Exposing UN Agenda 21

It's good to see that someone in government is concerned about the subversive UN Agenda 21.
Cheryl Gallant's recent Report from Parliament outlines those concerns and the action being taken in some quarters to combat it:

... the [United Nations] has very specific land use policies they would like to see implemented in every village, town, city, county, province and nation.  The specific plan is called United Nations Agenda 21 Sustainable Development, which has its basis in Communitarianism.  Most Canadians have heard of sustainable development, but are largely unaware of the U.N. initiative Agenda 21. A non-governmental organization headquartered in Toronto called the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives, ICLEI, is tasked with carrying out the goals of Agenda 21 worldwide.

In a nutshell, the plan calls for government to eventually take control of all land use removing decision making from the hands of private property owners.  It is assumed people are not good stewards of their land and “the government” will do a better job if it is in total control.  Individual rights in general are to give way to the needs of communities as determined by the governing body.

Take the poll at the bottom of Gallant's report.

Elizabeth Nickson's excellent book "Eco-Fascists" (inspired by her personal experience on Salt Spring Island, BC) also deals with many of these issues.

Brian's green blarney

Peter Foster:

Brian Mulroney’s speech earlier this week to Canada 2020 – a “progressive” group of PR/government advisory types who pretend to chart the country’s future – presumably involved walking a fine pipeline.

...  he leavened his recommendations with an attack on Mr. Harper’s leadership on energy and climate issues.

... shouldn’t the man who dismantled the National Energy Program be a little more skeptical about grand strategies?

...  it was Mr. Mulroney, by his early promotion of climate catastrophe, and his cuddling up to the subversive issue of sustainable development, who in many ways created the bed of policy nails on which Mr. Harper is forced to lie.

... Mr. Mulroney promoted the kinds of toxic policies with whose consequences Mr. Harper has had to struggle, accusing our current PM of lack of vision amounts go to green gall in more ways than one.

Buzz off Brian, you've had your chance.  And, haven't you heard, it's exceedingly bad form to bad-mouth a fellow Prime Minister.

"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!

Rio+20 "... a farce, even if everybody keeps a straight face"

Peter Foster:

The Rio+20 Earth Summit on Sustainable Development, which starts in two weeks, will be a farce, even if everybody keeps a straight face. The grand UN-based system conceived to co-ordinate the activities of all mankind has proved utterly unsustainable, a dysfunctional mess that generates nothing but endless meetings, agendas and reports.

That sustainable development would inevitably collapse under its own contradictions was inevitable. What is fascinating is why every country on Earth — including Canada — would earnestly have committed to a concept hatched by a cabal of ardent socialists. ....

... Canada’s “national submission” to the Rio conference is yet another model of bureaucratic pretension and political hypocrisy, in which an ostensibly right-wing government calls for more comprehensive and effective progress toward the socialist dreams of Brundtland and Rio ’92. ...

UN Agenda 21 and environmental Marxism

Lord Christopher Monckton expounds:



[Via Brian Lilley's post (in the comments)]

facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is "a self-serving hypocrite"

Peter Foster: "Two-faced book"

... [Adam] Smith noted that businessmen — like all human beings — are often self-serving hypocrites. His point was that free commercial markets turned self-interest into public benefit. We can only serve ourselves by serving others. Meanwhile Smith scoffed at those who would “trade for the public good.”

Posturing obviously comes more easily to the search engine and Internet tycoons because they can claim they are more virtuous than those who run wicked old smokestack industries. Except, that is, when they are advertising their products, which just happens to be how the new tykes make most of their money. This brings us to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s letter in this week’s IPO filing.

... In his letter, Mr. Zuckerberg, who stands to be worth up to US$28-billion, claims that Facebook was “built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

... Where it really gets murky is where he writes, “Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.”

... We have representative democracies for a reason. They don’t always work that well, but they are certainly preferable to the rule of any NGO-stoked Occupy cybermob.

