Category Archives: Agenda 21

Bureaucrats Bully Family Farms in D.C. Exurbs (Fauquier County attempting to fine county resident for holding Boy Scout jamborees on his property)

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I live outside Fauquier County in Rappahanock wine country.  Since moving out here ten years ago, we have seen several farms disappear in Rappahanock, Culpeper and Fauquier counties.  The ridiculous regulations and fines being imposed on the local farms and wineries are nothing short of Big Brother tactics.  Fauquier County Zoning Administrator Kimberley Johnson has shut down, or attempted to shut down, political fundraisers on  residential farms for lack of a permit.  The farm owners could have sued  her and the county under 42 U.S.C. 1983 for violating constitutional rights  under the color of state law.  Some of our ancestors died on these very grounds defending our liberty, property and freedom.  Why aren’t WE fighting for the same rights?

 

Bureaucrats Bully Family Farms in D.C. Exurbs

By Mark J. Fitzgibbons via The American Thinker

Fauquier  (/fɔːˈkɪər/)  County, Virginia has become a new battleground against the sprawl of  Washington-style government bullying.  Under the guise of business zoning  authority, Fauquier is now depriving an agricultural community of its liberty to  live the farm life when a little commerce is, and even is not,  involved.

The  county, you see, wants to regulate and fine farm residents on grounds of holding  pumpkin carvings, birthday parties for little girls, and Boy Scout  jamborees.

Fauquier  County is an agricultural community in the beautiful Piedmont mountain region  about an hour west of Washington.  Its motto is “life as it should  be.”  To some county bureaucrats and officials, that means “life as we tell  you how it should be.”

The  growth of the federal government, along with its bureaucratic mentality, has  sprawled into Northern Virginia, and mostly up to now, just shy of  Fauquier.  In once-bucolic Loudon County to the north of Washington, where  family farms stood just 15 years ago, now stand high-rise offices of businesses  with government contracts, lobbyists, and others feeding at the government  trough.  Loudon, the fastest-growing county in America, is not the free  market at work.  It’s a concrete and steel metropolis built directly and  indirectly on taxpayer money flowing into and out of  Washington.

Virginia  is divided now — in many ways — between the Washington suburbs of Northern  Virginia and the rest of the state.  With the sprawl of big government  comes the bureaucratic mentality that what’s yours is theirs to regulate,  control, and dictate.

Virginia,  of course, was the home of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,  Patrick Henry, and George Mason.  The spirit of liberty still runs deep in  parts of Virginia.  Sadly, however, the sense of freedom has been dampened  if not eviscerated among those tied to and benefiting from government power and  money.

Virginia  has long been supportive of agriculture, and the state has a Right to Farm  law.  While family farms are struggling, Virginia has discovered that its  soil and climate are splendid for grapes.  Hence, wineries are popping up  to the joy of a good number of Virginians now employed by them, tourists, and  many tax revenue collectors.

Fauquier  this past week, though, passed a new county ordinance requiring wineries to  close their doors at 6 p.m. and requiring them to pay the county for special  permits for such things as extended hours and catered food.  Because of one  or two wineries where bacchanalia has caused grief for some neighbors, the  county decided to punish all wineries…oh, and to make more money off its theft  of liberty, too.

The  wineries have numbers and money to fight this punitive over-regulation.  By  using narrowly tailored exemptions, though, the county bought off opposition  from some, including one that defeated the county at the Virginia Supreme Court  not long ago.  When government believes that it owns our liberty, it  selectively dishes out some as bribery.

But  Fauquier isn’t just stealing liberty from wineries.  Using Orwellian  oversight and threats of fines, Fauquier is also bullying a tiny farm in Paris,  Virginia that takes in rescued animals and sells organic tea but is not a  winery.  Reading the order against the farm issued by Fauquier County  Zoning Administrator Kimberley Johnson, one may confuse Fauquier for an  anti-family banana republic.

