The United Nations climate conference in Paris (COP21) concluded as a major success for the UN as the leaders of 195 countries unanimously signed on to the final agreement, including Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (shown).

According to the English-language Indian newspaper The Hindu, “Russia said the global community was beginning a new stage in its history after more than 20 years of international climate cooperation. The Russian Federation welcomed the Paris Agreement with differentiated efforts and in the spirit of climate justice.”

Earlier last week, the British newspaper The Guardian reported, “Russia has pledged not to stand in the way of a deal at the Paris climate change conference, removing another obstacle to a potential agreement.”

On December 1, the 21st session of the World Climate Change Conference opened with speeches from world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Climate change has become one of the gravest challenges humanity is facing,” Putin said in his remarks. He further stressed how Russia has “gone beyond the target fixed by the Kyoto Protocol for the period from 1991 to 2012.” Putin continued, “Russia not only prevented the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, but also significantly reduced it.”

Putin also asserted, “The solution of the climate problem is crucial for the quality of life of all people on the planet.” Regarded as a “climate change skeptic” for comments made in previous years regarding global warming, Putin’s recent remarks in Paris surprised many.

In 2003, speaking at the International Conference on Climate Change in Moscow, Putin said, “an increase of two or three degrees wouldn’t be so bad for a northern country like Russia. We could spend less on fur coats, and the grain harvest would go up.”

According to the Daily Beast, during “a visit to an Artic research facility in 2010, Putin acknowledged climate change and its likely harmful effects but reiterated that it was likely due to 'the Earth living its own life,'” comparing it to the extinction of woolly mammoths as result of rising temperatures at the end of the Ice Age rather than to human action.

These remarks by Putin led many to question his commitment to combating climate change. Now it would appear that he has made a 180-degree turn in favor of global UN action to combat it. This raises the question of what Putin actually believes concerning climate change and its purported devastating effects on the planet.

Director of the Institute of National Strategy Stanislav Belkovsky, a Putin critic and former Kremlin insider, told Reuters that Putin believes “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries including Russia.”

If Belkovsky’s portrayal of Putin’s views are accurate, then why the apparent sudden change of tone and support for the COP21 climate agreement?

One possibility put out by the Daily Beast is that it “could be related to plummeting oil prices":

[In] the past, Putin’s climate-change skepticism was rather transparently connected to his belief that the pressure to reduce carbon emissions was an economic assault on oil-producing missions. Today, when it’s increasingly clear that oil prices won’t be climbing back to their 2000s levels anytime soon, being part of the global oil-producing elite isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

In other words, with energy profits unlikely to rise as they did a decade ago, Russia has little to gain from not jumping on the UN globalist bandwagon of saving the planet from the “carbon footprint” emitted by its human occupants.

Another possibility is that Putin honestly no more believes in anthropogenic global warming than any one of the vast number of independent astrophysicists, climatologist, geoscientists, and other scientists who have been debunking UN and government claims to the contrary. But Putin's remarks in Paris and his backing of the COP21 agreement may demonstrate that he is a globalist insider committed to instituting a "New World Order" by various means, including perpetuating the global-warming swindle as a rationale for a world government to fight environmental catastrophes.

Regardless of whether individuals such as former Vice President Al Gore, Barack Obama, or Putin truly believe in global warming or not, they are utilizing it as a vehicle for global governance in the form of greater regulatory schemes such as a global carbon tax.

Photo: AP Images

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