Agenda 21 4 part Series Mtn. Democrat

[Bebe]

Here is 3 of a 4 part series being run in the Mountain Democrat on Agenda 21.

I've seen some of here writings before in the CABPRO Newsletter.

Here is a link:

http://www.mtdemocrat.com/news/agend...y-climategate/


Part 1

Agenda 21: Central planning on steroids: Global warming believers unmasked by Climategate
By Dawn Hodson
Staff writer From page A1 | May 18, 2012 | 25 Comments

Analysis

Editor's note — Agenda 21 is a topic of conversation at Tea Party meetings and coffee shops. This begins a four-part analysis series examining and explaining the issues associated with Agenda 21.


"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill .... All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself." (The First Global Revolution, the Club of Rome.)

In 1968, a global think tank called the Club of Rome issued a report called "Limits to Growth." Composed of heads of state, U.N. bureaucrats, business leaders, scientists and others, the group called for resource conservation, population reduction and global governance.

The Club of Rome was not the first group to develop this thesis, but in the modern era it was one of the most influential when it came to laying out an overall plan for governing humanity.

Other think tanks and researchers followed, issuing reports documenting environmental degradation due to industrialization and overpopulation. The culmination of these concerns was a U.N. sponsored conference held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. At the end of the conference a plan was released called Agenda 21 which was signed by 178 governments.

Primarily the brainchild of central planners in developed countries, Agenda 21 found fans on both sides of the aisle in Washington, D.C. In 1992 Congress ratified, and President George H. Bush signed, the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The purpose of the nonbinding treaty was to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations alleged to be due to manmade activities.

This was followed by President Clinton signing an Executive Order establishing a Council on Sustainable Development that employed different federal agencies to implement parts of Agenda 21. Clinton also signed the Kyoto Protocol, which was an international environmental treaty designed to prevent "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." However the Senate refused to ratify the treaty and President George W. Bush later withdrew the U.S. from the treaty.

President Barack Obama brought Agenda 21 back to center stage once again by signing an Executive Order to establish a White House Rural Council to coordinate federal management of rural America, including family farms. Recent examples of their activities include a proposal by the Department of Transportation that would require everyone on a farm to obtain a Commercial Driver's License to operate farming equipment. Also proposed was a ban on children under 18 from working on family farms, although that proposal was withdrawn after a firestorm of protests. And a continued war by the FDA on dairies that sell raw milk.

The use of Executive Orders and the federal bureaucracy to pursue actions related to Agenda 21 has resulted in the enactment of laws not supported by the public and not passed by Congress. For example, one of the most important environmental programs tied to Agenda 21 was cap-and-trade legislation.

The "cap" in cap-and-trade being the legal limit on the quantity of greenhouse gases a region could emit each year and "trade" meaning that companies could swap emission permits among themselves. When cap-and-trade legislation failed to pass in the Senate, the EPA took it upon itself to regulate greenhouse gases, in effect usurping the role of Congress.

According to critics, at the heart of Agenda 21 are a number of goals that are contrary to American values, including: redistribution of wealth; abolishment of private property; population control and reduction; government-sanctioned monopolies through private-public partnerships; implementation of "sustainable development" policies at the local level; elimination of the middle class; collective instead of individual rights; and elimination of unsustainable uses of the environment, such as single-family homes, private cars, air conditioning, paved roads, dams and reservoirs, power lines, ski runs, fences, hunting, logging, industrial activity, livestock grazing and farming.

In effect, a form of neo-feudalism, but with a high-tech, "we are the world" look to it. Call it "1984" meets "Brave New World."

Americans remain largely in the dark about these developments because they are not widely covered in the mainstream media and because the plans have been put into effect gradually over the past 20 years. Indeed what is covered by the national media is little more than tub thumping by the global warming crowd. The most recent example of this being an editorial in Scientific American stating that "Effective World Government Will be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe."

To make its case for Agenda 21, proponents have relied on "research" coming from governments, universities, think tanks and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Critics have accused some of these groups of altering their findings to fit a particular political agenda. One example of this being the claim that industrialization has resulted in climate change or manmade global warming.

Anthropogenic global warming: science or politics?

One of the major tenets of Agenda 21 is the need to control human development because of the damage done to the Earth.

Energy use, and particularly the use of fossil fuels, is blamed for alleged changes in the climate worldwide and makes up what is called the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory.

However, research and events over the last few years have raised doubts about the science behind AGW.

In 2009, for example, 61 megabytes of confidential e-mails between researchers at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (UEACRU) were hacked and released to the public in a scandal later dubbed "Climategate."

