ScreamingEagle
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- Jul 5, 2004
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Editors note Agenda 21 is a topic of conversation at Tea Party meetings and coffee shops. This begins a four-part series examining and explaining the issues associated with Agenda 21.
In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill . All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself. (The First Global Revolution, the Club of Rome.)
In 1968, a global think tank called the Club of Rome issued a report called Limits to Growth. Composed of heads of state, U.N. bureaucrats, business leaders, scientists and others, the group called for resource conservation, population reduction and global governance.
The Club of Rome was not the first group to develop this thesis, but in the modern era it was one of the most influential when it came to laying out an overall plan for governing humanity.
Other think tanks and researchers followed, issuing reports documenting environmental degradation due to industrialization and overpopulation. The culmination of these concerns was a U.N. sponsored conference held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. At the end of the conference a plan was released called Agenda 21 which was signed by 178 governments.
Primarily the brainchild of central planners in developed countries, Agenda 21 found fans on both sides of the aisle in Washington, D.C. In 1992 Congress ratified, and President George H. Bush signed, the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The purpose of the nonbinding treaty was to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations alleged to be due to manmade activities.
This was followed by President Clinton signing an Executive Order establishing a Council on Sustainable Development that employed different federal agencies to implement parts of Agenda 21. Clinton also signed the Kyoto Protocol, which was an international environmental treaty designed to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. However the Senate refused to ratify the treaty and President George W. Bush later withdrew the U.S. from the treaty.
President Barack Obama brought Agenda 21 back to center stage once again by signing an Executive Order to establish a White House Rural Council to coordinate federal management of rural America, including family farms. Recent examples of their activities include a proposal by the Department of Transportation that would require everyone on a farm to obtain a Commercial Drivers License to operate farming equipment. Also proposed was a ban on children under 18 from working on family farms, although that proposal was withdrawn after a firestorm of protests. And a continued war by the FDA on dairies that sell raw milk.
The use of Executive Orders and the federal bureaucracy to pursue actions related to Agenda 21 has resulted in the enactment of laws not supported by the public and not passed by Congress. For example, one of the most important environmental programs tied to Agenda 21 was cap-and-trade legislation.
The cap in cap-and-trade being the legal limit on the quantity of greenhouse gases a region could emit each year and trade meaning that companies could swap emission permits among themselves. When cap-and-trade legislation failed to pass in the Senate, the EPA took it upon itself to regulate greenhouse gases, in effect usurping the role of Congress.
According to critics, at the heart of Agenda 21 are a number of goals that are contrary to American values, including: redistribution of wealth; abolishment of private property; population control and reduction; government-sanctioned monopolies through private-public partnerships; implementation of sustainable development policies at the local level; elimination of the middle class; collective instead of individual rights; and elimination of unsustainable uses of the environment, such as single-family homes, private cars, air conditioning, paved roads, dams and reservoirs, power lines, ski runs, fences, hunting, logging, industrial activity, livestock grazing and farming.
In effect, a form of neo-feudalism, but with a high-tech, we are the world look to it. Call it 1984″ meets Brave New World.
Americans remain largely in the dark about these developments because they are not widely covered in the mainstream media and because the plans have been put into effect gradually over the past 20 years. Indeed what is covered by the national media is little more than tub thumping by the global warming crowd. The most recent example of this being an editorial in Scientific American stating that Effective World Government Will be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe.
To make its case for Agenda 21, proponents have relied on research coming from governments, universities, think tanks and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Critics have accused some of these groups of altering their findings to fit a particular political agenda. One example of this being the claim that industrialization has resulted in climate change or manmade global warming.
cont.
Agenda 21: Central planning on steroids: Global warming believers unmasked by Climategate | My Blog