Cancun is safe again...

Hasta la vista, global warming believers

It's over. The 15,000 delegates from 193 countries plus 10,000 hangers have packed their bags and left the Cancun luxury hotels where they were saving the Earth for two weeks. The purveyors of bad tequila (for technophobic young demonstrators) and fine wines (for delegates) are counting their money, and hotel employees are busily cleaning up the mess in preparation for the influx of Christmas tourists.

In the spirit of Copenhagen, civilization has again dodged the bullet of mass hysteria. A new dark age of deindustrialization has been evaded, and another nail has been driven into the coffin of the Kyoto accord. There was never any real possibility that major developing nations such as China and Brazil would line up to commit economic suicide, and agree to hobble their burgeoning industries by firmly limiting carbon dioxide emissions, while less developed countries would be free to do whatever they wish.

To justify the two-week waste of time and money, agreement was reached to establish a Green Climate Fund, projected to rise to $100 billion annually by 2020, for countries threatened by altered weather patterns. It's unclear who will contribute to the fund, how it will be administered or who (other than Third World tyrants) would be the beneficiaries. It looks like a classic shell game in which affluent countries will pledge funds but actually make no significant contributions. If money really does end up in the pot, what a carnival of graft, corruption and international conflict over the spoils that will be!

The Cancun meetings, from their inception, had less to do with saving the Earth than with the redistribution of wealth from industrialized countries to the Third World, on a much larger scale than has ever been accomplished through conventional foreign aid. Third World delegates were exemplified by Bolivian President Eva Morales who, for years, has been campaigning for international compensation for poor countries that agree to protect their own forests. The final declaration from Cancun indicates that this campaign was successful but, again, honeyed words don't necessarily produce hard cash. Ironically, Bolivia refused to sign the final agreement because it didn't contain mandatory (and crippling) emission caps for wealthy countries.
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Hasta+vista+global+warming+believers/3985464/story.html#ixzz18NC8hyDe