The e-mails revealed that East Anglia researchers had conspired with other researchers to exaggerate the amount of global warming, had silenced dissent by making it difficult for scientists who disagreed to have their work published, had manipulated temperature data to fit their theory, and had destroyed evidence at odds with their theory.

Since it was East Anglia, along with other institutions, that was feeding research findings to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), air began leaking out of the global warming balloon.

Following the Climategate scandal, additional research has cast even more doubt on the theory of AGW. The director of East Anglia, for example, finally admitted that the earth was actually warmer during the Medieval Warming Period than it is today.

Surveys of polar bear populations revealed their numbers were stable or growing, not declining. Claims of losses in the rainforests that were attributed to global warming were instead the result of logging. A new study established that the Himalayas have suffered no significant loss of ice over the past decade. Last, the most recent evidence is that world temperatures have risen less than two-tenths of 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last 20 years. Indeed some researchers now think it's more likely that we are entering a new mini Ice Age.

MIT scientist

Scientists dissenting from the theory of AGW have also become more outspoken about the flaws in the science.

One of these is Dr. Richard Lindzen who is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. He has written and spoken out against the AGW theory.

He said that over the last 150 years there have been temperature changes of only tenths of a degree, which calls into question the claim that industrialization has raised the Earth's mean temperature.

"There's no doubt that what we do will have some effect, but even the doubling of CO2 would have a relatively small effect, only a change of 1 degree," he said. "Models created by AGW scientists increase CO2 levels by a factor of 5 and everyone acknowledges that those are highly improbable."

Lindzen said that scientists who don't agree with the AGW proponents are often silenced. The Climategate e-mails included statements to the effect that any scientific journal editor who published articles critical of AGW would be severely attacked or fired. He said that he has been subject to it himself in cases where he was written articles for publication. Once those articles were published, the editor was immediately fired.

"Moreover, journals like Nature and Science have publicly declared that they will not publish anything that questions global warming," he said. "This is a political movement that co-ops a lot of things. Any time you hear anyone say, 'Believe us because we have authority and you can't check it yourself,' you should be suspicious. And I think the public at large is."

Lindzen is not alone in his skepticism. A petition was submitted to Congress in 2008 that was signed by over 31,000 American scientists, including 9,000 with Ph.D.s. Many of the signers currently work in climatological, meteorological, atmospheric, environmental, geophysical, astronomical and biological fields directly involved in the climate change controversy.

The petition states,"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate ... Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

However, not much has changed as a result of these revelations, because ultimately AGW theory is not about science but about global governance and, to a lesser extent, about making money. It is more about a belief system.

In short, it's bunk.

Contact Dawn Hodson at 530-344-5071 or dhodson@mtdemocrat.net. Follow @DHodsonMtDemo on Twitter.

Part 2

Agenda 21: The bioengineering of the planet
By Dawn Hodson
Staff writer From page A1 | May 21, 2012 | 35 Comments

Analysis

Editor's note — Agenda 21 is a topic of conversation at Tea Party meetings and coffee shops. This is Part II of a four-part analysis series examining the issues associated with Agenda 21. Part I ran May 18.


"Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton." (Bertrand Russell - The Impact of Science on Society)

Last October, the U.N. announced that the global population had reached 7 billion with nearly all of the increase occurring in sub-Saharan Africa. In developing countries in Asia and Latin America, the fertility rate now resembles that of the United States which is slightly above two children per woman.

One of the stated goals of Agenda 21 is population reduction to prevent a cataclysmic collapse of the ecosystem and changes to the climate that are claimed to be brought on by human activity.

Such alarmism is not new. Almost 250 years ago the Reverend Thomas Malthus warned that population growth would outstrip the earth's resources unless something was done to rid the earth of undesirables.

In the West, reductions in fertility have come as a result of greater educational and employment opportunities for women, the commonplace use of contraceptives and abortion, and changes in cultural norms. The government has facilitated these changes by mandating that women be included in affirmative action programs and by paying for abortions and contraceptives.

The recently passed health care mandate, i.e. Obamacare, furthered the population reduction agenda by requiring most employers with health care programs to provide contraceptive, sterilization and abortion services. President Obama also repealed the "global gag rule," a policy that requires all nongovernmental organizations that receive federal funds to refrain from performing abortions or citing abortion services offered by others.

Obama's appointments are also telling. For example, his Science and Technology Adviser John Holdren admits to being a neo-Malthusian.