In  deciding to seek fines against the farm, Ms. Johnson’s April 30 order includes  the following specious, frivolous, and ridiculous  items:

1.  The farm has rescued animals;

2.  The farm advertised an “organic tea café” and films its on-site small-farm  events;

3.  As a means to unscrupulously load up her case, Ms. Johnson includes in her list  of allegations certain “events” at the farm she found in an internet search that  even her own order later acknowledges were never held on the  property;

4.  Using her questionable internet investigative “techniques” (the county hasn’t  yet used drones), Ms. Johnson alleges two other events in support of her claims:  a “wine testing” in September 2011, and “a seasonal pumpkin patch and carving  event” in October.  Maybe Ms. Johnson should notify Homeland Security,  too.  Those kids carving pumpkins have knives!

5.  Perhaps the single most offensive allegation by Ms. Johnson is that the farm’s  Facebook page “includes photographs of a child’s birthday party that was held”  on January 22.  Ms. Johnson believes that a party of eight 10-year-old  girls on a family farm is subject to her regulatory purview and is cause to  threaten county citizens with fines up to $5,000.

Ms.  Johnson has shut down, or attempted to shut down, political fundraisers on  residential farms for lack of a permit.  The farm owners could have sued  her and the county under 42 U.S.C. 1983 for violating constitutional rights  under the color of state law.

Ms.  Johnson, the menace, wasn’t fired or sued for her imperious view of her power  versus her limited view of people’s rights on private property.  That’s a  shame.  Now, she’s attempting to fine a county resident for holding Boy  Scout jamborees on his property.

Not  all victims of Ms. Johnson’s lawbreaking are wealthy enough to assert their  rights through civil actions.  And that’s how bureaucrats build on their  arrogant lawbreaking.  They bully citizens who are good, mind-their-own  business types, or who lack the resources to file suit.

Other  Fauquier County officials, of course, should be ashamed of what’s  happened.  In the meantime, county citizens are forming a new organization  to protect family farms.  They’ve seen what happens when they wait for  politicians or judges to actually stop government lawbreaking.  They’ve  learned that to protect rights, citizens need to do it on their own — and in  numbers.

Read more here.

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Obama’s Energy Department Sneaks 30-year Offshore Moratorium Past Public

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By Thomas J. Pyle via The Washington Times

While the Obama administration was taking a victory lap last week after the 5-4 Supreme Court decision to uphold the president’s signature legislative accomplishment, Obamacare, the Interior Department was using the media black hole to release a much-awaited five-year plan for offshore drilling. That plan reinstitutes a 30-year moratorium on offshore energy exploration that will keep our most promising resources locked away until long after President Obama begins plans for his presidential library. Given the timing, it is clear that the self-described “all of the above” energy president didn’t want the American people to discover that he was denying access to nearly 98 percent of America’s vast energy potential on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).

The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) of 1953 provided the interior secretary with the authority to administer mineral exploration and development off our nation’s coastlines. At its most basic level, the act empowers the interior secretary – in this case, former U.S. Sen. Kenneth L. Salazar of Colorado – to provide oil and gas leases to the highest-qualified bidder while establishing guidelines for implementing an oil and gas exploration-and-development program for the Outer Continental Shelf. In 1978, in the wake of the oil crisis and spiking gasoline prices, Congress amended the act to require a series of five-year plans that provide a schedule for the sale of oil and gas leases to meet America’s national energy needs.

But since taking office, Mr. Obama and Mr. Salazar have worked to restrict access to our offshore oil and gas resources by canceling lease sales, delaying others and creating an atmosphere of uncertainty about America’s future offshore development that has left job creators looking for other countries’ waters to host their offshore rigs. More than 3 1/2 years into the Obama regime, nearly 86 billion barrels of undiscovered oil on the Outer Continental Shelf remain off-limits to Americans. Alaska alone has about 24 billion barrels of oil in unleased federal waters. The Commonwealth of Virginia – where Mr. Obama has reversed policies that would have allowed offshore development – is home to 130 million barrels of offshore oil and 1.14 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. But thanks to the president, Virginians will have to wait at least another five years before they can begin creating the jobs that will unlock their offshore resources.

Once you add those restrictions to the vast amount of shale oil that is being blocked, the administration has embargoed nearly 200 years of domestic oil supply. No wonder the administration wanted to slip its plan for the OCS under the radar when the whole country was focused on the health care decision.

