PART NINE
AGENDA 21: TELLING US HOW TO LIVE
The single most intrusive-and most ambitious-of the global initiatives that are under way as part of the effort to battle climate change is Agenda 21.
This set of principles, adopted at the First Rio Conference in 1992, spells out how each of us must live in the new world order. We need to leave rural areas, low-density suburbs, and leafy small towns and aggregate in big cities and crowded urban areas. Good-bye, Los Angeles. h.e.l.lo, midtown Manhattan. Why? So we don"t need to drive. We contribute to greenhouse gas emissions when we get behind the wheel. Bikes will become the order of the future.
Like Stalin"s collectivization in the 1920s and "30s and the British Enclosure Acts in the nineteenth century, the goal is to force a vast population movement, in this case so we don"t emit greenhouse gases.
Agenda 21 began as a long series of recommendations adopted at the First Rio Conference in 1992. Initially, they were really just suggestions to local zoning and planning boards on how to develop more "sustainable" communities. But the movement is gathering to make it the norm for land use decisions at the local level. More and more zoning boards are molding their plans to its contours. Cities are approving or vetoing land use plans based on Agenda 21. It is beginning really to structure how we live.
In Screwed!, we set out how Agenda 21 is influencing local communities around the nation.
Its requirements are all in the name of stopping climate change, but, in fact, through voluntary action and citizen education, we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions on our own. Without being herded into high density living arrangements.
We are driving less. Per capita vehicle mileage is down by 7 percent in the past five years and is continuing to drop.
One in ten coal-fired energy plants has converted to lower-emission natural gas in the past five years and the trend is accelerating.
Automobile energy efficiency is continuing to climb steeply.
Oil use for home heating is down by two-thirds in the past decade.
Overall, we have reduced our use of oil by 5 percent since 2000 even as our population has grown by 30 million people.
Total US greenhouse gas emissions are down by 10 percent since 2006 and are on schedule to drop by another 1020 percent by 2020.
We don"t need to change the fundamentals of our lives. Greater energy conservation and higher vehicle mileage are the answers. Not a radical change in how we live.
Sorry, environmentalists. We are doing it the American way.
PART TEN
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: WHO WOULD OUR BEDFELLOWS BE?
The oft-stated goal of global governance-one-world government-begs the question of whether such rule would be democratic and freedom loving or autocratic and arbitrary. Would the world government be fundamentally honest, albeit with a few bad apples, or would it be dominated by kleptocracies-governments whose rulers are only intent on stealing and plundering their way to mega-wealth? Would it be respectful of human rights or ride roughshod over them as happens in many parts of the world?
The fact is that the nations we would be entrusting with our sovereignty are not worthy of the trust. Were this a better world, filled with better nations and rulers, it would be different. But the world is crammed with tiny nations-barely as large as any of our states-who could easily gang up on us and become the tail that wags the dog. And far too many of the nations of the world-more, much more, than would be needed to outvote us-are autocratic, not free, corrupt, and regular violators of human rights.
It is one thing for those of us on the East Coast of the United States to trust our destiny to the voters of the West Coast or the South or the Midwest. It is quite another to give that power to Russia, China, or a collection of tiny, lightly populated, third world autocracies, riddled with corruption and dedicated to the enrichment of their leaders. These are not the kind of bedfellows we want in our government. They are not worthy of entrusting our sovereignty to them.
So let"s examine those who would come to rule us in any global governance scheme.
RULE OF THE LILLIPUTIANS: HOW TINY NATIONS OUTVOTE US
The fundamental concept underscoring global governance is the principle of one nation, one vote. All UN conferences and decision-making bodies-with the sole exception of the Security Council-operate on this principle. With 193 countries in the United Nations, a coalition of very small nations exercises a disproportionate power.
Is the principle of one nation, one vote an appropriate basis for global governance?