In 1977, Holdren wrote a book called "Ecoscience" in which he indicated support for forced abortions, putting sterilizing agents in the nation's drinking water, forcibly removing or aborting illegitimate children, and creating an armed international police force to control people's lives. All this in the name of protecting the planet and warding off global climate change.

Holdren later disavowed those views at his confirmation hearing, but he still takes the position that climate change skeptics are "dangerous" members of a "denier fringe."

The green zealots

The global climate change movement has attracted its share of those who can argue their position rationally as well as zealots who brook no disagreement.

For example, Dr. Kari Norgaard, an Oregon University professor recently compared skepticism of global warming to racism. She went so far as to suggest that "cultural resistance" to AGW "must be recognized and treated an aberrant sociological behavior."

Another zealot is Steve Zwick who is the Managing Editor of the Ecosystem Marketplace. In a recent Forbes Magazine article, he called for "denialists" to bear the price of their disbelief including allowing their homes to burn, taking their land away and making them pay for "breaking the climate."

Others come up with even more extreme ideas. A new paper in the journal "Ethics, Policy and Environment" proposes biomedical modifications to humans as one way to reduce greenhouse gases. The lead author of the paper, S. Matthew Liao, is a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University. He claims that bioengineering is one solution to global climate change.

One proposal includes a pill or patch to make people sick if they eat meat since livestock farming is considered to account for as much as 51 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

Another idea is for parents to use genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth "smaller, less resource-intensive children." One technique involves called preimplantation genetic diagnosis which would select which embryos would be implanted based on height. Another would be to use hormone treatments to induce height reductions in children.

In an interview in The Atlantic Magazine, Liao said there should be a fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. "If that's the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium-sized children, or three small-sized children ... A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child."

He even threw out the possibility of giving people cat eyes. "We figured that if everyone had cat eyes, you wouldn't need so much lighting, and so you could reduce global energy usage considerably."

While it would be easy to dismiss such people as being on the lunatic fringe, their ideas are often taken seriously by those who design public policy at both the international, national and local level. Totalitarian control has always had great appeal to those who live in a world where ideas are real and people are just an abstraction.

Taxes and carbon credit indulgences

For hundreds of years it was a common practice for sinners to gain relief by paying an indulgence to the Catholic Church. Today corporations pay an indulgence to the government to receive permission to pollute.

Indeed carbon and "greenhouse gas" trading has become such a big business worldwide that exchanges have been set up all over the globe.

Louis Redshaw, of Barclays Capital, has predicted that "Carbon will be the world's biggest commodity market, and it could become the world's biggest market overall."

The world's largest carbon offset market, the Kyoto Protocol's clean development mechanism, is run by the U.N. and administered by the World Bank. Often accused of corruption and profiteering, the U.N. views the exchange as one way to fund itself as a global governing structure. Third-world countries also see carbon credits as a way to further their development by selling pollution credits to corporations and to first world countries.

However the U.N. is not limiting itself to just pollution credits to fund itself as a global governing structure. In the year 2000, the U.N. General Assembly passed the Millennium Goals which included different proposals to raise taxes for the organization.

These taxes would not only increase the number of mandarins at the U.N. but would also be a mechanism for shifting wealth from the West to less developed countries.

Schemes that were contemplated included an e-mail tax; a tax on fossil fuels like gasoline, coal, oil and natural gas; a tax on currency transactions which would have raised the cost of just about every good shipped or traded internationally; an international air transport tax; an aviation fuel tax; a tax on the international conventional arms trade; fines for ocean dumping; a tax on commercial fishing; a tax on Earth-orbiting satellites; a tax on the use of the electronic spectrum (television, radio, cell phones, etc.); a tax on the profits of international businesses; and even a tax on international advertising.

According to working documents for the upcoming U.N. Conference on "Sustainable Development" in Rio de Janeiro, plans are to "re-shape civilization, the global economy, and even people's thoughts" in order to transition toward a so-called green economy.

Among the new proposals are imposing global carbon taxes, wealth distribution amounting to trillions of dollars per year and a barrage of new programs aimed at "global social engineering."

A big part of this transition involves giving global institutions like the U.N. the power to print currency so it can fund a global governing structure. The other part is educating children about the danger of AGW so they believe that the U.N. is needed to solve the "problem."

Since the "green program" anticipates that large numbers of people will become unemployed, built into the agenda is a global welfare program. So not only will people in America be subsidizing the poor in this country, they will be subsidizing them in Timbuktu as well.

Meet me in Cancun

The fact that AGW has been discredited has not changed the minds of its proponents one iota. Instead U.N. officials and their cohorts continue to meet in luxurious resorts to discuss how awful people are and that something simply must be done about them.

