Climate Conversation Group

Christopher Monckton, at the Science and Public Policy Institute, is despondent about the uses being made of the global warming “crisis”. He fumes about the supranational aspirations of the United Nations and speaks darkly of a “fledgling World Government”. I recommend you download the pdf and read him directly; it’s not only a demonstration of excellent writing but also illuminates the situation.

Does he exaggerate in referring to international arrangements, through treaties, which aim to control our emissions of greenhouse gases, as “this constitutional monstrosity, [this] abnegation of life, this repudiation of liberty, this cancellation of the pursuit of happiness”?

These are strong words — if strong be strong enough. The viscount is become peerlessly vexed. Yet it is hard to disagree with him. I wish with all my heart that he is wrong but I cannot fault his reasoning.

The behind-closed-doors-treaty-drafting will be going on, as he says, right now, just in the same way as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was raised in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

In actual fact the IPCC was raised by people connected with the WMO and the UNEP — organisations, and especially acronyms, decide nothing, only people do. Acronyms can obscure reality. When we realise that people make decisions, then getting them changed doesn’t seem so hard. Some of the gravitas sinks away and the organisation becomes less imposing.

People meet and talk and say what can we do, as people always did. This is what Monckton tries to remove: the mantle of authority we place on organisations at the level of governments and above. They do have power, but also they have human beings, men and women with opinions and desires, at their helms.

Importantly, these international organisations do not have one most important attribute: they do not have our permission to make our national decisions. They have no right to make decisions properly ours to make.

So we don’t need to let them. We won’t let them. Thank you, members of the IPCC, for your advice. But we’ll make our own decisions regarding our sources of energy, our industrial methods, our trading partners and how we treat our water sources, atmosphere, land and other natural resources.

Now go away.