It takes 97 nations to const.i.tute a majority of the 193 UN members. But it is possible that a majority of tiny nations could coalesce and outvote the rest. The 97 least-populated UN members have a combined census of only 241 million inhabitants-about one-quarter less than the population of the United States (310 million). These nations, representing only 241 million people, comprise less than 4 percent of the world"s 7 billion people, but together they can determine the direction of its decisions.
Many of these countries are really tiny, their nationhood a result of being an island or remote from population centers. Forty countries-enough to outvote the members of NATO-have populations of less than one million people and thirteen have fewer than one hundred thousand people. The most populated of the 97 smaller countries-which, again, can const.i.tute a majority of voting members of the UN-is Bulgaria, with a population of just over 7 million. That"s smaller than the population of the five boroughs of New York City!
What kind of global government can be predicated on a system in which Monaco (33,000), San Marino (33,000), Palau (20,000), Tuvalu (20,000), and Nauru (10,000) can outvote China (1.3 billion), India (1.2 billion), and the United States (310 million)?
Permitting these minuscule countries to cast one vote each summons the memory of the old pocket boroughs that were represented by one member each in the British House of Commons for centuries. Wealthy landowners would get their own estate and the surrounding town-largely populated by their servants-declared a const.i.tuency and become ent.i.tled to their own personal member of Parliament. Apportionment of seats being what it was, these tiny districts would often outvote the big cities of the UK.
The US Supreme Court realized the injustice of apportioning power based on any measurement other than population when it struck down legislative districts at the state and local level where seats were not allocated based on the number of inhabitants. It was common practice in the state senates of forty-nine states (Nebraska is unicameral) to allocate seats by county, mirroring the composition of the US Senate, where each state gets two members. This distorted legislative apportionment permitted rural counties to outvote the big cities and perpetuate the power of the rural squires who dominated politics in New York, Pennsylvania, Ma.s.sachusetts, and many eastern states.
The system came to be derided as "one cow, one vote" and met its doom at the hands of the Supreme Court in the reapportionment cases of 1964. The justices ruled that both houses of the state legislatures must be apportioned based only on population. They distinguished state senates from the US Senate because the Const.i.tution explicitly mandates two members from each state for the latter. This provision, of course, stems from the fact that the early United States was a federation of thirteen sovereign states that had won their independence from Great Britain.
It is not merely that it is unfair for St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific to have votes equal to that of the United States. It is that these tiny islands can have no conception of what things are like in larger countries. How can they cast intelligent votes based on their own life experiences living in nation-states that are really no larger than small towns?
And then there is the potential for corruption. Like the pocket boroughs of old Britain, these tiny countries frequently tend to be one-man, quasi-feudal estates. Their UN delegates vote the interests of the one person who controls the island-or the one company. And, in many cases, that vote can be easily bought by offers of foreign aid, investment, or access to the markets of larger nations.
The potential for corruption and injustice implicit in allowing the tail of 241 million people to wag the dog of 7 billion people in the world is too great to let the system continue.
Here"s a list of the 97 smallest nations in the UN who const.i.tute a majority of the world body. These tiny nations can outvote the rest of the world and its 7 billion people.1
At its inception, the Charter for the United Nations carefully vested most of the organization"s power in a Security Council dominated by its five permanent members: the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China, each of whom was given a veto power over the actions of the global body. This formulation stemmed from the fact that the UN was originally formed as an a.s.sociation of the Allied powers, who had emerged victorious from the Second World War. The vital role played by each nation was recognized in giving it the veto power.
The power of the Security Council overshadowed the rest of the UN organization during the Cold War since neither Russia nor the United States and our allies was willing to trust its fate to a roll of the dice in the General a.s.sembly, where each nation has a single vote.
When North Korea, with Chinese help, invaded South Korea in 1949, the Soviet veto would have precluded intervention by the Security Council. The United States and our allies pa.s.sed the "uniting for peace" resolution in the General a.s.sembly, which became the basis for the UN"s intervention in Korea to repel communist aggression. Never again would Russia permit the General a.s.sembly to play such a role.