At the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, for example, over 140 private jets were used to fly in VIPs while 1,200 limos were used to squire them around. The top hotels in the area were all booked, at a cost $1,000 a night, for the 11 day conference.

In attendance were 15,000 delegates and officials, 4,000 journalists and 98 world leaders along with the usual bevy of Hollywood celebrities who wolfed down scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

Luckily they were able to save on prostitution services. In a show of solidarity, the city's prostitutes offered free sex to anyone with a delegate's pass.

The conference, including travel, created a total of 41,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. But nothing is too good for these globe-trotting, fois gras eating hypocrites whose conferences are held at the best resorts including Rio de Janeiro, Cancun, and Durban, South Africa.

Apparently being an AWG believer means never having to go without a tan.

[Bebe]

Part 3

Agenda 21: Regional planning and sustainable development
By Dawn Hodson
Staff writer From page A1 | May 23, 2012 | 32 Comments

Analysis

Editor's note — Agenda 21 is a topic of conversation at Tea Party meetings and coffee shops. This is Part III of a four-part analysis series examining the issues associated with Agenda 21. Part I ran May 18 and Part II ran Monday.


"Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat consumption and large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations.” (Maurice Strong, opening speech at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit)

The phrase sustainable development is one of the catch phrases of the Agenda 21 crowd. It is defined as development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

While it has a warm fuzzy sound to it, the devil is in the details and how it plays out in the way people live in the near future.

One can get a preview of what they have planned by looking at how it's being put into effect through new laws, taxes, regulations, executive orders, and bureaucratic fiat.

California, for example, was the first jurisdiction to adopt a full-scale cap-and-trade system for its carbon emissions. The program was a central element of California's Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) which was signed into law in 2006.

In 2009, a follow-up bill — the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act (SB 375) — was put into effect which required regional growth scenarios for land use and transportation improvements that took into account state-mandated goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Its intent was to control urban sprawl by confining new development to corridors located adjacent to transit centers.

The fact that AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has been revealed to be largely based on junk science hasn't resulted in the repeal of this legislation. If anything, revenue shortfalls at the state level have provided an incentive to use the bogeyman of global warming to impose even stricter regulations and assess additional taxes.

For example, Gov. Jerry Brown recently proposed filling the $9 billion hole in the state budget by auctioning off credits that would allow California companies to emit additional greenhouse gases. He is also hinting at using the carbon tax to pay for the proposed high-speed railroad.

Stack'em and pack'em

In the meantime, work proceeds on transforming how ordinary people live. Recently regional planning bodies in California adopted plans that would require most new housing to be built at much higher density levels.

The Association of Bay Area Governments, for example, is proposing that only 3 percent of new housing built by 2035 be allowed on or beyond the "urban fringe" — where current housing ends and countryside begins. Over two-thirds of the housing built for new residents living in San Francisco and San Jose would be multifamily and concentrated along major thoroughfares.

ABAG's counterpart in the south, the Southern California Association of Governments, wants even denser housing with 30 or more unit per acre in Los Angeles County and five other Southern California counties.

According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, if these planners have their way, by the year 2035, 68 percent of all new housing built in Southern California would be condos and apartment complexes.

Unfortunately, this type of housing may be all that the average person living in California will be able to afford in the future. According to U.S. demographer Joel Kotkin, as hard as it is for a middle class family to afford a home in California now, "things will only get worse in the coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre implement their 'smart growth' plans to cram the proletariat into high density housing."

Kotkin predicts that "... California is turning into a two-and-a-half-class society. On top are 'entrenched incumbents' who inherited their wealth or came to California early and made their money. Then there's the shrunken middle class of public employees, and, miles below, a permanent welfare class. As it stands today, about 40 percent of Californians don't pay any income tax and a quarter are on Medicaid ... In short, 'the state is run for the very rich, the very poor, and the public employees.'"

Pushing people off the land

Orlean Koehle, a resident of Sonoma County and author of the book "By Stealth and Deception," is one of those tracking all these developments which she traces back to Agenda 21. She complains that the government is making it more and more difficult for people to own or use their own property in California.

She cites her own experience in Sonoma when the county rezoned rural properties to require a 100-foot setback from all creeks."This took a lot of land out of productive use," she stated."They also tried to monitor, meter, and tax our well water but that effort failed."

Another example noted by Koehle was when farmers in Central California had their irrigation water cut off for three years to protect the Delta smelt. That action came in response to a 2006 lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups. Farmers ended up having to plow under their orchards as a result and unemployment in the area skyrocketed.

