholm in 1972. Its importance was indicated by the man Mr. Strong selected to be its first head: himself.

... UNEP has always reflected Mr. Strong’s genius for using global taxpayers’ money to further his political agenda. As Mr. Strong’s successor, Mr. Steiner controls not only UNEP but the United Nations Office in Nairobi, UNON, ... which hosts offices and projects of more than 60 UN agencies, funds and programs, and over 5,000 staff.”

Ending on a happier note:

... Despite the increasingly desperate rearguard action of Mr. Steiner and his ilk, the green global revolution seems to be going the same way as its red predecessor.

It's just amazing how much influence global totalitarian, Mo Strong, has had with the UN.  His fingerprints seem to be on every cock-a-mamie green globalist program they've ever sponsored.  He's no where near as wealthy as his intellectual twin, George Soros, but his influence has been enormous.

Ted Turner = Idiot + hypocrite

Peter Foster:

Ted Turner, the billionaire philanthropist ...  urged world leaders to institute a Chinese-style global one-child policy to save the Earth from catastrophic climate change.

... Previously, Mr. Turner, who has five children and owns two million acres of land on which he raises bison, has recommended tax penalties for those having more than one child.

... Like his old buddy Maurice Strong, a key advisor on setting up the UN Foundation, Mr. Turner appears to see people as a blight on the earth. In 1996 he suggested that his “ideal” population would involve 95% of humanity disappearing. Since then he has opined that population might be chopped by a more modest five billion....

Another billionaire squandering his time and cash on dumb, if not dangerous, ideas.

Chairman Mo in Beijing

Global socialist and environmentalist Maurice ‘Mo’ Strong has been hiding out in eco-disaster Beijing for the past few years (in the wake of the Iraq/U.N. oil-for-food fraud) as consultant and visiting professor, sharing his grandiose statist vision with China’s government and students. Writing in Maclean’s Magazine this week Chairman Mo expounds on China. Of a number of commentaries parsing Mo’s essay two of my favourites were one by Peter Foster and another by blogger ‘John the Mad’.

Peter Foster does his usual sterling job of reality checking and interpretation concluding with an observation that Strong and his global vision are high maintenance:

... it is difficult to see how any reasonable person, presented with the bizarre facts of his business history and political ideology, could not be disturbed by everything that Mr. Strong stands for and has promoted, especially as the public cost has run into the tens, perhaps even hundreds, of billions of dollars.

Maurice Strong is perhaps the world's most expensive man. He is also the very last person from whom China should be seeking advice if it wants to live in true harmony with the rest of the world.

And ‘John the Mad’ captures the overall flavour of Mo’s essay with this:

On reflection ... I came to the conclusion that Comrade Strong's piece was really ghost written by a gaggle of Chinese communist party communications flacks undertaking damage control for the public relations fiasco leading up to the Peking Olympics.

...[really, however] I accept that Maurice Strong may well have written it. His agitprop is entirely consistent with the plethora of crap written throughout the 20th century by those whom Vladimir Lenin called "useful idiots of the West." His defense of evil is an ignoble, but unfortunately all too common, tradition with those on the left.

Both are great reads and serve as reminders that the Wikipedia entry (puff-piece) for Mo Strong is in serious need of revision to cover the more, ahem, ‘colorful’ aspects of his history.

A ‘Peace’ prize for junk science

Two excellent columns in Saturday’s ‘Post’ on the Nobel Peace Prize.

Terence Corcoron concludes:

Peter Foster agrees and says that Gore’s and IPCC’s work have nothing to do with ‘peace’:

Global warming theory has been in political and scientific trouble for some time, but who knew it had sunk so low it needed a boost from the Nobel Peace Prize committee?
Mr. Gore is by no means an anomaly when it comes to Peace Prizewinners being peddlers of nonsense, tellers of whoppers, or even promoters of political strife.
... the prize was awarded to Mr. Gore and the IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change." But what does that have to do with peace?
[...]
... Al Gore's and the IPCC's idea of a good cause involves -- as with Mr. Strong -- demonization of Western lifestyles and promoting the belief that, until we change, we deserve to be attacked morally, and perhaps even physically. It's a funny basis for a Peace Prize.

Update: Mark Steyn's contribution.

The prize has elevated junk science, gross exaggeration and outright misrepresentation to high international stature, the most prestigious award in the world, discrediting all who work honestly to find the facts and do the right thing.

Scrap CIDA

Peter Foster, in today’s ‘Post’, gives a number of excellent reasons for killing the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). In my estimation the most compelling of these is - and I didn’t know this till now - "CIDA was created in the late 1960s by Maurice Strong". Anything that Maurice Strong is involved in has to be deeply suspect. In Peter Fosters words:

[Strong] the self confessed socialist master-manipulator behind ...Kyoto, sustainable development and global governance.

