Rio – 50,000 people flock to a flop – but that is success in its own right

According to Greenpeace its an “epic fail”. WWF says its a “colossal failure”, and it’s so bad, Oxfam want to start all over again. That news may sound good to the free citizens of the West, but that’s only because we aim so low.

They may not get as much as they aim for, but they will still get what they came for.

Rio 2012: How big is this junket?

[It is] “billed as the biggest UN event ever organised. This time, 15,000 soldiers and police are guarding about 130 heads of state and government, as well as ministers and diplomats from 180 countries and at least 50,000 others.”

The Guardian

So 50,000 people got a trip to Rio. They may want world peace, free energy, and control over your light bulbs, your car, and your wallet, but most of them still got an expenses paid ticket to the Olympics of Global Bureaucracy. In the end they may say they are disappointed, but in reality they still scored one heck of a free lunch. And this is the point. As long as the masses are not saying that they want their money back, the show is a success. The junket is the point. The headlines crying “failure” are still advertising the meme. The world is still talking about hopes of environmental campaigners, not about the waste of money; Not about the 200,000 people starved by biofuel policies (and that was just the tally for 2010).

But as Bureaucratic success go, the signs are encouraging nonetheless… look who couldn’t make it… “Obama, Cameron, Merkel and most other G20 leaders are snubbing it.” According to John Vidal (The Guardian) no one expects any agreement to be reached, the UN is only aiming at another “roadmap”.

They blame the financial crisis for slowing things down, but if, hypothetically, the skeptics were winning, well, they would say that wouldn’t they? Indeed things are so bad, people admit they don’t use the term “climate change”: The name of the game in Rio is to change the name.

The term “Climate Change” is so on the nose, everyone is thinking of ways to reframe it. Activists openly admit the new terms are biodiversity, and sustainable development.

Huxley Lawler, Executive Coordinator of Environment and Climate Change of the Gold Coast City Council in Australia (an ICLEI member), told CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker bluntly that “we don’t use the term climate change anymore. It’s sustainable development.” Rucker and CFACT staffer Abdul Kamara confirmed this in conversations with other delegates, including Paul Chambers, a Sustainability Manager for the Auckland Council in New Zealand. Chambers said it is important to use inexact environment protection terminology when dealing with conservative governments, like the one he says currently heads his nation. [CFACT]

What are they hiding?

What is worrying though is that as Christopher Monckton points out, they have, for the first time ever, locked out all the non-government delegates. So much for transparency. The pain of Copenhagen and Durban has made them both sharper and more desperate.

RIO DE JANEIRO — In a shock move, officially-accredited non-government delegates who had traveled thousands of miles to attend the UN’s Rio+20 sustainable development conference in Brazil have been refused all access to the central negotiating text.

There is no public UN documentation center at Rio, though such centers were always available at previous UN conferences.

Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot, has attended many UN conferences and is in Rio, said: “This censorship by the UN is without precedent. The public has had access to these documents at previous UN summits. This latest development makes a mockery of any UN claim to ‘transparency.’” [Climate Depot]

Keep up with it all on CFACT TV.

Kudos to Marc Morano, and Craig Rucker at CFACT for being there.

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ICLEI International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.

PS: I”ll finish my reply to Paul Bain tomorrow hopefully…

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