This and my next two essays will
be updated précis of earlier,
longer works on the history of the green agenda. Today, I’m going to relate that
history from its earliest rumblings around 1968 up to the Rio Earth Summit of
1992. The original version can be found at [[i]]. It includes links to many official
documents about the agenda.
Right from the
start, one institution has done more to drive the deep green agenda than any
other. That is the United Nations. The UN is an unelected, politicized and
unaccountable élite, with a strong globalist and controlling tendency. It has
dozens of agencies, through which it keeps a finger in every pie. But it also
has an uncanny level of influence over the governments of its member states, and
in particular the UK.
The Biosphere Conference
When I try to put a
start date on the green agenda, it is 1968. That year, UNESCO held in Paris a
Biosphere Conference. This led to a “Man and the Biosphere” program, billed as
“an intergovernmental scientific programme that aims to establish a scientific
basis for enhancing the relationship between people and their environments.” It
is still going!
The first Earth Day
The UN’s green
agenda became plain, to those who could see back then, on the first Earth Day: April
22nd, 1970. (The centenary of Lenin’s birth!) The then secretary-general,
U Thant, approved the date. He also personally proclaimed the second Earth Day
the following year.
Scares of the 1970s
In the 1970s, alarmist
pundits competed to paint the scariest scenarios they could about where our
civilization was headed. By 1980, they said, air pollution would be so bad that
city dwellers would need to wear gas masks; and life expectancy in the USA
would be down to 42 years. By 1995, three-quarters or more of all species of
living animals would be extinct. And by 2000, not only would there be famines
throughout most of the world. Not only would we have run out of oil and of many
metals. But there would also have been global cooling of up to 6 degrees
Celsius. (Yes, that’s cooling, not warming!).
See here for some
scare balloons being flown at the time: [[ii]]. How many of those scares actually panned
out? And given that track record, why should any of us believe a single thing any
of the alarmists have moaned about since?
The 1972 Stockholm conference
The UN continued to
stoke the green fires. In 1972, they convened a Conference on the Human
Environment in Stockholm. Olof Palme, the controversial Swedish socialist prime
minister, was host. Maurice Strong, whom I regard as the evillest man of the 20th
century, was secretary-general. The UK and USA were among 113 nations
attending.
This conference produced
a report, including a Declaration and an Action Plan. It also led to the
creation of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), with Strong as its first
director.
The Declaration sought
“to inspire and guide the peoples of the world in the preservation and
enhancement of the human environment.” Supposedly, “for the benefit of all the
people and for their posterity.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? But with hindsight,
we see some very tyrannical things in there, too. For example, “the release of
heat, in such quantities or concentrations as to exceed the capacity of the
environment to render them harmless, must be halted.” And the report provided
apparent justification for the Chinese communists’ inhumane and failed one
child policy.
The report also
recommends that governments “be mindful of activities in which there is an
appreciable risk of effects on climate.” And it gave the UN’s World
Meteorological Organization (WMO) a role of guiding and co-ordinating
countries’ efforts to “monitor long term global trends in atmospheric
constituents and properties which may cause changes in meteorological
properties, including climatic changes.”
The World Charter for Nature
In 1982, the UN introduced
a resolution called the World Charter for Nature. This mandated, among
much else, that “Nature shall be respected and its essential processes shall
not be impaired.” “The genetic viability of the Earth shall not be compromised.”
And: “All areas of the Earth, both land and sea, shall be subject to these
principles of conservation.” Sounds good, no? But do you not see the totalitarian
agenda behind those honeyed words?
Oddly, the Charter
doesn’t mention climate. But it does contain some extreme statements, like:
“Activities which might have an impact on nature shall be controlled.” “Their
proponents [of activities likely to pose a significant risk to nature] shall
demonstrate that expected benefits outweigh potential damage to nature.” And:
“Where potential adverse effects are not fully understood, the activities
should not proceed.”
This is red meat
for those with tyrannical leanings. Very cleverly, it inverts the burden of
proof, and requires those they accuse of causing a risk to nature to prove a
negative. In the process, denying us one of our most basic human rights: the
presumption of innocence.
You can also see some
premonitions of policies we suffer under today. “Special protection shall be
given to … the habitats of rare or endangered species.” “The allocation of
areas of the earth to various uses shall be planned.” (By whom?) And: “Resources,
including water, which are not consumed as they are used shall be reused or
recycled.”
But the kicker is
at the end. “Each person has a duty to act in accordance with the provisions of
the present Charter; acting individually, in association with others or through
participation in the political process, each person shall strive to ensure that
the objectives and requirements of the present Charter are met.” Where on earth
did “democratic” politicians get the right to make such a huge, open-ended
commitment on behalf of every single individual they are supposed to be serving,
without at the very least full and open debate, objective and honest cost-benefit
analysis, and a referendum?
The resolution was
passed by 111 votes to 1, with 18 abstentions. Only the USA voted against. The
UK voted for the resolution! In my view, every government that signed up
to that resolution, including Thatcher’s, committed treason against the people
they were supposed to serve. They all breached two cardinal tenets of Enlightened
government: that government must always act for the benefit of, and with the
consent of, the governed.
Our Common Future
Our Common
Future was the 1987 UN report, that set the scene for the deep green agenda
that has brought us to where we are today. On its 30th anniversary,
I wrote a review of that report: [[iii]].
To give a brief
summary: Our Common Future was the nexus where two strands of UN
activity, one environmentalist and the other internationalist or globalist,
joined together. The early history of the environmentalist strand, I have
covered above. The globalist strand came out of Willy Brandt’s commission,
which in 1980 produced A Programme for
Survival, followed in 1983 by Common
Crisis North-South: Co-operation for World Recovery.
