“I’m in Rio for the carnival,” said the voice on the telephone.
It was Henny-Penny
“You’re a few weeks late,” I said.
MS. H-P: I don’t mean that Carnival, I
mean the annual Doomsayers’ Carnival, where they get together to
stroke their chins and proclaim disaster for the planet if everyone
doesn’t adopt their political agenda. They do it every year and
their prescription is always the same.
ME: I’m surprised that you’re welcomed since you resigned as
founder and Recording Secretary of the Holy Order of The Sky Is
Falling, then denounced it and its pontiff, Al Gore. Now you’re a
leading global warming skeptic.
MS. H-P: I’m not being welcomed by the delegates. I’m here as
the climate correspondent of an important publication, The Egg
Layers’ Gazette. My boss, the farmer, is giving me the week
off to do it.
ME: So what’s on the conference agenda?
MS. H-P: The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, will propose
several things that will take our taxpayers’ breath away, along
with their money. One proposal would have industrialized countries
transfer about $2 billion a year to non-industrialized ones.
Another would be a new Carbon Tax that would cost U.S. taxpayers
$250 billion a year by the year 2020. A third “reform” in the name
of establishing a new “Green World Order” would result in price
increases for most anything derived from agriculture, fishing,
forestry, and other kinds of land and water use. All these
endeavors would be reorganized, according to the Moon plan, in
order to “contribute to a more level playing field between
established ‘brown’ technologies and newer, greener ones.”
Along with all this, there would be new global social spending
programs to provide nearly everything free for those put out of
work in fossil fuel industries, including “access to nutritious
food, health services, education, training, retraining and
unemployment benefits.”
ME: Sounds as if it will create a new class of people dependent
upon their government.
MS. H-P: That’s right.
ME: I thought these conferences were made up of
scientists.
MS. H-P: Some have been trained as scientists, but a lot of them
depend upon grants from governments and foundations which promote
global warming (now called “climate change”) and expect their
subsidized scientists to do the same.
Most of the those attending are seconded by their home countries
(many of them non-industrialized) to the United Nations, which
would oversee this One World operation. They are the authors of
these plans and this is their carnival.
ME: Haven’t they been pushing similar stuff for about a
decade?
MS. H-P: Yes, but China and India haven’t agreed to any of it
because don’t want their economic growth thwarted. So far, the U.S.
has said it won’t sign on unless they do. Even if that were to
happen, I can’t imagine the U.S. Senate ratifying such a radical
treaty in an election year. On the other hand, if Obama is
re-elected and brings with him a strengthened Democrat majority in
the Senate, next year it may be Katie, bar the door!
ME: Still, the alarmists have quite a cheering section.
MS. H-P: They sure do. The Sierra Club and its allies profess to
be concerned about the environment. The specific concerns —
spotted owls and such — are just devices for pushing their real
agenda, which is to reduce industrial production and get us all
used to having a lower standard of living.
You see, they really believe that the planet’s resources are
finite; that we have overused them and overpopulated the world it
and that we must now in the opposite direction.
ME. Some carnival. I hope it will prove as fruitless as all the
previous ones.
MS. H-P: Even though I’m here as a journalist, you can bet I’ll
be working behind the scenes to make sure of it.
Mr. Hannaford first met Henny-Penny several years
ago when she was touting global warming.
