Future Global Environmental Entity seeks Immunity from Prosecution

By LUIS R. MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | MARCH 24, 2012

The Green Climate Fund, an entity created during the last Climate Change meeting in Durban, South Africa, is seeking diplomatic style immunity, just as the United Nations itself has it. Although the UN is the organization that sponsored the Durban Climate Change talks, the Green Climate Fund does not officially belong to the UN and therefore does not have the right to be immune from prosecution.

All things aside, an important question to ask is, why is a supposed environmental agency seeking diplomatic immunity? What kind of actions is it carrying out or will it carry out that prompts it to request such a privilege? Let’s start with the money issue. The Green Climate Fund is in charge of distributing some $ 100 billion a year, which it will receive from countries that adhere to the agreements signed during the climate conferences such as the one conducted in Durban and the next one to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil next June.

From those $ 100 billion that member states have pledged, the Fund intends to spend some $30 billion in projects it calls “fast start-up” endeavours. Those tasks are supposedly oriented towards helping underdeveloped nations to mitigate the effects of an imaginary climate crisis that is underway in the minds of people who believe that humanity is causing the planet to get warmer. This assertion has been at the very least found to be erroneous by thousands of independent scientists who separately observed historical data and recent measurements of water levels, CO2 emissions and planetary weather and have determined that not only is the planet not warming, but that it is indeed cooling off. (Please do your own research).

The Green Climate Fund’s only purpose is, as UN members have confessed, a plan to redistribute the wealth of the planet, except that wealth does not seem to be going to the neediest people in the poorest countries. Additionally, politicians and unelected participants in previous UN meetings plan to obtain the funding for their Green Climate Fund from taxpayer money taken from middle and lower classes in developed countries, to give it to rich folks in underdeveloped nations. How will that contribute to saving the planet from the nonexistent condition they fear so much? (Again, do your own research).

So far, 24 nations are part of an interim board of trustees ( emphasis added on interim) which in future meetings will be cut down to a handful of representatives (centralized power) that will then become the permanent members of such a board of trustees at the Green Climate Fund. After being conformed last year in Durban, the interim body will have its first meeting next month in Switzerland to elect its secretariat which should be up and running by next November

This interim body (again emphasis given on interim) already expects to spend some $6.7 million of the taxpayer resources starting now and until June 2013.

“Before it is fully operational, the GCF’s creators — 194 countries that belong to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — want it to be immune from legal challenges and lawsuits, not to mention outside inspections, much like the United Nations itself cannot be affected by decisions rendered by a sovereign nation’s government or judicial system,” reports FoxNews.

The UNFCCC, another creation of the UN, under which the GCF operates, does not enjoy the privilege of having immunity either. This means that is not protected by the General Convention that provides the United Nations with diplomatic immunity against anything and everything. Neither the UNFCCC nor the Green Climate Fund are at this point under any type of immunity or protection, which makes their work and personnel accountable to international law and even perhaps decisions made by independent nation states. The UN cannot be affected by such decisions. The General Convention that protects the UN was established after the end of World War II.

In order for the UNFCCC to have diplomatic immunity, the organization would need to call for a vote where all members of the Kyoto Protocol must approve such a resolution. That vote must be accepted, approved or ratified before it had any legal effect. Another way in which the UNFCCC could obtain their dreamed immunity is by asking the UN General Assembly to vote on its initiative and again, all members are required to vote for the resolution to make it binding.

Neither the UN itself nor the UNFCCC seems to have a finalized written draft that explains what would their request for immunity entail. The organization is said to be working on a final document that may be presented to the UN in the next few months.

You may share our original content as long as you respect our copyright policy as shown on our website footer. Please don’t cut articles from The Real Agenda to redistribute by email or post to the web if you don’t follow our policies.

Luis Miranda is the founder and editor of The Real Agenda. For more of his stories, subscribe to our article feed. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Email article ideas and insights through the Contact page.

Get Your Hands off My Water

Prepare for the ‘Water Wars’ says intelligence analysis

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | MARCH 23, 2012

A report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) warns about a new kind of wars to come in a decade’s time. The report released on Thursday cites water shortages, polluted water and floods as the potential causes for increasing conflict in countries where the US has explicit vested interests. Intelligence analysts not related to the ODNI are already questioning what this report means for the type of activities the United States carries out abroad or that may already be carrying out either in representation of the country itself, or in combination with transnational corporations which dominate the water market.