Koehle, who helped organize a conference on Agenda 21 in April of this year, said, "Agenda 21 is being implemented at the local level though changes to our general plans. Their ultimate goal is to put everyone under regional governments and undercut local government. Even states that don't have laws like California are implementing these policies. That should tell people something."

Even more fundamental changes in land ownership are being considered. Recently a U.N. "investigator" demanded that the U.S. government return some of the land "stolen from Indian tribes." This was in addition to a $1 billion settlement some tribes recently received because of commercial projects on their land. While no one from Congress would meet with this U.N. investigator, he said he received "exemplary cooperation" from the Obama administration.


Re-wilding America

Another one of Agenda 21's goals is re-wilding American by removing all signs of human habitation from large portions of the country.

Called the Wildlands Project, its goal is to set aside approximately 50 percent of the North American continent as "wild land" to preserve the biological diversity of the continent and protect the migratory routes of animals.

One plan to accomplish this includes blocking huge portions of land from human use by linking up existing public lands, such as national forests and parks, with private land on which human use would be limited or disallowed. Human activity on the remaining land would be heavily controlled.

At present the federal government owns approximately 650 million acres or 30 percent of the land in the United States. In California, the federal government owns about 45 percent of the land.

In pursuit of this objective, the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act of 2010 was introduced in Congress. The bill proposed coordinating efforts between the federal government, the states, and Indian tribes to identify fish and wildlife habitat and corridors. The information was to be used in planning and development decisions with grants available to preserve and protect these corridors.

While the bill never made it out of committee, efforts at re-wilding the country continue.

One of the biggest examples of this is in the Klamath River basin where there is a proposal to remove four dams in response to a drastic decline in the salmon population. If approved, it would be the biggest dam removal and restoration pact in U.S. history. However, the project is currently stalled in Congress and questions were raised after a whistleblower was fired for questioning the integrity of the dam removal study process.

Debbie Bacigalupi, a woman whose family owns land in the area, alleges that the goal of the dam removal is not to bring back the salmon but to enable the government, special interest groups, and certain tribes to take over the entire basin. She claims that Fish and Game was fining people if dead salmon were found on their land and Indians in the area were planting dead fish on people's property to push the project forward.

"This is all a land grab," she said. "They are trying to regulate people so they can't afford to live on the land. And if that doesn't work, they will try something more drastic."

Skirmishes of this sort are taking place all over the country as different nonprofit groups, working alone or in tandem with government agencies, propose different projects that tie into the Agenda 21 program.


Locally, there is ongoing litigation between miners and different environmental groups regarding allowable mining activities. More recently, the Center for Sierra Nevada Conservation, asked the court for a blanket closure of 42 roads in the Eldorado National Forest because the roads pass through small meadow areas. The court ordered the trails closed until a study is completed which the Forest Service estimates could take up to a year.


Incremental implementation

The push to implement Maurice Strong's opening speech at the U.N. is already in process. The fact that he made the statement at the beginning of the conference indicates that the Agenda 21 plan did not result from the U.N. conference but rather was written long before the attendees arrived.

If Agenda 21 has largely been under the radar for a while, it's because much of what has been accomplished has been done incrementally. In addition, rarely is there a discussion of how disparate laws, regulations, lawsuit rulings, and planning efforts come together to form a pattern. To raise the topic usually gets one labeled a "conspiracy theorist."

However, Americans have every right to question what the central planners have in mind for us — as evidenced by all the laws and regulations being put into place — and whether what is being planned is really in our best interest or theirs.

[1966Scout800]

Been reading these before breakfast this past week and all I can say is we need a lot more of these types of publications circulating the entire United States. Hats off to Ms. Hodson for a well written and informative sequence of articles. The citizens of the United States of America need transparency from our central planning. They need to know how Agenda 21 is going to affect their daily lives respectively, we all know it will be detrimental to our freedoms, and they need to know what elected officials are behind this so so we can vote them out of office. As the great Charlie Daniels once said, "There's a whole lot more of us common folk then there ever will be of you".
The "real" America will not allow this happen. Its just a matter of exposure and informing the people of the United States what is really happening behind closed doors. I am glad to see Agenda 21 is gaining exposure, lets hope there will be more of this in other publications around the nation

[LYIN' KING]

Ms. Hodson certainly did her homework, covered all the bases and hit a home run . . . great journalism IMHO!!!

[Bebe]

Reading the comments is AWESOME Entertainment!!!

[Mad Machinist]

Bebe,

Thank you. I haven't laughed that hard in a while. And I needed it.