... it’s worth noting that while rattling on about higher purpose and the voice of the people, Mr. Zuckerberg ... is keeping a firm grip on Facebook control via a dual share structure.  ... while he is paying lip service to the meddlers, he is doing his best to insulate himself from them. We knew he was a smart young man. Shame about the bafflegab.

Great column!  Read any corporate annual report and you'll find it filled with the same kind of posturing bafflegab about "stakeholders", "corporate social responsibility" and "sustainability". They dedicate people as full-time generators of this bullcrap and to sucking up to NGOs.

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.]

Corporate Social Responsibiliy - Milton's Loophole

Peter Foster:

It was more than 40 years ago that economist Milton Friedman described the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as “pure and unadulterated socialism.” He noted that the embrace of CSR by businessmen helped to “strengthen the already prevalent view that the pursuit of profits is wicked and immoral and must be curbed and controlled by external forces. Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron fist of government bureaucrats.”

In fact, a new “iron fist” has emerged in the intervening period to “curb the market.” It belongs not to bureaucrats but to radical environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), who have achieved a stunning amount of boardroom influence. They have done this, paradoxically, by learning from Prof. Friedman, and in particular by exploiting what might be called “Milton’s loophole.”

Prof. Friedman said that part of an executive’s role, beyond his primary task of serving shareholders, was to conform to “the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical customs.” ...

There is not a company on Earth that now fails to pay obeisance to the essentially socialist notion of “sustainable development” (SD), ... Corporations keen to achieve their CSR and SD badges have, meanwhile, found themselves cast as mouthpieces for radical environmentalism.

... A classic example appeared in a recent ad in USA Today. The ad features the names of both California-based grocery chain Trader Joe’s and ENGO ForestEthics...

It seems astonishing that a company would allow itself to be the ventriloquist’s puppet for so much misinformation. ...

Today there were two responses, one from Greenpeace Canada:

[From the first letter] ... firms would not respond to environmentalist bullying if they didn’t think it would help their bottom lines [more accurately avoid having their bottom lines damaged by smear campaigns].

[From Greenpeace]... Milton Friedman would surely have approved of this Greenpeace tactic: private actors negotiating with private actors for the public good ...

The first admits the "bullying" which Greenpeace calls "negotiating".  What neither will acknowledge is that the Trader Joe ad is dishonest scare-mongering aimed at intimidating oil sands producers and fund raising.  Greenpeace's and ForestEthics' "bottom lines" come from the money they raise from whipping up public environmental hysteria. Milton Friedman would definitely NOT approve of such dishonest, extortionate tactics.

Environmental fraud - the 2,4D scare

Today, on page 5 of the Post, Terence Corcoran responded to Monday's happy-faced front-page story about dandelions:

So now the old "yellow flower" is a thing of horticultural attraction. This glorious news hit the front page of the National Post Monday in a report that portrayed the weedy dandelion as a reborn object of beauty and affection.

... Unfortunately, the yellow dandelion flower has a halflife of about nine hours, after which it starts cranking out fluffy white seed carriers that scatter billions of future dandelions all over the urban nation.

... oh how the green activists and environmental alliances must have loved that story. What an achievement, a great science con job, a brilliant bait-and-switch policy scam, and a model for future activism. It's a con job the National Post story, brightly illustrated and with an upbeat headline (Dandelions finally get their day in the sun), failed to mention.

Ottawa, the Quebec government and Dow AgroSciences settled a lawsuit under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Dow AgroSciences had sued over Quebec government claims the pesticide 2,4-D, the key dandelion exterminator, was a health risk.

The settlement agreement, a victory for the company, includes a statement from the government of Quebec saying the pesticide 2,4-D does "not pose an unacceptable risk to human health or the environment" when used according to instructions. It is too late, however, to undo the damage at the municipal level.

... Governments have long known that 2,4-D is safe, but they eventually caved in to activists, who ... turned the pesticide battle into a war on cosmetic pesticides as a "precautionary" move. [The same fraudulent "logic" they use to push their AGW scare-mongering.]

