Libertarian views on UN's Global Green New Deal for Sustainable Development

The U.N.’s Global Green Raw Deal. By Patrick J. Michaels
Planet Gore/NRO, Thursday, April 09, 2009

Day by day, our government is taking more and more control over once-private corporations, with plenty of green strings attached. GM will be required to produce more hybrid cars that people won’t buy. Employee compensation will be determined by federal fiat. “Everyone will be better off.”

Not surprisingly, the United Nations has just jumped on President Obama’s hybrid bandwagon, demanding yet another trillion dollars (coming mostly from you-know-who) to fund “A Global Green New Deal for Sustainable Development.” Translation: The U.S. will provide funds to poorer nations so that they, too, can tell their private companies what to make, whom to employ, and how much to pay them. The U.N. wants your money pronto, by the end of next year.

The U.N.’s “deal” really amounts to drastic interference in the development of other nations that are neither recipients of nor contributors to the cool Trillion. India’s Tata Motors has just unveiled a $2,000 mini-car, which could be a hit in a lot of poor countries. China’s Cherry is poised for a global pounce as soon as liquidity reappears. But the U.N. proposes to spend our money fighting “automobiles, which are environmentally harmful,” promoting instead a “shift to clean public transport” which they then call “clean fuel buses.”

Huh? So the UN is hoping to close developing markets in poor countries to developing producers in countries a tier or two up the economic ladder, and then substitute a nonexistent technology?

Our researchers are still busy at work trying to figure out what a “clean fuel bus” is. It can’t be one run on ethanol, because that takes more energy to produce than we currently get out of it. If it‘s run on electricity produced by solar panels, the physics become daunting. An array required to run just one bus for 100 miles per day would stretch over ten miles. And where would the energy come from at night?

Like Obama’s initiatives, the U.N.’s purpose is to provide “green jobs.” Nothing new here. Germany put in a similar program a few years ago, sending out an army of people otherwise employed or not employed to install solar panels. German taxpayers subsidized each of these 35,000 jobs at $170,000 apiece. Now the UN wants to do the same with your money — all over the world.

Worse still, the “Green New Deal” wants energy subsidies from you — called global “feed-in tariffs” — to boost inefficient energy sources. This reverse tariff would “overcome” the “difficulty” of noncompetitive energy, providing guaranteed purchase prices to producers in developing countries for a period of 20 years. The electricity would then be sold to final consumers at a lower price.

What’s the difference between a “feed-in” tariff and a real one? There isn’t one. It basically says that anyone who has cheaper electricity for sale across national borders need not apply. As is the case with Obama’s cap-and-trade energy taxes here in the States, the U.N. says their tax on us is “desirable on climate-related grounds.”

Nothing is new here. The U.N. is hoping for more green stimulus from an already overstimulating and intrusive president, and returning more of the same: higher taxes, and technologies that won’t work and that will cost a fortune.

— Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of the forthcoming Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know.