The chair of the 23-strong
commission that wrote Our Common Future was Norwegian prime minister Gro
Harlem Brundtland. She was a vice-president of the Socialist International, and
had several posts with the UN, including director-general of the World Health
Organization from 1998 to 2003, and UN special envoy on climate change from
2007 to 2010.
The report raised
concerns about 14 issues, including desertification, forest clearing, loss of
biodiversity, acid rain from pollution, catastrophic global warming caused by anthropogenic
CO2 emissions, ozone layer depletion, loss of coral reefs, and population
growth. It also introduced a novel concept of “sustainable development,” that “meets
the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their own needs.”
When, back in 2017,
I reviewed how far we had come in addressing these concerns, I found that desertification
no longer appears to be a problem. De-forestation has been greatly reduced.
Allegations of species or bio-diversity loss cannot be substantiated without
far more hard evidence. The problem labelled “acid rain” has been fixed, by
hugely cutting emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides; though the doomsayers
have sought to keep up their alarums, by re-badging the problem, first as “air
quality,” then most recently as “clean air.” Allegations of humans causing catastrophic
global warming are no longer scientifically credible: they are now an entirely
political matter. Ozone depletion, whatever its cause, seems to be all but
solved. Claims that coral reefs would be all but gone by the early 2000s have
been shown to be false. And population growth is not a problem in the developed
world; birth rates in almost all Western countries are below replacement
levels. Haven’t we done well?
Moreover, the 2022
famine in Sri Lanka has shown that catastrophic consequences come, not from
environmental damage caused by human civilization, but from policies
implemented in the name of the UN’s “sustainable development.” And yet, the activists
and alarmists continue to scream their accusations at the tops of their voices.
The IPCC and its First Assessment
Report
The UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded in 1988. It produced
its First Assessment Report in 1990.
At that time, scientists
could not detect any signal of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by human
civilization causing any temperature rise over and above “natural” variation.
The report projected a rise of 0.3 degrees C per decade in global temperatures,
leading to 2025 temperatures that would be a little over 1 degree C higher than
1990’s. According to the US National Centers for Environmental Information [[iv]], the actual temperature trend from July
1990 to June 2025 has been about three-quarters of this: 0.23 degrees C per
decade.
The Rio Earth Summit of 1992
Then there was
the UN’s 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which then UK prime minister John Major
attended. Indeed, Major was the first Western leader to announce that he would
be there. At that summit, Major and his aides signed us up to the extreme green
agenda that was on offer.
Our supposedly
democratic representatives signed us up to an internationalist project that,
inevitably, would cause great pain to the people they were supposed to be
serving. They must have known that. Yet they did it anyway.
A number of different
agreements were made. I’ll say a few words about four of them.
Framework Convention on Climate
Change
In the Framework
Convention on Climate Change, Western countries agreed to restrict their
greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Even at the time, this was already
a binding agreement.
The Convention sought
to achieve “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that
would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Required
“policies and measures to protect the climate system against human-induced
change.” And re-defined “climate change” as: “a change of climate which is
attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition
of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate
variability observed over comparable time periods.”
So, now we know.
Climate change, because of the way the UN defines it, has to be our fault! Again,
they denied us our right to the presumption of innocence.
This Convention also
set up the UN’s Conference of the Parties (CoP) meetings, which have led to
many subsequent commitments by governments.
Rio Declaration on Environment and
Development
The Rio
Declaration on Environment and Development brought to prominence the UN’s all-embracing
goal called sustainable development.
“The right to development must be fulfilled so
as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of present and
future generations.” And: “States should reduce and eliminate unsustainable
patterns of production and consumption and promote appropriate demographic
policies.” A recipe for global tyranny and slavery, methinks; if not also for genocide.
Meanwhile, the Declaration highlights the important roles the UN envisaged for
women, youth and indigenous people. Sexist, ageist and racist, no?
Moreover, this
Declaration brought about the first stage of the perversion of the
precautionary principle, which successive governments have used ever since to
“justify” restrictions on our rights and freedoms, without ever having to
objectively assess risks, or costs versus benefits.
That perversion
is a large enough subject, that I shall later devote a whole essay to it.
Agenda 21
Agenda 21
was a blueprint for the kind of world the élites have
long wanted, and are now trying, to enforce on us. They envisaged a deeply
green and feminist world, with recycling all but a religion, most of us crammed
into cities and using “high-occupancy public transport,” and a “culture of
safety.”
The Convention on Biological
Diversity
The Convention
on Biological Diversity reported a concern that “biological diversity is
being significantly reduced by certain human activities,” without saying what
those activities were. And exhorted contracting parties to seek out activities
which might reduce biological diversity, and to regulate or manage them.
That sounds like a
wet dream for bureaucratic meddlers, no? Which has, indeed, eventuated.
To sum up
Everything that
took place on the green agenda prior to 1992, was part of the build up to the
Rio Earth Summit. I find it impossible to believe that all this wasn’t
carefully planned, not only by Maurice Strong and other UN functionaries, but
by very many politicians and government officials in countries around the
world. Including successive UK governments, Labour and Conservative.
At Rio in 1992, our
“representatives” signed us up to a whole raft of commitments, that they must
surely have known were utterly opposed to the interests of those they were
supposed to represent and serve. They set something they called “the
environment” up on a pedestal, like a god. They made out that this was more
important than the human environment, the rights and freedoms that we
need. So, they set us the people of the UK, without any chance to object, on a
course that would inevitably lead to us losing our prosperity, rights and freedoms.
And they did it gladly!
As I like to put it, they sold us all down the Rio.
[[i]]
https://libertarianism.uk/2023/04/13/climate-crisis-what-climate-crisis-part-three-the-back-story-up-to-1992/
[[ii]]
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocalyptic-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-the-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-2/
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