Maldives Cabinet Stunt

Gotta hand it to these guys--they know what drives the media boat:

With fish as witnesses, the president of Maldives and his Cabinet wore scuba gear and used hand signals Saturday at an underwater meeting to highlight the threat climate change poses to the archipelago nation. The Maldives declaration will be presented at a U.N. summit on climate change in December.

The Maldives are a small group of beautiful islands in the Indian Ocean. But they aren't the only small group of islands playing the global sea level rise card. Tuvalu, a map dot in the south Pacific, were the trailblazers:

Tuvalu has limited resources, and so their main source of income is foreign aide.

To the left is one of the Tuvalu islands. Not surprisingly they hold western governments responsible for causing the purported sea level rises due to carbon emissions, even if science might not always agree with them.

Greenpeace was most probably behind promoting the Tuvalu cause as they clearly saw the potential for a white man's guilt factor, ie, Americans driving to the corner market in the SUV could be seen to cause the drowning of poor Tuvaluans.

So it's no wonder the Maldive government has pulled this stunt before Copenhagen since guilt and it's resulting cure--"spreading the wealth around", is the root of most environmental platforms from a political perspective. White man's greed, etc.

Speaking of the Climate Summit in Copenhagen, somebody needs to put in an order for warmer temps during next year's MLB playoffs. Seriously though, Anthony Watts' place was jumping yesterday based on what Lord Monckton said in a recent speech about the pending treaty. Watts has it, and commented thusly:

Skimming through the treaty, I came across verification of Monckton’s assessment of the new entity’s purpose:

38. The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:

World Government (heading added)
a) The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.

To Redistribute Wealth (heading added)
b) The Convention’s financial mechanism will include a multilateral climate change fund including five windows: (a) an Adaptation window, (b) a Compensation window, to address loss and damage from climate change impacts [read: the "climate debt" Monckton refers to], including insurance, rehabilitation and compensatory components, © a Technology window; (d) a Mitigation window; and (e) a REDD window, to support a multi-phases process for positive forest incentives relating to REDD actions.

With Enforcement Authority (heading added)
c) The Convention’s facilitative mechanism will include: (a) work programmes for adaptation and mitigation; (b) a long-term REDD process; © a short-term technology action plan; (d) an expert group on adaptation established by the subsidiary body on adaptation, and expert groups on mitigation, technologies and on monitoring, reporting and verification; and (e) an international registry for the monitoring, reporting and verification of compliance of emission reduction commitments, and the transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries. The secretariat will provide technical and administrative support, including a new centre for information exchange [read; enforcement].

Kind of sensational, but read the comments for a balanced and thought-provoking discussion. Seemingly not in dispute is the notion that Obama is aligned with other world leaders about 'spreading the wealth around', and global climate might work as a convenient vehicle. Not to say there might not be some good reasons, such as fending off future regional wars and terrorism due to diminishing resources in an age of WMDs (something they probably discuss over cognac and caviar at Davos and der Bilderberger) but it would be much nicer to approach the problem honestly. Americans have always been generous folks.

Nevertheless, it seems the politicians would rather approach this from a sneaky direction, which begs the question--can a system designed to protect individual liberties survive in the shrinking world of the 21st century? And how are such clandestine plans any different than the neocons' vigorously derided PNAC proposal?