Agreement puts ‘international wealth transfers’ over ‘sound science‘;
U.S. Senate should reject
ESSEN, GERMANY — The United Nations today released the final “draft” of the “Adoption of the Paris Agreement, the end result of a climate conference called COP-21 that ran from November 30 through December 12. The agreement states “deep reductions in global emissions” of carbon dioxide are necessary to prevent the “potentially irreversible threat to humankind” of climate change. The plenary session at COP-21 was expected to take up the agreement at 17:30 GMT+1.
Staffers and friends of The Heartland Institute have been in Europe monitoring the story, and on December 7 held a “counter conference” in Paris featuring climate scientists and policy experts from around the world. Heartland has also hosted the 11th International Conference on Climate Change (with the European Institute for Climate and Energy, or EIKE) in Essen, Germany on December 11 and 12.
The following statement is by James Taylor, vice president and senior fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute. If you require additional comments, or would like to interview Taylor directly, please contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at [email protected] or call his U.S.-based cell phone at 312/731-9364.
“The final draft of the proposed ‘Paris Agreement’ gives disastrous primacy to politics, political correctness, and international wealth transfers at the expense of sound science. This proposed Agreement should be dead on arrival if submitted to the United States Senate.
“Among the proposed Agreement’s unacceptable provisions:
“The proposed Agreement stresses an urgent need to keep temperatures ‘well below’ a 2-degree increase compared to pre-industrial times, yet human civilization first developed and excelled in temperatures warmer than that.
“The proposed Agreement repeatedly mentions a $100 billion per-year wealth transfer from developed to developing nations, yet does not clearly state whether that wealth transfer is an obligation under the proposed Agreement. Such ambiguous language could be interpreted as forcing the United States to commit to such a fund.
“The proposed Agreement claims it is important to enact ‘some of the concepts of “Climate Justice”,’ which would legally obligate the United States to enact extreme leftist wealth transfer and “social justice” programs.
“The proposed Agreement requires the United States and other nations to enact ever-escalating carbon dioxide restrictions and wealth transfer obligations, even if real-world evidence continues to contradict the notion of a global warming crisis and exposes alarmist global warming speculation as unjustified.
“If the Obama administration requests approval of this Agreement by the United States Senate, the Senate should reject this treaty unanimously.”
The Heartland Institute is a 31-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site or call 312/377-4000.