“During the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will almost certainly experience water problems – shortages, poor water quality, or floods – that will contribute to the risk of instability and state failure and increase regional tensions,” reads the report from the office of the director of national intelligence states. According the report, there are at least seven important river basins in the Middle East Asia and Africa that the United States deems important for its security interests. Those river basins are the Indus, Jordan, Mekong, Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Amu Darya and Brahmaputra basins.

It is likely that the strong concentration of water resources in few corporate hands together with ongoing military conflict in those regions of the world will contribute greatly to bring even more instability to the people of those countries. There is a change that conflict will not be limited to fighting inside the countries themselves, but that it can expand to turn nation against nation. Even though countries’ borders are clearly drawn today, water basins and the rivers those basins supply generally go through many countries at a time and this is the key point when determining whether there will be war or not. The intelligence report says that in a decade or so water in shared basins will increasingly be used not as a resource, but as leverage over friends and foes.

“It’s very difficult to be specific about where because it depends upon what individual states do and what actions are taken on water issues between states,” said a senior U.S. intelligence analyst. If water as a resource becomes more scarce as a result of monopolization, a technique used by the United States government with other essential resources such as land and food, there is a potential for water to be used as a weapon. This weapon is considered even more powerful than many others because water is perhaps the most essential resource to guarantee the survival of people. The report warns that more powerful may decide to block the flow of water from rivers to other less powerful countries which would mean immediate scarcity for the weaker nations.

The intelligence report did not waste the opportunity to fear monger by saying that available water sources could also be poisoned by terrorists — because there is a terrorist under every single bed and rock. “Because terrorists are seeking more high visibility items to attack, in some cases we identified fragile water infrastructure that could potentially be a target for terrorism activity.” Can terrorists contaminate water to a greater degree that what it is now with fluoride, lithium, aluminum and other heavy metals that water companies already put in it? The report went even further to warn that terrorists could also blow dams as a way to threaten populations. It says that terrorists would take advantage of population displacement to target large groups of people who move away from their lands to seek fresh water in weak nations.

The report also took the opportunity to connect water scarcity to population growth, a talking point commonly used by the fake environmental movement that seeks to impose policies originated at the core of the United Nations. This organization, through numerous initiatives, already controls large masses of land that include National Parks and Conservation Areas. It is exactly those large areas the ones that possess vast amounts of fresh water sources. The U.N. also intends to amass control over water resources through policies such as Agenda 21, and the Law of the Sea Treaty. In theory, this convention defines the rights and responsibilities of nations in their use of the world’s oceans. It also provides policies for businesses, the environment, and the management of oceanic natural resources. In practice, the Law of the Sea Treaty gives power to the U.N. to govern over the oceans.

The report also took a shot at Climate Change as a the origin of future water driven conflicts. It is the belief of much of the environmental movement that the naturally changing world climate — a change they blame on humans –  will result in lack of adequate water for people to drink or to use in their daily activities. Environmentalists have changed their doomsday warnings from Global Warming to Climate Change, or even adventure themselves to talk about these two as if they were the same thing. The intelligence report does the same, referring to Climate Change as a potential source of problems for populations that do not have access to clean water. “Food markets are threatened by depletion of ground water in some agriculture areas of the world. Food production will decline, increasing the stress on global markets,” asserts the report. More of a reason for people to prepare and become independent and self-sufficient instead of waiting for the government or the corporations to offer magical solutions.

The report which concentrates heavily on how U.S. interests may or may not be threatened, concludes that by 2040 water shortages and pollution will harm the economic performance of some important trading partners. It does not say which countries these partners are, though. As it is commonly done nowadays, the report does not propose any measures to stave off the consequences of water wars. It simply mentions that current actions such as “improved water management” could compensate for the increasing demand in decades to come. The intelligence paper cites technological advances as a possible tool to aid large scale agriculture, but does not highlight anything that could help small and mid-size farmers.

In the past few months, third world countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia have moved to secure their own water resources, kicking out multinational corporations such as Nestle, which sought to monopolize the water market in those nations. But the 10 intelligence agencies that helped write the report conclude that underdeveloped nations will turn to the United States to lead the effort to resolve water problems. The study about water security and how it impacts American interests around the world was requested by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has voiced her concern about how lack of clean water may threaten U.S. interests overseas. Clinton announced Thursday what she called the U.S. Water Partnership, an initiative that according to her will bring private sector — corporations — and government agencies to confabulate about solutions to water problems.

