Free Republic

NEW YORK — Before the United Nations can save the planet, it needs to clean up its own house. And as scandal after scandal has unfolded over the past decade, from Oil for Food to procurement fraud to peacekeeper rape, the size of that job has become stunningly clear. But any understanding of the real efforts that job entails should begin with a look at the long and murky career of Maurice Strong, the man who may have had the most to do with what the U.N. has become today, and still sparks controversy even after he claims to have...

Raising $100 billion a year of climate finance by 2020 is challenging, but possible through mechanisms including carbon markets, domestic carbon taxes and a variety of international transportation taxes, a United Nations advisory group said in a report Friday. Earlier this year, the UN's Ban established the panel, which includes U.S. National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, billionaire financier George Soros and Deutsche Bank vice-chairman Caio Koch-Weser. The financing will be used to support mitigation and adaptation efforts in developing countries--in particular, for the poorest and most vulnerable communities.

Bicycles instead of cars? Dense apartment clusters instead of single homes? Community rituals instead of churches? "Human rights" instead of religious freedom? The UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) which met June 3-14 [1996]in Istanbul, painted an alarming picture of the 21st century community. The American ways-free speech, individualism, travel, and Christianity-are out. A new set of economic, environmental, and social guidelines are in. Citizenship, democracy, and education have been redefined. Handpicked civil leaders will implement UN "laws", bypassing state and national representatives to work directly with the UN. And politically correct "tolerance"-meaning "the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism"...

Rattled in Europe by the REACH regulation and carbon dioxide emission curbs, international chemical companies are at the Rio Earth Summit determined to push for a global approach to environmental policy—but with a light regulatory touch. … The reasoning is simple and well-known. Rather than complying with a myriad of environmental laws in different countries, companies prefer dealing with a single set of globally-harmonized rules. … In Europe, the REACH regulation, adopted in 2006, has started a mammoth process of registering about 100,000 substances that are currently used in a wide range of consumer products, with the aim of gradually...

There is no reason to suppose that yet another global conference will solve the world’s environmental woes. But for three days in June, the UN is to hold a meeting in Rio de Janeiro where more than 100 leaders are expected to go at least some way towards doing that. So far, the signs are not encouraging for Rio+20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development being held 20 years after the 1992 UN Rio earth summit that helped push the environmental movement into the mainstream. High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link...

The upcoming United Nations environmental conference on sustainable development will consider a breathtaking array of carbon taxes, transfers of trillions of dollars from wealthy countries to poor ones, and new spending programs to guarantee that populations around the world are protected from the effects of the very programs the world organization wants to implement, according to stunning U.N. documents examined by Fox News.

With gasoline prices spiking, a presidential election looming in the fall, and recent failures at reaching sweeping global agreements on environmental policy, the Obama Administration is heading into this summer’s Rio + 20 Conference on Sustainable Development with modest goals, looking for areas of broad agreement and civic engagement that can be touted as populist environmental progress. “We consider it an aspirational meeting,” a U.S. State Department spokesman told Fox News. “This is a good, positive meeting,” in which “we go forward in as pragmatic a way as possible.”...Nevertheless, the long-term goal of Rio + 20 remains the same: to...

There is a whiff of Fascism emanating from the Obama White House. Reports say that the head of GM is quitting under duress from the Obama administration:

The United Nations' Cash for Kim Jong Il scandal is now six months old, so it's a good time to assess progress, if that's the right word. The evidence of misdeeds at the U.N. Development Program in North Korea continues to mount, but there's still no "urgent" and "external" inquiry, as ordered by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in January. Now the U.S. has uncovered evidence that in addition to transferring millions of dollars in cash that may have gone to help prop up Kim's grotesque regime, the UNDP also transferred dual-use technology. It did so without bothering to secure a U.S....

The problem with ‘post-modern’ society is there are too many people with nothing meaningful to do, building ‘careers’ around controlling the lives of others and generally making social nuisances of themselves. They justify their meddling by discovering social ‘problems’ and getting the media to magnify them out of all proportion. The latest example in Queensland, Australia, concerns the ‘discovery’ that schoolchildren are in danger from their own lunchboxes. While millions of members of former generations ate lunch out of lunchboxes and lived to tell about it, it seems today’s mummy-chauffeured generation is at risk. A recent lunchbox survey (sic)...