Paris’s scary climate agenda – by Peter Foster (National Post – October 7, 2015)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Details of two international agreements were released on Monday. One, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which reduces trade barriers between 12 signatories, including Canada, got lots of ink. The other, which purports to control global weather, end the era of fossil fuels, and place all human activity under bureaucratic control, got very little.

The pretensions of the latter text, released by the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, ADP, which is assigned to come up with an agreement to put to the vast UN climate meeting in Paris in December, are mind-boggling. The fact that they attracted little attention means either that the media and public have no idea of the climate agenda’s implications, or that nobody takes the agenda seriously. Probably both. After all, the UN has been promoting the “urgent threat of climate change” for more than 25 years.

While the text of the TPP has yet to be finalized, that of the Paris meeting is skeletal. But, like skeletons, it is scary.

If anybody doubts the significance of the changes to which the puppeteers of Paris aspire, they should refer to remarks made last week by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, who suggested that the climate thrust could destroy massive value as oil and gas assets are “stranded” by climate legislation.

Carney, former Governor of the Bank of Canada, has been lauded by segments of the Canadian mainstream media as a “rock star.” Indeed, he does bear some similarity – at least in orientation — to icon Neil Young, who has become deranged over the oil sands and recently signed his name to Naomi Klein’s loopy Leap Manifesto.

Carney would perhaps see his status as more analogous to another anti-capitalist crusader, Pope Francis, the man who put the “vestment” in “divestment.”

In fact, this is not the first time that Carney has addressed the risk of stranded assets. After a similar Bank of England claim earlier this year, Carney gave evidence before a House of Lords committee. Nigel Lawson, the redoubtable former Chancellor of the Exchequer and founder of skeptical think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation, noted that the bank’s projections were entirely at odds with those of the International Energy Agency, which saw decades of fossil-fuelled growth. Lawson suggested that Carney should stick to his financial mandate, and that the Bank should stop spouting “green claptrap.”

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