But facts are stubborn things, and the Obama administration cannot run forever from its abysmal energy record. In the past three years, the government has collected more than 250 times less revenue from offshore lease sales than it did during the last year of the George W. Bush administration – down from $9.48 billion in 2008 to a paltry $36 million last year. Meanwhile, oil production on federal lands dropped 13 percent last year, and the number of annual leases is down more than 50 percent from the Clinton era.

Under the new Obama plan, those numbers will only get worse. The 2012-17 plan leaves out the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the vast majority of OCS areas off Alaska. It cuts in half the average number of lease sales per year, requires higher minimum bids and shorter lease periods and dramatically reduces lease terms. Yet, somehow, we’re supposed to believe that our “all of the above” president is responsible for increased production and reduced oil import.

With oil hovering around $85 a barrel and nationwide gas prices nearly double what they were when Mr. Obama took office, you’d think the administration might implement a sensible plan to promote robust job creation and safe offshore energy development. Instead, what we get is the latest phase in the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy, filed under cover of media darkness while the nation was swallowing its Obamacare medicine.

Thomas J. Pyle is president of the Institute for Energy Research.

Read more here.

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Top Seven Reasons to Re-Elect Obama…..

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Just counting the days until November 6, 2012!

Very good video by Natural News highlighting Fast and Furious, Genetically Modified Foods, Vaccinations, Big Brother and Farmers, and Free Education!

Obama Admin skewers numbers for “Green Jobs” – Watch them squirm!

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“If you sweep the floor at a solar panel facility, is that considered a green job?” Congressman Darrell E. Issa   “Yes.”

Government official confirms that Obama Administration definition of “green jobs” include such things are putting gas into a school bus, driving a school bus, working at a bicycle shop, or working at a used record shop.

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Send In The Drones: Obama Spies On America

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Via Investors.com

 

Privacy: News the EPA is conducting surveillance on farmers goes against our grain. Freedom means freedom of movement and the presumption of innocence. How can we have it if every move is monitored by government?

Nebraska’s congressional delegation sent a justifiably angry letter  to Administrator Lisa Jackson last week  complaining that her Environmental Protection Agency had exceeded its legislative and constitutional authority by conducting drone surveillance flights over Nebraska and Iowa farms looking for violations of the Clean Water Act.

“They are just way on the outer limits of any authority they’ve been granted,” said Nebraska GOP Sen. Mike Johanns, an opinion the bureaucrats rejected Friday in responding to the letter. The EPA argues that the courts, including the Supreme Court, have already authorized aerial surveillance, such as taking aerial photographs of a chemical manufacturing facility.

“Farmers and ranchers in Nebraska pride themselves in the stewardship of our state’s natural resources,” says the letter signed by Republican Reps. Adrian Smith, Jeff Fortenberry and Lee Terry, as well as Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson and Johanns.

“As you might imagine, this practice has resulted in privacy concerns among our constituents and raises several questions.”

Smith, co-chairman of the Modern Agriculture Caucus and the Congressional Rural Caucus, said Tuesday the operations in many cases are near homes so “landowners deserve legitimate justification given the sensitivity of the information gathered by the flyovers.”

America is awash in surveillance cameras, from red-light cameras at intersections to cameras in and outside businesses. For the most part, we tolerate their intrusiveness if the pictures are triggered by actual lawbreakers or are in a public place for legitimate security purposes where the expectation of privacy does not exist.

But a drone flying over farmer Jones’ farmhouse seems a stretch that sets a dangerous precedent.

A federal policy promotes the use of drones by local law enforcement, and drone manufacturers are now pushing their products to the nation’s 18,000 police jurisdictions. This raises the question of whether drones will be allowed to capture information normally requiring a search warrant authorized by a judge?

Syndicated columnist and IBD contributor Charles Krauthammer calls drones instruments of war suited for war. They should not be used domestically, he says.

He notes that you can hear a police helicopter but not a drone over your house, and argues that “the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country.”

This is not the crazy urban legend of black helicopters roaming about. “We’ve seen in some records that were released by the Air Force just recently, that under their rules, they are allowed to fly drones in public areas and record information on domestic situations,” says Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Association, who is looking into various government surveillance techniques.

Under current guidelines, information gathered deliberately or accidentally by military drones over the U.S. can be kept by the military up to three months before being purged.

They can also be turned over to “another Department of Defense or government agency to whose function it pertains.” Presumably that includes Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.