...deliberately installed a vague agenda and loose controls over CIDA

...agenda to promote activist, leftist NGOs in the development field

Mr. Foster’s latest exposé follows columns (here and here) detailing CIDA and NGO interference with various mining operations around the world. His column today calls for CIDA to be dumped:

CIDA should be a candidate for the scrap heap, not because it has been ineffective in promoting development, but because it has become a prime factor in stopping it.

The solution to poverty is trade, investment and the rule of law... NGO activists ... should have less influence inside the gates of Ottawa.

I think I’ll write to the Minister responsible for CIDA and urge her to give it the axe.

Related

Letter to the editor from Kairos (CIDA funded NGO) chairman Father Paul Hansen protesting Peter Foster’s earlier column.

Also in today’s FP ‘Comment’ section along with Mr. Foster’s column is a letter from an Ecuadoran indigenous group to Mining Watch (funded in part by Kairos) protesting its anti-development activities which are helping to keep poor people in poverty.

Sustainable development - all you need to know

Once again, in his National Post column on Friday, Peter Foster set his critical sights on ‘sustainable development’. He observed that critics of the election of Zimbabwe’s Francis Nhema as head of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development have largely missed the point. While Nhema’s election is bad enough - what is far more deserving of criticism is the very notion of ‘sustainable development’ itself. His bottom line:

It is deeply ironic that the commission should only be brought into disrepute by the appointment of a witless representative from a banana-peel republic, not for the muddleheaded and/or dangerous nonsense for which it stands.

A few more quotes [emphasis mine]:

The definition of 'sustainable development' -- meeting the needs of the present without jeopardizing the needs of the future-- was hatched by the UN's 1987 Brundtland Commission.

The definition manages to be at once bland, meaningless, utopian and dangerous. How can we know, much less add up, the "needs" of everybody on earth? How can we possibly gauge what the needs of "the future" will be?

Canada 's maestro of multinational multi-tasking, Maurice Strong, was a key member of Brundtland. ....It is essentially yet another of the sleeper cells set up to pursue Mr. Strong's impossible dream.

....as Mr. Strong has said without attracting sufficient laughter, what the world needs is a UN-based system to manage literally everything.

If anthropogenic global warming represents the mother of all management problems, sustainable development represents the matriarch of all political pretensions.

Sustainable development, like its semantic sister, corporate social responsibility, is merely the failed socialist wolf in the emperor's new sheepskin.

In short, reasons we should all recoil in horror from ‘sustainable development’:

• It’s socialist utopianism involving global central planning;
• Like most socialist ideas it’s not workable, even in theory;
• Maurice Strong was a key figure in hatching the idea;
• The U.N. is enthusiastic about it;

BlackBerries, Liberals and global socialism

Peter Foster on successful Canadian businessmen dabbling in anti-capitalism.

Interesting! I didn’t know that, courtesy of Paul Martin Jr, Canadian taxpayers donated $30,000,000 towards the promotion of global socialism. BlackBerry maker RIM co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazardis did the same.

Peter Foster follows this trail in his National Post column this morning. The donations went to the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) on whose board sat the shadowy Maurice Strong who is linked to Paul Martin through Paul Desmarais’ Power Corp. Mr. Foster reminds us that Mo Strong is associated with the following lovely ideas:

... economic growth is a "disease"
...[Strong’s] "Earth Charter" .... a "shared positive vision ... for anti-capitalism"

Sounds like Mo subscribes to the Suzuki school of economics. Or is it the other way around?

Louise Frechette, former U.N. deputy secretary-general, was also recruited by CIGI. Frechette, along with Strong, is linked to the U.N. oil-for-food kickback scandal. Mr. Foster notes:

She [Frechette] was described by the Wall Street Journal as "incompetent [at best]."

Yet another prominent Canadian joining CIGI is Liberal "roader" Paul Heinbecker:

....former U.N. ambassador, whose claims to fame include a leading role in negotiating Canada’s disastrous Kyoto commitments.>

Mr. Foster provides some skinny on CIGI via its IGLOO Project website which included documents covering:

... a series of lectures on Marxism.

..."the injustices of global capitalism."

..."Harnessing Globalization"

...a speech by Fidel Castro

Apparently Jim Balsillie is quite enamored by CIGI’s megalomaniacal visions of global governance. Which is not just a little ironic given that he has just been forced to step down as RIM CEO because he failed to comprehend corporate regulations governing stock options.

Peter Foster is rightly disillusioned by the fact that so many businessmen (capitalists in practice) like Balsillie seem to hold a fascination for seriously anti-capitalistic thinking:

...you probaly couldn’t find a businessman to support capitalism. Most
prefer ....to be "educated by their enemies."

Interesting ....and depressing.