CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, November 2, 2009

Gullible Gulliver goes to Copenhagen

Just when you thought Halloween was scary enough, the boyz in the Obamahood are planning to do something this December in Copenhagen that will make Halloween seem as benign as Arbor Day.

Mr. Obama is going to Copenhagen to sign the U.N. Climate Change Treaty. According to Lord Christopher Monckton, the English parliamentarian who has made his life’s work the study of climate change, the Treaty, in its current draft form, will: 1. Create a communistic world government to which the United States would be subservient. 2. The Treaty transfers some of the wealth of the industrialized nations to the Third World based on the “notion” that the United States and the other industrialized nations have, somehow, damaged the climate of the Third World.

Excuse me. Has anyone sat around the cooking and heating fires that burn day and night across the Third World? Has anyone noticed the choking pall of wood smoke that hangs over every village and hamlet? Has anyone seen the enormous, black clouds of unfiltered factory smoke being thrown into the air by Red China, India and Russia? None of them plan to do anything about carbon emissions.

Thirdly, the draft Treaty sets up a system of international police with the authority to fine those signatories found in violation of the Treaty. But since the major polluters either won’t sign the Treaty or, if they do, won’t abide by it, the predictable slavish adherence to the Treaty by the tiny societies of Lilliput Europe won’t do much to reduce carbon emissions. But it will make the Euro-Lilliputians feel good. (A 2009 Rasmussen survey of hybrid-fuel car purchasers revealed that 72-percent said they bought hybrid cars because of the statement it made about them.)

The socialist governments in Western Europe are all agog about the draft Treaty. England’s liberal Manchester Guardian breathlessly opines: “There are five weeks left to the opening of the climate-change summit in Copenhagen. Virtually every national leader is expected to gather in the Danish capital in an attempt to hammer out a deal to bring unity to the battle against global warming. All that is required is an agreement to find a method to achieve one simple goal. Emissions of carbon dioxide from the planet’s factories, power plants, cars, planes and homes must be made to peak in a few years so that by 2020, a substantial decline in the world’s output of greenhouse gases will have begun.”

Don’t hold your breath. While the U.S. Constitution empowers the U.S. President to sign treaties, the Constitution also requires a 2/3rd vote of the U.S. Senate for ratification. In the Treaty’s current form, not even Senator Harry Reid and his loony-Left colleagues can muster enough votes for ratification.

There was such overwhelming bi-partisan Senate opposition to the Kyoto Protocol (Copenhagen Lite) that 95 U.S. Senators resolved not to ratify it. In 1998, President Clinton made Vice-President Al Gore sign Kyoto; however, Clinton never submitted Kyoto to the Senate.

Lord Monckton asserts the supporters of the Soviet Union’s failed experiment to bring about world communism have seized upon new-world-order schemes such as Kyoto and Copenhagen in an attempt to hog-tie American productivity. Communist conspiracy or not, the Green Movement does provide certain benefits. For example, environmentally-conscious Americans are doing what they can to reduce carbon emissions and also to reduce the kind of junk that is filling up our landfills. Even without the passage of Mr. Obama’s anti-business, Crap-on-Trade legislation, America’s major industries increasingly find ways to reduce carbon emissions.

The most disturbing thing about December’s Copenhagen Conference is that the Obamanistas are determined to win the plaudits of the Euro-Greens no matter what kind of won’t-be-ratified enviro-nonsense Mr. Obama is sure to sign.

Nationally syndicated columnist, William Hamilton, is a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Naval War College and Harvard’s JFK School of Government.

©2009. William Hamilton.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com