“Our Founding Fathers had no idea that there would be remote-control drones with television monitors that can feed back live data instantaneously — but if they had, they would have made darn sure that these things were subject to the Fourth Amendment (protecting individual privacy),” Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, told Fox News.

It’s been said that those who sacrifice liberty for the sake of security will likely wind up with neither.

We agree with Mr. Krauthammer on drones surveilling American citizens: “Stop it here. Stop it now.”

For more click here.

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War on Terror Declared Over; Environmental Justice War Now Begins

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By Bob Beauprez via Townhall

An official for the State Department made it official, “The War on Terror is over.”  

It would seem that Barack Obama would have wanted to make the rather significant announcement himself, but instead the proclamation was made by an unnamed State Department official to Michael Hirsch of the National Journal.

Whew!  That’s good news for sure. 

I wonder if the Obama Administration also sent a memo to the 50 Foreign Terrorist Organizations identified by the State Department that the clock has run out – the game is over – take your suicide bomber vest and go home?  

We’ve all come to know their names:  Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Palestinian Islamic Jihad , Al-Shabaab, etc. 

Now that the War on Terror has come to an end, look for an announcement that the Department of Homeland Security will be eliminated.  DHS should no longer be necessary since fighting the War on Terror was the stated reason for creating the new agency in the first place. 

In defining the Mission for DHS, Sec. 101 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 says “The primary mission of the Department is to…prevent terrorist attacks within the United States.”  The short mission statement uses the word “terrorist” or “terrorism” six times. (See below)

No more War on Terror, no more DHS, no more Janet Napolitano…would that also mean we could go back to the good old days of airport security when we could keep most of our clothes on before boarding a plane? 

One can hope, but don’t hold your breath.

As reported on these pages yesterday, DHS has moved on to a new mission – Environmental Justice – no kidding!  That is yet another fascinating pivot in the land of Hope-and-Change from protecting Americans from terrorists who want to kill us, to protecting ferns, mice, and insects from….well, us.  

Homeland Security Act of 2002

SEC. 101. EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT; MISSION.

(a) ESTABLISHMENT.—There is established a Department of Homeland Security, as an executive department of the United States within the meaning of  title 5, United States Code. (b) MISSION.—

(1) IN GENERAL.—The primary mission of the Department is to— (A) prevent terrorist attacks within the United States;

(B) reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism; (C) minimize the damage, and assist in the recovery, from terrorist attacks that do occur within the United States;

(D) carry out all functions of entities transferred to the Department, including by acting as a focal point regarding natural and manmade crises and  emergency planning;

(E) ensure that the functions of the agencies and sub- divisions within the Department that are not related directly to securing the homeland are not  diminished or neglected except by a specific explicit Act of Congress;

(F) ensure that the overall economic security of the United States is not diminished by efforts, activities, and programs aimed at securing the homeland;  and

(G) monitor connections between illegal drug trafficking and terrorism, coordinate efforts to sever such connections, and otherwise contribute to  efforts to interdict illegal drug trafficking.

(2) RESPONSIBILITY FOR INVESTIGATING AND PROSECUTING TERRORISM.—Except as specifically provided by law with respect to entities  transferred to the Department under this Act, pri- mary responsibility for investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism shall be vested not in the  Department,  but rather in Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies with jurisdiction over the acts in question.

For more information click here.

Bob Beauprez

Bob Beauprez

Bob Beauprez is a former Member of Congress and is currently the editor-in-chief of A Line of Sight, an online policy resource. Prior to serving in Congress, Mr. Beauprez was a dairy farmer and community banker. He and his wife Claudia reside in Lafayette, Colorado. You may contact him at:  http://bobbeauprez.com/contact/

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Lie, Cheat, Steal: Save the Planet!

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By John Ransom via Townhall

Speaking of lies and the liars that spread them: In light of yesterday’s column on the cottage industry of global warming hysteria and the slant they give the day’s news, I got a nice email from the people at the Heartland Institute reminding me of the theft and alteration of documents from Heartland by hysterical warming apologist Professor Peter Gleick, a supposed ethics expert with the Pacific Institute.

I first covered the story as it was occuring in February, when Heartland reported the theft. Sinced then Heartland has published a list of websites and periodicals that abetted Gleick. I have have appended that list at the end of this column.

