Dempsey’s response boiled down to “no.”47
“Our ability to project force will not deteriorate,” he said, if we refrain from ratifying the treaty.48
A BACKDOOR GLOBAL WARMING TREATY
In 1997, amid much fanfare, the nations of the world signed the Kyoto Protocol on Global Climate Change. The treaty took effect in 2005. While it was signed and ratified by 191 nations, the United States, to the intense frustration of the global community, never approved it. Indeed, it has never even been submitted to the Senate for ratification, so slight would be its chances. (In 2011, Canada renounced the treaty.)
The document commits thirty-seven largely European and Western nations to a 5 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. While the US did not ratify the treaty, the fact is that we have more than doubled the reduction goals of the treaty through market forces—high gasoline and low natural gas prices—and public education and conservation. China, India, and much of the developing world refused to sign up for any carbon emission reductions and have not achieved any. For more information about the US record on curbing carbon emissions, see the chapter on Saudi Arabia in our previous book,
But it has been a goal of the liberal globalists to get Uncle Sam’s signature on a global climate change treaty. They say that this is because the US generates one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases. But America’s record in cutting emissions is so extraordinary that it gives the lie to this stated objective. Their real goal is to control the United States, diminish our power, and assert regulatory jurisdiction over our power plants, factories, and entire economy.
Obama tried to force our cooperation in this effort by pushing Congress to enter a global system of cap and trade that obliged us to pay for our emissions by giving money to third world nations that do not emit comparable levels of greenhouse gas. His bill passed Nancy Pelosi’s House but was rejected by the Senate (even when the Democrats had the requisite sixty votes to pass it if they wanted to do so).
So when Congress didn’t act as Obama wanted, he turned his attention to the Law of the Sea Treaty. Environmentalists hope that they can bind the US finally to their emission targets by getting us to ratify the treaty.
How does LOST replace the Kyoto accords? It requires its signatories to prevent the release of pollution from land-based sources that can enter the ocean through either the atmosphere or from seagoing vessels.
Article 212 of the treaty states, in part, “States shall adopt laws and regulations to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment from or through the atmosphere…. States, acting especially through competent international organizations… shall endeavor to establish global and regional rules, standards and recommended practices and procedures to prevent, reduce and control pollution.”49
When it was written in the 1970s, nobody was thinking about climate change. But today, green advocates are breathlessly awaiting Senate ratification of LOST so they can use this provision to force emissions controls on American power plants and industries.
Environmentalists claim that carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere create global warming through what they call the “greenhouse effect.” And, conversely, the warmer the ocean becomes, the more it emits carbon dioxide on its own. The ocean, literally, pollutes itself!
At the Senate hearing on LOST in June 2008, Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said that he believed that the UN will “look upstream” at the causes of marine pollution and pass binding regulations on signatory nations to reduce them.50
Already, environmentalists have begun an action under LOST to stop the United Kingdom from operating its power plant at Sellafield, which produces MOX nuclear fuel for Japan’s reactors. Sellafield has closed anyway after the Fukayama nuclear power plant disaster. But the precedent has been set that LOST can be used to modify the environmental policies of signatory nations. (The UK is a signatory.)51
The latest panic among environmentalists concerns the “acidification” of the ocean. About a quarter of atmospheric carbon dioxide goes into the ocean, where it forms carbonic acid and changes the base/acidic ratio (pH ratio) of the seas.
Between 1740 and 1994, scientists tell us that surface ocean pH has dropped from 8.25 to 8.14, almost a 30 percent increase in the acidity of the oceans. Environmentalists worry that the change in pH may impact our food supply from the seas.
Christopher C. Horner, writing in the
WILL THE SENATE RATIFY LOST?
The fact that the Senate is even considering ratifying LOST is hard to fathom. Why would we subject ourselves to the jurisdiction of a third world–dominated body that hates us?
As Gaffney says: “If Americans have learned anything about the United Nations over the last 50 years, it is that this ‘world body’ is, at best, riddled with corruption and incompetence. At worst, its bureaucracy, agencies and members are overwhelmingly hostile to the United States and other freedom-loving nations, most especially Israel.”53
Michelle Malkin asks the key question: “So why on earth would the United States Senate possibly consider putting the UN on steroids by assenting to its control of seven-tenths of the world’s surface?”54
After all, let’s remember with whom we are dealing when we give the United Nations the kind of power conferred by LOST. Malkin lists the “well-documented fiascoes” that bespeckle the UN’s history, including “the UN- administered Iraq Oil-for-Food program; investigations and cover-ups of corrupt practices at the organization’s highest levels; child sex-slave operations and rape squads run by UN peacekeepers; and the absurd, yet relentless, assault on alleged Israeli abuses of human rights by majorities led by despotic regimes in Iran, Cuba, Syria and Libya.”55
She fittingly warns that “the predictable effect of US accession to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea —better known as the Law of the Sea Treaty (or LOST)—would be to transform the UN from a nuisance and laughingstock into a world government: The United States would confer upon a UN agency called the International Seabed Authority (IA) the right to dictate what is done on, in and under the world’s oceans. Doing so, America would become party to surrender of immense resources of the seas and what lies beneath them to the dictates of unaccountable, nontransparent multinational organizations, tribunals and bureaucrats.”56
This does not sound good.
So what will the Senate do?
In plotting how to get approval for this act of self-enslavement, the Obama administration has craftily decided to seek ratification only during the lame-duck session of the Senate, after the ballots have been counted in the 2012 election. Then, some senators will be retiring—a few voluntarily and a great many Democrats involuntarily—and they will have no worries about running for reelection. For the others, the classes that will face reelection in 2014 and 2016, the balloting is in the distant future and not a matter of immediate concern.
Obama’s hope is that these factors induce senators to back him in passing the treaty. He used much the same tactics in getting the START Treaty with Russia ratified, submitting it to the lame-duck session of the Senate after the massacre of 2010 had left many senators still in office but doomed to retirement as soon as the new year dawned. This one-sided giveaway to Russia—which limited ballistic and strategic nuclear weapons but did nothing to curb the tactical nuclear weapons in which Moscow has a decided advantage—was ratified easily by the lame- duck body.
