Maurice Strong: Godfather of the international environmental movement

Editor:
I have posted the last part of this paper. It is important that you follow the link to read the full paper. In order to understand what is going today it is important to understand the history that got us here. Maurice Strong has been a very busy man over the years. The environmental movement is about power, money and control.
By Neil Hra
web posted December 24, 2001
Key Environmental Strategy: Strengthen the U.N.

Twenty-five years ago Strong sketched out a global political framework that would curtail the sovereignty of nations and expand the power of the U.N. and other international organizations. Strong’s downpayment on this vision have been the policies he subsequently has helped advance at a series of U.N.-sponsored conferences from Stockholm and Rio to Kyoto and, next year, Johannesburg.

Strong appears to rule out a formal world government when he suggests that “the technological society [his shorthand expression for life in a globalized world] cannot be managed by traditional systems of hierarchical control.” Instead, “it requires a network of institutions, governmental and non-governmental, local, regional, national and international, to perform the wide variety tasks and functions necessary to the operation of that society.”

This new network does not exactly end nation-state sovereignty. Instead, it should lead to the creation of a formalized “system of international organizations” whose purpose will be to “provide the instrumentalities for carrying out those common tasks which it is either not feasible or advantageous for [individual nation-states] to carry out themselves.”

There’s no need to describe the peril of handing over U.S. sovereignty – a sovereignty that guarantees the freedoms of U.S. citizens – to a centralized and often corrupt foreign bureaucracy whose agenda is frequently at odds with U.S. policies and values. Strong’s enthusiasm for the U.N. completely ignores its history of failure in numerous policy areas. In the years since Strong’s 1974 speech the U.N. has failed to alleviate poverty – and ecological devastation – in Africa and other developing nations. And its peacekeeping efforts in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia failed to deter aggression in the 1990s.

Global Warming Alarmism

Critics say Strong and other environmentalists are transfixed by disaster scenarios built on junk science. Nowhere is this more apparent than Strong’s attitude toward global warming.

Global warming is the theory that rising man-made carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, autos and other industrial activities will cause a dangerous increase in temperatures that will wreak havoc on the planet’s climate in myriad ways, from melting the polar ice caps to causing powerful storms and severe droughts.

In Where on Earth Are We Going? Strong presents a fictional “Report to the Shareholders, Earth Inc.” bearing the date January 1, 2031 and built around the imagined impact of global warming. In Strong’s telling North America will be a hell on earth. The Midwest will be struggling through a tenth straight year of drought, and New Orleans will be ravaged by tropical diseases to such an extent that it becomes little more than a “shrinking fortress held only with poisonous amounts of lethal pesticides.” In Los Angeles, “water vendors with armed guards roam the streets…” Both cities are better off than the state of Florida, which will have fallen under the sea.

Strong advocates ratification of the Kyoto treaty to stop the impending crisis. Negotiated by the Clinton Administration in December 1997, the treaty requires the U.S. to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30 to 40 per cent by 2010. But according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, that could cost the economy $400 billion per year, raise electric utility rates by 86 per cent, hike the cost of heating oil by 76 per cent, and impose a permanent “Kyoto gasoline tax” of 66 cents per gallon. In total, each U.S. household would have to spend an extra $1,740 per year on energy. WEFA, an economic information and consulting firm, reports that 2.4 million jobs would be lost and manufacturing wages cut by 2.1 per cent.

This gives Strong no pause. Indeed, he seems to want to inflict economic damage on Western industrial democracies. When it comes to environmental policy, Strong says, “Economic growth is not the cure, it is the disease.”

Strong supports Kyoto despite the scientific evidence. The U.N. has repeatedly scaled down its prediction of rapid temperature increases in coming decades. In 1990, for instance, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that global temperatures would rise six degrees farenheit by 2100. Just three years later, the IPCC adjusted its projection downward to a rise of less than two degrees farenheit. NASA satellites, the most accurate measure of global temperature, show that the Earth has slightly cooled since 1979, contradicting doomsayers who predicted global warming should have caused the temperature to increase six-tenths of a degree by now.

Scientists who once strongly believed in the theory are now more skeptical. Dr. James Hansen, the NASA scientist who inaugurated the global warming debate in 1988, said then that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would cause the temperature to increase and lead to increased drought by the end of the 20th century. In 1998, Hansen candidly admitted his predictions had not come true because he didn’t know enough about the climate system. In 2000, Hansen went further and said carbon dioxide is not responsible for global warming. Hansen still subscribes to the global warming theory but he believes the treaty should be abandoned because it targets the wrong greenhouse gas and harms international relations by turning developing and developed nations into “adversaries.”

Conclusion

Environmental politicians like Maurice Strong don’t follow the science. They push for power. Strong has devoted his life to establishing international legal procedures to enforce his vision. And his imagination is haunted by a parade of environmental horribles. Scientists doubt they may ever come to pass, but Strong, like many contemporary environmentalists, is motivated more by fervent conviction than scientific evidence. Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” never exploded, and the Club of Rome’s reports on the limits to growth are famously wrong. Not one catastrophe hypothesized by Strong and other environmentalists has occurred. But that hasn’t stopped them from building the environmental movement. Continue Reading

Neil Hrab is a graduate of the University of Toronto and served as a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow at Capital Research Center.