Gleick, who was chairman of the ethics committee at the American Geophysical Union, admitted that he recently stole some documents- and he may have forged others- from the conservative think-tank. But that’s all in a day’s work for a work-a-day climate warrior. The important thing isn’t the quest for the truth in global climate research, but, as Charlie Sheen would say, winning. With winning comes cash.

Because for some time it’s been clear, that in the climate debate, instead of actually accomplishing something worthwhile, all the attention will be on the winners and losers. And some losers in the debate are much bigger than others.

For example:

“In the field of climate science, when someone — especially skeptics — did something ethically questionable or misrepresented facts,” writes MSNBC, “scientist Peter Gleick was usually among the first and loudest to cry foul. He chaired a prominent scientific society’s ethics committee. He created an award for what he considered lies about global warming.”

No word yet whether Gleick will create an award for forgery. I hear the pool of candidates isn’t deep this year since all of the forged data from Climategate has already gone pro.

The authentic documents stolen from Heartland were released by Gleick, along with some documents the Heartland folks say are forgeries.

The real documents were prepared by the think-tank to counter the global warming bunk that is being taught in US schools.

I know about the global warming hysteria that is taught at the elementary and secondary level, because my kids come home everyday and instead of telling me about how they’ve learned to read and write and how great George Washington was, they instead tell me that “transfer calculations indicate that strong gradients in both ozone and water vapor near the tropopause contribute to the inversion.” Ah, huh. I think neither they, nor their teachers, nor the authors, nor myself, knows what that means.

Still I hope the question is on the ACT. But I doubt it.

This is a very serious issue.

How serious?

“Heartland has not said whether any of the documents it unwittingly released were altered,” reports the LA Times, “and Gleick said he did not change any of the material he got. But several of the key points the purported strategy document makes are backed up in the material Gleick obtained from Heartland. Most notably, in a fundraising document, Heartland identifies one of its priorities as reshaping the discussion of climate change in K-12 classrooms.” Ohmygosh!

Well let’s just say that the Heartland Institute is in BIG trouble now.

How dare these right-wing troglodytes have a scientific position contrary to the United Nations Interplanetary Council on Wealth Transfer and Class Envy.

No, no. no. You can’t do that. Not under an Obama administration.

Yeah sure: The UN misspends our money on their sex scandals, mismanagement of programs designed to secure peace and prosperity and engage in habitual human rights abuses by a majority of the members states who make up the one-world-government to-be. But clearly, those problems aside, they have the skill to put together a group of scientists who can report objectively on the science behind global warming; especially the part where the remedies include:

1) You footing the bill; and

2) They get your money.

Don’t we mere mortals know that our puny powers of reason and deduction are impervious to the powers granted to the Society of Ethical Geophysicists by the government of the United Nations?

That’s why the scientist, Geophysicist Ethicist Mr. Gleick, is now being hailed by the director of research for Greenpeace, Kert Davies, as a “hero,” says the LA Times.

Most other commentary declaims Gleick’s methods, while not-so subtly applauding his aims.

The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle has had about the only rational response, concluding that Gleick is crazy:

And ethics aside, what Gleick did is insane for someone in his position–so crazy that I confess to wondering whether he doesn’t have some sort of underlying medical condition that requires urgent treatment.  The reason he did it was even crazier.  I would probably have thrown that memo away.  I might have spent a few hours idly checking it out. I would definitely not have risked jail or personal ruin over something so questionable, and which provided evidence of . . . what?  That Heartland exists?  That it has a budget? That it spends that budget promoting views which Gleick finds reprehensible?

When conservatives question global warming, we are lying, apparently. When liberals steal in the name of global warming, it can’t be a sign of desperation, poor science or character. No; they must be crazy, with due respect to Ms. McArdle, who I believe is sincere .

I guess since liberals haven’t yet embraced retroactive abortions, the next, best thing they can do is label someone crazy when they want to cut them from the herd, as they did recently with Media Matter’s David Brock.

Skeptics- or rather, deniers, as we’d much rather be called- will point out that increasingly the public is distrustful of global warming science.

Despite a little bounce in the polls, 60 percent of US respondents to a Rasmussen survey don’t think that global warming is man made. “In a January survey of the top 22 policy priorities for the US,” writes Our World 2.0 “the public ranked climate change dead last, according to the Pew Research Center.”