... Celebrating seeming acceptance of the weeds as "flowers" is to celebrate the triumph of the politics of social and esthetic control by government. The dandelion is the official flower of statism.

Now, if only I can get my strata landscaping committee to resume use of 2,4D before their new "environmentally sensitive" pesticide-free lawn keeping takes its toll any more than it already has. That is, assuming that the push for a complete ban doesn't come to pass. Oops - my City of Surrey, a self-proclaimed champion of the environment and "sustainability", has already effectively banned it.

Environmental shakedown racket?

Peter Foster fills us in on an interesting "partnership" between the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and cement giant Lafarge:

I came across an example of the WWF's earning power at the recent Globe conference on business and the environment in Vancouver. The Cement Association of Canada had just produced its second "Sustainability Report."

... In the interests of transparency, I decided to ask three questions: What was the cost to Lafarge of meeting the WWF's demands? How much was Lafarge paying the WWF? And, since the freedom to criticize was such an important part of the partnership, what criticism did Lafarge have of the WWF's approach?

The Lafarge executive on the dais suddenly looked like a deer in headlights. He didn't have a clue what meeting the WWF's demands was costing. Moreover, he would presumably rather have chewed off his own arm than criticize the WWF.

Subsequently ... I discovered [from the WWF chief executive]...that the figure [paid to WWF] was ... $2.4-million, annually over three years ... [but he] didn't have a figure for the cost of meeting the WWF's demands (beyond what Lafarge would have done anyway).

The WWF thus seems to have found a very profitable and powerful niche for itself, both as business and political consultant, while at the same time somehow retaining its posture as guardian of the planet.

The whole thing comes across as a kind of protection shakedown --- with links to that notorious international man of mystery:

This ... reminded me of the modus operandi of Maurice Strong, the den father of radical environmentalism. It is surely not a coincidence that Mr. Strong ...was one of the earliest and most influential members of the WWF. Meanwhile, the Cement Association's Sustainability Report came about as a result of the "Cement Sustainability Initiative" of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The WBCSD was started by? Go on, have a guess!

And finally, remember to mark Earth Hour:

So if you love freedom, and possess the slightest trace of ability to think independently, don't forget to keep those lights burning brightly between 8 and 9 P.M. on Saturday night.

Cow farts, Chairman Mo and the “tiny perfect Minister”

Peter Foster is blogging from the Globe Conference in Vancouver. As might be expected his reports are chock-a-block with great insights and hilarious lines:

Well, here I am, possibly the only climate change skeptic and sustainability naysayer at the huge Globe Biennial Trade Fair and Conference in beautiful downtown Vancouver.

I ... plan to keep my eye out for humour, hoping that something may crop up to equal TransAlta’s purchase a couple of conferences ago of emissions credits based on restraining Ugandan cows’ farts. You can’t make stuff like that up. Which is one of the reasons why I’m here.

.... noted the absence of one of this conference’s greatest supporters, Maurice Strong, who is apparently confined, for health reasons, to his home in Beijing. Since Beijing is one of the smoggiest cities on earth, and Mr. Strong is a severe asthmatic, this is a somewhat strange hidey hole for Chairman Mo. Presumably it is the bracing air of Communist rule in which his lungs rejoice ...

... one of my favourite analogies for the non-likelihood of governments being able to promote new technologies is that of the drunk looking under the lamppost for his car keys..... You can imagine my surprise and delight, therefore, when I came across Canada’s tiny perfect Minister of Natural Resources, Gary Lunn, standing Thursday under a solar lamppost!

... a stunning $3.6-billion that the .... government is “investing” in so-called ecoENERGY projects. These are designed both to teach dim-bulb Canadians how to save their money, and to promote technologies that seem, by definition, to be economically”unsustainable,” since they can’t hack it without subsidies.