Let’s hope the result of these talks do not end in policies such as the White House Security Memorandum 200, a document issued by the U.S. government where they explain how the United States will officially combat development in third world nations as well as curb population growth in those countries because the U.S. thought development and population growth threatened their national security. Based on the policies adopted under White House Memorandum 200, the U.S. has waged war against those countries through trade penalties, conditioning aid to the adoption of population control measures, artificially created famine and military destabilization operations, among others.

You may share our original content as long as you respect our copyright policy as shown on our website footer. Please don’t cut articles from The Real Agenda to redistribute by email or post to the web if you don’t follow our policies.

Luis Miranda is the founder and editor of The Real Agenda. For more of his stories, subscribe to our article feed. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Email article ideas and insights through the Contact page.


“World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe”

By GARY STIX | SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN | MARCH 17, 2012

Almost six years ago, I was the editor of a single-topic issue on energy for Scientific American that included an article by Princeton University’s Robert Socolow that set out a well-reasoned plan for how to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below a planet-livable threshold of 560 ppm. The issue came replete with technical solutions that ranged from a hydrogen economy to space-based solar.

If I had it to do over, I’d approach the issue planning differently, my fellow editors permitting. I would scale back on the nuclear fusion and clean coal, instead devoting at least half of the available space for feature articles on psychology, sociology, economics and political science. Since doing that issue, I’ve come to the conclusion that the technical details are the easy part. It’s the social engineering that’s the killer. Moon shots and Manhattan Projects are child’s play compared to needed changes in the way we behave.

A policy article authored by several dozen scientists appeared online March 15 in Science to acknowledge this point: “Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.”

The report summarized 10 years of research evaluating the capability of international institutions to deal with climate and other environmental issues, an assessment that found existing capabilities to effect change sorely lacking. The authors called for a “constitutional moment” at the upcoming 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio in June to reform world politics and government. Among the proposals: a call to replace the largely ineffective U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development with a council that reports to the U.N. General Assembly, at attempt to better handle emerging issues related to water, climate, energy and food security. The report advocates a similar revamping of other international environmental institutions.

Unfortunately, far more is needed. To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as academic naivete. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere. Some of the things that would need to be contemplated: How do we overcome our hard-wired tendency to “discount” the future: valuing what we have today more than what we might receive tomorrow? Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries? How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.? Could we ensure against a malevolent dictator who might abuse the power of such organizations?

Behavioral economics and other forward-looking disciplines in the social sciences try to grapple with weighty questions. But they have never taken on a challenge of this scale, recruiting all seven billion of us to act in unison. The ability to sustain change globally across the entire human population over periods far beyond anything ever attempted would appear to push the relevant objectives well beyond the realm of the attainable. If we are ever to cope with climate change in any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we must focus, though. The relative efficiency of the next generation of solar cells is trivial by comparison.

Mad: Engineer Humans to Combat Climate Change?

by Ross Andersen
The Atlantic
March 13, 2012

The threat of global climate change has prompted us to redesign many of our technologies to be more energy-efficient. From lightweight hybrid cars to long-lasting LED’s, engineers have made well-known products smaller and less wasteful. But tinkering with our tools will only get us so far, because however smart our technologies become, the human body has its own ecological footprint, and there are more of them than ever before. So, some scholars are asking, what if we could engineer human beings to be more energy efficient? A new paper to be published in Ethics, Policy & Environment proposes a series of biomedical modifications that could help humans, themselves, consume less.
Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating. Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.
The lead author of the paper, S. Matthew Liao, is a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University. Liao is keen to point out that the paper is not meant to advocate for any particular human modifications, or even human engineering generally; rather, it is only meant to introduce human engineering as one possible, partial solution to climate change. He also emphasized the voluntary nature of the proposed modifications. Neither Liao or his co-authors,  Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford, approve of any coercive human engineering; they favor modifications borne of individual choices, not technocratic mandates. What follows is my conversation with Liao about why he thinks human engineering could be the most ethical and effective solution to global climate change.
Judging from your paper, you seem skeptical about current efforts to mitigate climate change, including market based solutions like carbon pricing or even more radical solutions like geoengineering. Why is that?