“When government muzzles scientists for political reasons, it cuts at the fundamental principals of good science,” Stephen Hwang, professor of general internal medicine at the University of Toronto told Our World.

But when the doctors and scientists seek to muzzle the rest of us it’s all A.O.K.

And for some weird reason the public just doesn’t trust those scientists who are fully sponsored and funded by the UN, US, UK and other government grants, which in turn were funded by you.

By talking about it, you troglodytes just emit more carbon. Good going.

Your proper role is to just shut your big, fat mouth and fork over a carbon credit or cash equivalent so the truth-seeking can continue unimpeded.

For more information you can see the Heartland’s website on the scandal at Fakegate.org.

In the meantime, here’s a list of publications that Heartland says is a rogue’s gallery of organizations that are willing to invade people’s privacy in pursuit of an ideological campaign called “global warming.”

Please contact them – by commenting on the posts, emailing the bloggers or webmasters, even picking up the phone or writing a letter – to insist that they (1) remove those documents from their sites; (2) remove from their sites all posts that refer or relate in any manner to those documents; (3) remove from their Web sites any and all quotations from those documents; (4) publish retractions on their Web sites of prior postings; and (5) remove all such documents from their servers.

For more information click here.

John Ransom

John Ransom

John Ransom is the Finance Editor for Townhall Finance. You can follow him on twitter @bamransom and on Facebook: bamransom.

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Conservatives Hate Science (Fiction)

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Reblogged from The Last Civil Right:

  • Click to visit the original post
  • Click to visit the original post

 by: Takia Hollowell (Originally posted at www.kiradavis.net)

It is often argued that Conservatives and Libertarians do not believe in science since we overwhelmingly reject the theory of Global Warming.  Progressives and Democrats have labeled the right as “Deniers” and have even extended the vitriolic rhetoric by equating them with Holocaust Deniers as well.  Of course this does nothing but make Conservatives out to be the bogeyman and obfuscate the fact that man-made Global Warming is one big tyrannical redistribution hoax.

Read more… 1,133 more words, 1 more video

"It is often argued that Conservatives and Libertarians do not believe in science since we overwhelmingly reject the theory of Global Warming." Funny, so do many of the scientists who were duped into falsifying data to support the liberal agenda. We Conservatives rely on REAL facts, science and data - not the liberal lies initiated to take control of what we buy, use, and eat!
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“If I Wanted America to Fail”…..I would continue on the path we are on!

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This excellent and insightful video explains, in detail, steps required to ‘fundamentally transform America’ and set us up for failure – steps the current Obama regime have been initiating and implementing for the last three years!  Free market is failing, our housing market is failing, jobs are failing, the economy is failing, education is failing, energy independence is failing, and soon our new heavily taxed health care program will fail.  If America fails, the world will soon follow!  Please watch and please share!

Related articles at Letting Freedom Ring:

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The tab for U.N.’s Rio summit: Trillions per year in taxes, transfers and price hikes

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By  via Fox News

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.

The main goal of the much-touted, Rio + 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, scheduled to be held in Brazil from June 20-23, and which Obama Administration officials have supported,  is to make dramatic and enormously expensive changes  in the way that the world does nearly everything—or, as one of the documents puts it, “a fundamental shift in the way we think and act.”

Among the proposals on how the “challenges can and must be addressed,” according to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon:

–More than $2.1 trillion a year in wealth transfers from rich countries to poorer ones, in the name of fostering “green infrastructure, ”  “climate adaptation” and other “green economy” measures.

–New carbon taxes for industrialized countries that could cost about $250 billion a year, or 0.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product, by 2020. Other environmental taxes are mentioned, but not specified.

–Further unspecified price hikes that extend beyond fossil fuels to anything derived from agriculture, fisheries, forestry, or other kinds of land and water use, all of which would be radically reorganized. These cost changes would “contribute to a more level playing field between established, ‘brown’ technologies and newer, greener ones.”

– Major global social spending programs, including a “social protection floor” and “social safety nets” for the world’s most vulnerable social groups  for reasons of “equity.”

