The Synod of the Church of Gaia has found a new excuse for trying to impose international communism on the world under the dictatorship of the UN.

This is from Townhall, by Paul Driessen and David Rothbard:

The UN Conference on Sustainable Development is underway [20-22 June, 2012] in Rio de Janeiro. This time, 20 years after the original 1992 Rio “Earth Summit,” thousands of politicians, bureaucrats and environmental activists are toning down references to “dangerous man-made climate change,” to avoid repeating the acrimony and failures that characterized its recent climate conferences in Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban.

Instead, “Rio+20” is trying to shift attention to “biodiversity” and alleged threats to plant and animal species, as the new “greatest threat” facing Planet Earth. This rebranding is “by design,” according to conference organizers, who say sustainable development and biodiversity is an “easier sell” these days than climate change: a simpler path to advance the same radical goals.

What are those radical goals? Same old, same old. They don’t change.

Those goals include expanded powers and budgets for the United Nations, UN Environment Programme, US Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies, and their allied Green pressure groups; new taxes on international financial transactions (to ensure perpetual independent funding for the UN and UNEP); and more mandates and money for “clean, green, renewable” energy.

Their wish list also includes myriad opportunities to delay, prevent and control energy and economic development, hydrocarbon use, logging, farming family size, and the right of individual countries, states, communities and families to make and regulate their own development and economic decisions.

Aside from not giving increased power to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats and activists, there are two major reasons for stopping this attempted biodiversity-based power grab.

1) There is no scientific basis for claims that hundreds or thousands of species are at risk. …

No bird or mammal species in recorded history is known to have gone extinct due to climate change. …

2) The greatest threats to species are the very policies and programs being advocated in Rio.

Those policies would ban fossil fuels, greatly increase renewable energy use, reduce jobs and living standards in rich nations, and perpetuate poverty, disease, death and desperation in poor countries. …

The Rio+20 biodiversity and sustainability agenda means artificially reduced energy and economic development. It means rationed resources, sustained poverty and disease, and unsustainable inequality, resentment, conflict, and pressure on wildlife and their habitats. …

Soon after that the authors go off the rails, raving about “Our Creator”, a mystical being who, they imagine, “endowed” us with “a world of riches”.

But the greater part of the article is worth reading.

As we provoked indignant comments from an environmentalist enemy with our post yesterday (though he/she only addresses marginal points), we return to the attack today with more on the UN’s climate conference being held now in Durban, South Africa, and the lethal threat named “Agenda 21”  (see our posts Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011).

Phyllis Schlafly goes right to the heart of the matter – the UN making a power-grab on the pretext of protecting the planet from human depredation – with this article at Townhall:

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, opening on Nov. 28, called COP-17, is one of a series of U.N. meetings working toward a specific goal … to move the United States into a global government by environmental regulations and a vast network of taxes. These newly imposed taxes will give the U.N. a tremendous stream of money in addition to U.S. dues and congressional appropriations.

The plan for taxes was launched at the 1992 U.N. meeting in Rio de Janeiro, known as the Earth Summit, where Conference Secretary-General Maurice Strong produced a 300-page document with 40 proposals called Agenda 21.

The tax-seeking route then proceeded through U.N. meetings in Cancun in 2010, in Durban this November and will be finalized next year at what is called Rio+20 (i.e., Rio de Janeiro after 20 years).

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive master plan to reshape and control the U.S. while locking us into the clutches of the U.N. under the innocuous phrase “sustainable development.” Along with 178 countries, President George H.W. Bush accepted Agenda 21 as “soft law.” It was adopted by a new tactic called collaborative consensus building, instead of by treaty.

Bush popularized the term “new world order,” but left it for others to define. Mikhail Gorbachev said the threat of an environmental crisis will be the international key to unlocking the new world order, and former President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in 1993 creating the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.

Advocates of Agenda 21 talk about the three E’s of sustainable development: economy, equity and environment.

Equity means replacing our American constitutional system with central planning and social justice, which is a code word for redistribution of wealth, abolition of private property rights and giving favored corporations tax breaks, grants, and use of eminent domain.

Economy means shifting from a private enterprise system to government, private-corporation partnerships. That would be a giant step toward total government and U.N. control of our economy, with the ability to redistribute our goods and services to foreign countries.

Environment means giving animals and plants more rights or equal rights with humans. It also promotes worship of nature and mother Earth.

Yes, a multitude of genuine anti-human fanatics are only too happy to be used by the UN as it pursues its political aim of a centrally controlled world economy, which is to say a global socialist tyranny.

To talk about Agenda 21, you will have to get used to a new vocabulary: green jobs, green building codes, going green, regional planning, smart growth, biodiversity, sustainable farming, growth management, resilient cities, sustainable communities, redistribution, urban growth boundaries, redevelopment districts and consensus.

Agenda 21 wants to herd people into crowded communities with limited housing space and limited parking spaces. This will promote the green goal of reducing our use of automobiles, allowing only electric cars that can’t go very fast or very far, so people will have to walk, use bicycles and mass transit.

Agenda 21 supports the Wildlands Project, which seeks to re-wild 50% of our nation and turn it into a pre-Columbian wilderness where animals roam freely and humans are crowded into limited spaces. Already, we find that rural roads are not being repaired or maintained.

Agenda 21 has started its attacks on rural and small-town property rights. Six hundred U.S. cities and counties have signed on to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives putting themselves indirectly under supervision of U.N. regulations and restrictions.

Advocates of Agenda 21 believe the earth is overcrowded. They demand an 85% reduction in human population. It’s a major goal of Agenda 21 to lower the U.S. standard of living by cutting our use of energy. Agenda 21 plans to use smart meters, smart grids and smart growth so that our nation’s use of electricity can be controlled, limited and redistributed.

Schools and universities are important to Agenda 21’s goals. The plan is make them indoctrination institutions, where kids are taught “green” propaganda, as well as global education to make them citizens of the world.

The UN will tax “currency transfers, fossil energy production including oil, natural gas and coal, the commercial use of oceans, international airplane tickets and all foreign exchange transactions”.

Taxes of this magnitude would give the U.N. so much power that it would become a de facto world government.

So, Phyllis Schlafly urges, take action to prevent this happening:

Tell your members of Congress to pledge that the day the U.N. adopts this nonsense will be the day we say goodbye to the U.N.

But why wait until then? The UN does enough harm right now.

The UN must be destroyed.