Liao: It’s not that I don’t think that some of those solutions could succeed under the right conditions; it’s more that I think that they might turn out to be inadequate, or in some cases too risky. Take market solutions—so far it seems like it’s pretty difficult to orchestrate workable international agreements to affect international emissions trading. The Kyoto Protocol, for instance, has not produced demonstrable reductions in global emissions, and in any event demand for petrol and for electricity seems to be pretty inelastic. And so it’s questionable whether carbon taxation alone can deliver the kind of reduction that we need to really take on climate change.
With respect to geoengineering, the worry is that it’s just too risky—many of the technologies involved have never been attempted on such a large scale, and so you have to worry that by implementing these techniques we could endanger ourselves or future generations. For example it’s been suggested that we could alter the reflectivity of the atmosphere using sulfate aerosol so as to turn away a portion of the sun’s heat, but it could be that doing so would destroy the ozone layer, which would obviously be problematic. Others have argued that we ought to fertilize the ocean with iron, because doing so might encourage a massive bloom of carbon-sucking plankton. But doing so could potentially render the ocean inhospitable to fish, which would obviously also be quite problematic.
One human engineering strategy you mention is a kind of pharmacologically induced meat intolerance. You suggest that humans could be given meat alongside a medication that triggers extreme nausea, which would then cause a long-lasting aversion to meat eating. Why is it that you expect this could have such a dramatic impact on climate change?

Liao: There is a widely cited U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization report that estimates that 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and CO2 equivalents come from livestock farming, which is actually a much higher share than from transportation. More recently it’s been suggested that livestock farming accounts for as much as 51% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. And then there are estimates that as much as 9% of human emissions occur as a result of deforestation for the expansion of pastures for livestock. And that doesn’t even to take into account the emissions that arise from manure, or from the livestock directly. Since a large portion of these cows and other grazing animals are raised for consumption, it seems obvious that reducing the consumption of these meats could have considerable environmental benefits.
Even a minor 21% to 24% reduction in the consumption of these kinds of meats could result in the same reduction in emissions as the total localization of food production, which would mean reducing “food miles” to zero. And, I think it’s important to note that it wouldn’t necessarily need to be a pill. We have also toyed around with the idea of a patch that might stimulate the immune system to reject common bovine proteins, which could lead to a similar kind of lasting aversion to meat products.
Your paper also discusses the use of human engineering to make humans smaller. Why would this be a powerful technique in the fight against climate change?

Liao: Well one of the things that we noticed is that human ecological footprints are partly correlated with size. Each kilogram of body mass requires a certain amount of food and nutrients and so, other things being equal, the larger person is the more food and energy they are going to soak up over the course of a lifetime. There are also other, less obvious ways in which larger people consume more energy than smaller people—for example a car uses more fuel per mile to carry a heavier person, more fabric is needed to clothe larger people, and heavier people wear out shoes, carpets and furniture at a quicker rate than lighter people, and so on.
And so size reduction could be one way to reduce a person’s ecological footprint. For instance if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm, you could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means lower energy and nutrient needs.
Read Full Article →

Leon Panetta says Military Industrial Complex governs over US Congress

by Paul J. Watson
Infowars.com
March 8, 2012

The Pentagon is engaging in damage control after shocking testimony yesterday by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at a Senate Armed Services Committee congressional hearing during which it was confirmed that the U.S. government is now completely beholden to international power structures and that the legislative branch is a worthless relic.

During the hearing yesterday Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey brazenly admitted that their authority comes not from the U.S. Constitution, but that the United States is subservient to and takes its marching orders from the United Nations and NATO, international bodies over which the American people have no democratic influence.

Panetta was asked by Senator Jeff Sessions, “We spend our time worrying about the U.N., the Arab League, NATO and too little time, in my opinion, worrying about the elected representatives of the United States. As you go forward, will you consult with the United States Congress?”

US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

The Defense Secretary responded “You know, our goal would be to seek international permission. And we would come to the Congress and inform you and determine how best to approach this, whether or not we would want to get permission from the Congress.”

Despite Sessions’ repeated efforts to get Panetta to acknowledge that the United States Congress is supreme to the likes of NATO and the UN, Panetta exalted the power of international bodies over the US legislative branch.

“I’m really baffled by the idea that somehow an international assembly provides a legal basis for the United States military to be deployed in combat,” Sessions said. “I don’t believe it’s close to being correct. They provide no legal authority. The only legal authority that’s required to deploy the United States military is of the Congress and the president and the law and the Constitution.”

Panetta’s assertion that he would seek “international permission” before ‘informing’ Congress about the actions of the US military provoked a firestorm of controversy, prompting the Pentagon to engage in damage control by claiming Panetta’s comments were misinterpreted.

Read Complete Article →

Related Links:

Togel178

Pedetogel

Sabatoto

Togel279

Togel158

Colok178

Novaslot88

Lain-Lain

Partner Links