–Even more social benefits for those displaced by the green economy revolution—including those put out of work in undesirable fossil fuel industries. The benefits, called “investments,”  would include “access to nutritious food, health services, education, training and retraining, and unemployment benefits.”

–A guarantee that if those sweeping benefits weren’t enough, more would be granted. As one of the U.N. documents puts it:  “Any adverse effects of changes in prices of goods and services vital to the welfare of vulnerable groups must be compensated for and new livelihood opportunities provided.”

Click here for the Executive Summary Report.

That  huge catalogue of taxes and spending is described optimistically as “targeted investments  in human and social capital on top of investments in natural capital and green physical capital,” and is accompanied by the claim that it will all, in the long run, more than pay for itself.

But the whopping green “investment” list  barely scratches the surface of the mammoth exercise in global social engineering that is envisaged in the U.N. documents, prepared by the Geneva-based United Nations Environmental Management Group (UNEMG), a consortium of 36 U.N. agencies, development banks  and environmental bureaucracies, in advance of the Rio session.

An earlier version of the report was presented  at a closed door session of the U.N.’s top bureaucrats during a Long Island retreat last October, where Rio was discussed as a “unique opportunity” to drive an expanding U.N. agenda for years ahead.

Click here for more on this story from Fox News.

Under the ungainly title of Working Towards a Balanced and Inclusive Green Economy, A United Nations System-Wide Perspective,  the  final version of the 204-page report is intended to “contribute” to preparations for the Rio + 20 summit, where one of the two themes is “the green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication. ”  (The other theme is “the institutional framework for sustainable development” –sometimes known as global environmental governance.)

But in fact, it also lays out new roles for private enterprise, national governments, and a bevy of socialist-style worker, trade and citizens’ organizations in creating a sweeping international social reorganization, all closely monitored by regulators and governments to maintain environmental “sustainability” and “human equity.”

“Transforming the global economy will require action locally (e.g., through land use planning), at the national level (e.g., through energy-use regulations) and at the international level (e.g., through technology diffusion),” the document says. It involves “profound changes in economic systems, in resource efficiency, in the composition of global demand, in production and consumption patterns and a major transformation in public policy-making.”  It will also require “a serious rethinking of lifestyles in developed countries.”

As the report puts it, even though “the bulk of green investments will come from the private sector,” the “role of the public sector… is indispensable for influencing the flow of private financing.”  It adds that the green economy model “recognizes the value of markets, but is not tied to markets as the sole or best solution to all problems.”

Among other countries, the report particularly lauds China as “a good example of combining investments and public policy incentives to encourage major advances in the development of cleaner technologies.”

Along those lines, it says, national governments need to reorganize themselves to ” collectively design fiscal and tax policies as well as policies on how to use the newly generated revenue”  from their levies. There,  “U.N. entities can help governments and others to find the most appropriate ways of phasing out harmful subsidies while combining that with the introduction of new incentive schemes to encourage positive steps forward.”

U.N. organizations can also “encourage the ratification of relevant international agreements, assist the Parties to implement and comply with related obligations…and build capacity, including that of legislators at national and sub-national levels to prepare and ensure compliance with regulations and standards.”

The report declares that “scaled-up and accelerated international cooperation” is required, with new coordination at “the international, sub-regional, and regional levels.”  Stronger regulation is needed, and “to avoid the proliferation of national regulations and standards, the use of relevant international standards is essential” — an area where the U.N. can be very helpful, the report indicates.

The U.N. is also ready to supply new kinds of statistics to bolster and measure the changes that the organization foresees—including indicators that do away with old notions of economic growth and progress and replace them with new statistics. One example: “the U.N. System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), which will become an internationally agreed statistical framework in 2012.” 

These changes, the authors reassure readers, will  only be done in line with the “domestic development agendas” of the countries involved.

“A green economy is not a one-size-fits-all path towards sustainable development,” an executive summary of the report declares.   Instead it is a “dynamic policy toolbox” for local decision-makers, who can decide to use it optionally.

But even so, the  tools are intended for only one final aim. And they have the full endorsement  of U.N. Secretary General Ban, who declares in a forward to the document that “only such integrated approach will lay lasting foundations for peace and sustainable development,” and calls the upcoming Rio conclave a “generational opportunity” to act.

Click here for the full report.

H/T Leslie Burt

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