Happy with her own lot, our former Aunty Helen thinks “we,” i.e., everyone else, could do with less.
Attending the eco-gathering in Rio in her new guise as United Nations Development Programme head, Aunty Helen told media
frankly human development in the West -- we don't need more cars, more TVs, more whatever. Our needs are by and large satisfied, although the recession has put a lot of strains on that.
It sure has. As have earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, bushfires, and bullshit from the likes of her. Tell someone in Christchurch East or elsewhere struggling to make ends meet or to find affordable housing—or to pay their eco-inflated power bills—that they don’t need more “whatever.”
Clark and her fellow would-be world leaders are meeting in Rio to devise new eco-ways by which to bankrupt us, both Clark and her boss Ban Ki-moon saying “moving toward a green economy can be a source of growth, much-needed jobs, investment and export.” Yeah right.
It’s easy to dismiss the eco-fest (sucking in squillions of tons of the earth’s resources) as “cheap New Age green mysticism,” especially when the you read the public “final draft document” for the conference, released not at the end of the conference when you’d expect it but just as the conference is starting (another absurdity in a conference full of them).
Read the final draft document of the Rio+20 conference. You will be astonished by its utter vacuity. It is 49 pages of pap, expressing nothing but platitudes and mawkish sentimentality, with a dose of health-spa green religion. The only thing to interrupt the droning is the occasional vigorous shake of the collection tin for the United Nations and its army of bureaucrats. And prime ministers are sitting there, nodding, clapping and signing this drivel?
Yes, they are. And because they do think it’s just cheap vote-buying drivel, they’re signing up to much more as well. Which is not just drivel:
It is known that the Rio text includes several items dropped from the Durban text, including proposals for the UN to levy a 2% tax on all financial transactions worldwide, which would cripple the financial markets by imposing costs many times the profits on each transaction…[and other] strange proposals in the Durban text – which gave “Mother Earth” the right to sue Western nations in a new “International Climate Court”, and suggested that CO2 concentration should be halved (which would wipe out most plant and animal species on Earth).
So the figleaf* of “sustainable development” is still with us, even if “a good portion of the activists attending this time are not at all happy with the concept of sustainable development anymore,” and even if the claims for calamity—the desperate pleas for urgency repeated at this conference’s opening yesterday by Wellington teenager and green shill Brittany Tilford—all of which were so prominent at the first Rio Summit 20 years ago have all been proven moot by their non-arrival. Largely absent from the conference this time, for example, is widespread fear-mongering about global warming.
Perhaps because they’ve realised, like former warmist and green religionist James Lovelock, that these fears like all the other fears are just meaningless green drivel.
But dangerous drivel.
* * * * *
* "Sustainability" Chris Trotter reminds us is not just a meaningless feel-good buzzword, it has "revolutionary social and economic implications": It means, he says “that private enterprise must acknowledge the need for restraint: for regulations that are no longer light-fingered but heavy-handed. Sustainability," he concludes, " isn't just a fast track to re-election, it's a clarion call for revolution.”
4 comments:
As you say, tell all the elderly people around New Zealand who are freezing this week because they can't afford to heat their homes because of the policies Of Clarke and her ilk. Or, better yet, tell the parents of a child dying of cancer that we don't need any more development. Does she think CAT scanners, smart drugs and gene therapy grow in sustainable forests?
If only these people lived the life they propose to compel everyone else to do.., but they never do, do they.
What's amazing is that people go on voting for more of the same, decade after decade. Fortunately for me, I'm able to cope with their ideologies better than they can themselves. Unfortunately for me, eventually they will take everyone down the gurgler of war and catastrophic calamity with them as they do every time they start marching to the beat of a "strong man" or "strong woman" if Helen Clark gets her way.
The amazing technological and globalisation revolutions have allowed the kleptocratic suffocatocracy to run the system far longer than they would otherwise have been able to do, with "inflation" being "held in check" but really only because technological developments have enabled dramatic improvements such as megacomputers in pockets and a billion Chinese to get a Made in China real job in a Foxconn factory instead of eking out a borderline existence in a rice paddy.
The strange thing is that Helen Clark almost certainly thinks she is doing good. Meanwhile NZ's debts mount by over a $billion a month, which is not really "sustainable development" though it was set up by her and the socialist supporters.
Will Aunty Helen surrender most of her US$500,000 per annum tax free salary, and stay in 4 star hotels and fly business class instead of 5 star hotels and first class, or is all that "just enough" for her?
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