It’s too bad Peter doesn’t have a speaking part at the conference.

Update: Sustainability - it's for the children:

Do you love your children? Then you must be for sustainable development.

... Could anything be more bizarre than the concept of destroying the jobs of present parents so that those jobs might somehow, magically, be teleported to their great-grandchildren? Is there a more obvious and objectionable strategy for writing off your intellectual opponents than implying that they lack the love for their children that you have for yours?

Water ‘conservation’ idiocy

This survey today reminded me of another of my pet gripes - idiotic conservationsim.

A perennial bugaboo of the local Victoria press, politicians and enviro-nuts is the state of the fresh water supply. The Regional water Nazis restrict water usage during the dry months and hector the populace year round to conserve. UVic and the local newspaper recently teamed up to publish a conservation bulletin just chock-full of nifty recommendations for cutting down on water use including: multiple toilet uses before flushing, halving time spent the shower, not running the tap while brushing teeth, etc.

As Glenn Beck would say - this is a load of conservationist bullcrap!

There is no shortage of water! This is the Pacific Northwest for God’s sake! We get 5 feet of rainfall every year. We’re surrounded by rain forests. If there were a shortage of anything (and there isn’t, except for common sense) it would not be water but water storage capacity.

If we don’t use the stuff it collects in the reservoir which overflows in January every year (December last year) and flows into the frickin’ ocean. So instead of flowing out our taps, down the sewer pipes and into the ocean, it just flows over the top of the reservoir dam and straight into the ocean. With the amount of available fresh water it’s not possible to ‘waste’ it. It’s an annually renewable resource.

So why the phony hype about conservation - as if using it today is somehow robbing future generations? I don’t know. It’s hard to figure except that it gives the Regional government ‘authorities’ a chance to yap about what wonderful ‘stewards-of-the-earth’ they are. In my estimation, given all the fresh water that falls out the sky here, the Regional authority’s principal job is to make sure that enough of it is collected in reservoirs and avoid having to hector us with stupid ‘conservation’ suggestions.

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;

‘Sustainable development’ - Kyoto’s close cousin

Stéphane Dion, Mr. SD

Sustainable development (SD) is another of those 'big ideas' that is apparently beyond question. Like Kyoto it’s been effectively sold and is now widely accepted. SD is ‘the answer’ to all issues of conservation, resource management and ... you name it. Every government and every corporation touts SD as part of its 'corporate social responsibility' agenda.

Although SD is widely accepted, few have any real idea what it is. And on close inspection the concept is so fuzzy as to have little meaning at all. But, as with most platitudes, it sounds virtuous, so it must be good.

Peter Foster, in an excellent column in today’s National Post highlights newly minted Liberal leader Stéphane Dion's attachment to the notion and exposes it for the nonsense that it is:

The problem is that sustainable development is an anti-concept -- designed semantically to be beyond question or even fundamental discussion. After all, who speaks for unsustainable development?

That definition sure has a familiar ring to it. And SD, naturally, suffers the same difficulty as Marx’s dictum. Mr. Foster explains:

Sounds reasonable. But only a moment's reflection demonstrates insurmountable problems. What are "needs?" Are they synonymous with "wants?" If not, who decides which is which? And what are "the needs of the present?" .....it would be impossible to calculate or express the needs of even one person, let alone compare the needs of two. .....One thing is for sure, not all present needs are being met, so why should we consider catering collectively to those of the future, assuming, of course, that we have any idea of what "future needs" might be, which we don't, and can't.

The implicit assumption of the Brundtland formulation is that we live in a manageable, tribal world where needs are clearly defined and "collective-action problems" (as left-wing intellectuals love to call them) can be hashed out around the campfire.

And, finally, referring to Mr. Dion:

....anybody who embraces the glib nostrums of sustainable development is not merely at best a conventional thinker, he is not much of a thinker at all.

....the bland formulation provided by the socialist-packed UN Brundtland commission in 1987, that SD is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."