Bureaucrats Swindle Greens in Cancun. By Walter Russell Mead, American Interest, 12/12/10. “The climate conference in Cancun was a turning point for the world’s greens. There were two possible outcomes. One was a total political meltdown in Cancun that would have been hideously embarrassing in the short run but that in the long term would have cleared the way for more hopeful approaches to carbon issues. The other was a cobbled together pseudo-deal of some kind that would have avoided short term embarrassment but over the long run would doom the greens to a future of frustration and futility… Guess who won?...
“For the bureaucrats and NGO staff it’s a clear and resounding win… The UN process has kept just enough diplomatic credibility to make several new rounds of vast, unfocused global gabfests of bureaucrats and NGO administrators inevitable. More pre-meeting meetings will be held; more secretariats will employ new staff; more non-papers will be circulated, marked up and revised. Paychecks will be mailed; travel vouchers issued. Life will be good. It’s probably a win for the Obama administration, too. For now, the President got the green monkey off his back. President Obama hasn’t delivered cap and trade or a carbon tax to his green backers, and the early signs are that the EPA is backing off from fights with the Republicans in Congress -- but Cancun didn’t collapse into complete and utter chaos, so the President can, just, argue that his administration is keeping green hopes alive…
“The ‘success’ of Cancun is a best case scenario from the skeptic’s point of view. The cost of funding endless UN gabfests in exotic tourist locations (next up: South Africa in 2012) is trivial compared to the cost of any serious efforts to deal with carbon emissions on the scale current scientific theory suggests would be needed. Bureaucrats will dance, journalists will spin and carbon will spew, and the greens will be unable to escape this dysfunctional UN process for years and maybe decades to come.”
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