By Amanda Carey
From November 29 to December 10, delegates from 194 countries gathered in sunny Cancun, Mexico to “lay the ghost of Copenhagen to rest,” as one dignitary put it. After last year’s chaotic, disastrous and worthless climate change conference in Copenhagen, the goal this year was simple: avoid further embarrassment.
The focus has been on hashing out details for a global climate fund, extending the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012, and establishing an official agreement among developed countries to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by about 40 percent by 2020.
But in the middle of all the global-warming demagoguery and calls for developed nations to shell out $100 billion per year by 2020 in climate reparations to help less-developed countries cope with the unfair burden of climate change, one thing has very obviously not changed: the hypocrisy.
Yes, hypocrisy was present in Cancun just as it was in Copenhagen in 2009, Ponzan in 2008, Bali in 2007, and the many other climate change summit cities before them. As hundreds of officials travel in gas-guzzling jets and carbon-dioxide emitting cars to the conference site and stay in luxurious, high electricity-consuming resorts, the carbon footprint of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is ironic, to say the least.
The unbearable spectacle of it all is what prompted one climate scholar to stop attending the conferences all together. Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of the newly-released “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America,” told The Daily Caller he hasn’t been to the annual U.N. climate change conference since it was held in Montreal in 2005.
“The ritual teary-eyed Europeans declaring a never-ending series of ‘historic agreements,’ which were no such thing, became too farcical to continue attending,” said Horner. “The enterprise is pompously and risibly dedicated in equal parts to wealth redistribution and self-perpetuation, as a platform for, and along the way, engaging in visceral anti-Americanism.”
According to The Telegraph, the carbon footprint of the Cancun conference is five times larger than it was for the 2009 conference in Copenhagen, despite the fact that attendance this year was significantly lower. The figure of the carbon footprint released by the Mexican government is 25,000 tons.
The plan is to offset the conference’s carbon footprint by protecting forests and planting trees in the surrounding poor areas.
The Telegraph article also pointed out that although recycling bins were located throughout the lavish Moon Palace hotel, the closest actual recycling facility was hundreds of miles away.
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