As President Obama prepared to join more than 100 heads of state at the United Nations’ Climate Change Summit in New York City on September 23, the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), often described as the world’s most influential think tank, was churning out global-warming alarmist propaganda at full-tilt speed. On its various blog sites and through several events sponsored at its New York City headquarters, the council featured columns, interviews, and speeches by a wide array of prominent politicians and public intellectuals — all aimed at shoring up support for the rapidly melting credibility of the theory of anthropogenic (human caused) global warming, or AGW.
Desperate Dash to Paris Summit
On September 19, CFR.org editor Robert McMahon interviewed Michael A. Levi, director of the CFR’s Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and the one of the council’s principal voices on global warming and other environmental and energy issues. In the interview, entitled “Can Summit Spur Climate Policy Changes?” McMahon asked, “The next item on the calendar for climate commitments is the meeting in Paris next year, right?”
That’s right. The goal set in Durban [South Africa, in 2011] was to have participants agree to some sort of legal instrument by the Paris summit in late 2015 that would include goals for cutting emissions. The countries that are participating are supposed to come up with their commitments, or what they’re calling contributions, by the first quarter of 2015, so that there can be discussion about them and deliberate efforts to integrate them into some sort of agreement. In the run up to the Copenhagen talks [in 2009], many of the most important announcements, emissions-cutting goals, didn’t come until a month or less before the summit. We expect those numbers to come out almost a year before.
As we reported in August (“Desperate Dash of Global Warming”), the global-warming alarmists have been frustrated by Mother Nature’s failure to cooperate with their computer model predictions of unceasing, catastrophic warming. They have been forced to acknowledge that there has been no measurable global warming for the past 18 years. In fact, some of the leading AGW theorists admit there may even be a cooling trend underway. Nonetheless, they are determined to continue with their efforts to establish a global regulatory regime that would subject all human activity to monitoring and control under United Nations mandates. That means kicking the climate-hysteria machine into high gearto produce at least the appearance of public support for the UN Climate Summit in Paris in 2015.
In his interview with McMahon, Levi expressed approval of President Obama’s unconstitutional use of EPA regulations to legislate new greenhouse gas rules for power plants that he was unable to get Congress to pass. Of course, the CFR has ever been in favor of centralizing and concentrating power, and doing away with the “unnecessary” checks and balances that are foundational to our constitutional system of government. As early as its 1928 Survey of American Relations, the council complained — after listing the U.S. Constitution’s various separations of power — that, “all these militate against responsible government.” In the council’s view, “responsible government” is that which is run by CFR “wise men,” unhindered by checks and balances. The CFR report advocated elimination of most restraints on executive power. Thus, it is not surprising that the organization has supported — and its members, from both inside and outside of government have led — the efforts to transform the United States from a constitutional Republic to an autocracy, while at the same time leading the drive to establish a world government under the United Nations.
On September 22, the CFR’s speaker program presented “A Conversation With Laurent Fabius,” the French foreign minister, who will chair the UN’s Climate Summit in Paris next year. Fabius, who served as prime minister of France in the 1980s and president of the National Assembly in the 1990s, is a member of the French Socialist Party, one of the principal member parties of the Socialist International. Sharing the CFR’s globalist perspective, the Socialist Internationalhas played a central role in transforming the United Nations into a world government and is in the forefront of those groups promoting the idea that the supposed threat posed by global warming justifies ever-greater restrictions on personal liberty and national sovereignty.
Monsieur Fabius told the CFR’s assembled guests:
Forgive my pigeon English. OK, I’ve been told to speak about COP-21 [Conference Of Parties on Climate Change] because France will chair next year in December 2015 the great international conference about climate change.
In fact, I’m not speaking about climate change. I’m speaking more about climate disruption because it’s real disruption. And it’s not for 2100; it’s for now….
And I think the awareness of the problem of — of climate disruption is more and more acute…. And my belief is very clear. It’s an enormous problem not for the day after tomorrow, but for now, not only because of environmental problems, but because if we don’t do things, it will change in the worst way a lot of things.
(See “Is It ‘Global Warming,’ ‘Climate Change,’ or ‘Climate Disruption?'”)
Foreign Minister Fabius continued:
The problem, you know it, is that today the risk is that if we are not acting very — in a very powerful way, the warming of the climate will not be only two degrees, but maybe five, four — five or six degrees. And when it comes to these figures, it’s a real catastrophe. Today we already see that because there is more and more extreme phenomenons. When it’s a question of rains, when it’s a question of typhoons, when it’s a question of growth, if you compare things today [to previous times], they are more and more extreme. And therefore, we have to act in order to — because it’s the main thing, to go to a low-carbon economy, if we want to keep under two degrees, which already will be very difficult.
The problem for Fabius and his CFR sponsors is that despite the advent of cable TV weather stations and their saturation coverage of every weather disaster, there is no evidence that “extreme weather” events — tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, etc. — have increased in recent times. (See here and here.)
The CFR-dominated establishment media have been assisting this buildup of AGW propaganda for the Paris Summit for months. On June 22, for instance, the New York Times ran an op-ed by CFR member Henry Paulson (the former Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO) entitled “The Coming Climate Crash: Lessons for Climate Change in the 2008 Recession.”
The Paulson column served as a promo for “Risky Business,” the high-profile report co-authored by Paulson and fellow CFR member Michael Bloomberg (along with hedge fund billionaire and Democrat fundraiser Tom Steyer) promoting AGW alarmism to the business community.
On August 19, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by CFR member (and former CIA director) John M. Deutch, entitled “Obama’s Second-Term Energy Policy Is Working,” in which Deutch opined that Obama’s draconian new EPA regulations “will strengthen the U.S. position in international climate negotiations that seek to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions.”
A more comprehensive look at the Council on Foreign Relations’ central role in promoting climate alarmism to advance the cause of “global governance” can be found in our report entitled “CFR Pushes End to Sovereignty at UN’s Doha Climate Summit.”
That article reported:
Foremost among the groups that have been driving the global-warming alarm bandwagon is the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). There are many think tanks affecting national policies, but the CFR, long ranked as the premier brain trust, is still the most influential. The UN Climate Summit in Doha will carry the CFR imprint in many ways, as have virtually all previous global conferences. Representing the U.S. government in Doha is President Obama’s Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern. Stern, who was previously a White House assistant to President Bill Clinton, played a role in U.S. negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. He was selected as climate envoy by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Todd Stern is a longtime member of the CFR.
The article continued:
Stern’s boss, Hillary Clinton, has explicitly confirmed what critics of the CFR have often charged: that the Council unofficially runs the U.S. State Department, and has virtually taken control of the entire executive branch of the federal government, regardless of which party may occupy the White House. In a famous speech at the Council on Foreign Relations’ Washington, D.C., office in 2009, Secretary Clinton referred to the CFR’s Pratt House headquarters in New York City as the “mother ship” and said she had been there often. She was glad, she said, that the CFR’s new Washington headquarters is so close to the State Department, making it easier to be “told what we should be doing and how we should think.”
The article quoted above from The New American includes an embedded video of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s address to the CFR, including her reference to the CFR as the “mother ship” of the State Department, and her dependence upon the CFR “to be told what we should be doing” at State.
Related articles:
Billionaires and Communists Plan “People’s Climate March”
UN Predicts Climate Hell in Media Blitz for Global Warming Treaty
Cold Summer: 1,025 Record Lows in First Three Weeks of August
Risky Business: Billionaires Hype Climate for Power and Profit
Desperate Dash of Global Warming