THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES OF THE UN

Christiana Figueres: Well, that is, ironically, of course, the other side of this right? It may be good for climate. But I think because there is less trade, there’s less travel, there’s less commerce. Expect more disease outbreaks if we continue to deny, delude and delay on climate change. If we continue to eat animals, we will be poisoning ourselves and being the genesis of new diseases we have not seen before.

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Remember when the ILO did labor, the FAO did agriculture, the WHO did health, the World Bank did infrastructure loans for developing countries, the WMO did Meteorology, and the UNDP did economic development of poor countries? Now they all do Climate. This post is an examination of this anomaly in terms of the structure and function of the UN that are not constrained and that contain no provision for accountability, oversight, discipline, or budgetary constraint. These structural flaws have created a rogue public service organization that serves itself and not the public and they make it possible for the UN to use its self declared global environmental authority to invent global environmental crises that inflate its budget and serve its bureaucratic needs.

That the World Health Organization (WHO) is busy with climate change these days with predictions that climate change is causing starvation and malnutrition, is best understood in this context. The WHO is no longer a World Health Organization but an agency of the UN that takes its orders from Antonio Guterres the climate guy.

(1) IN THE BEGINNING: A history of world wars among nation states and the yearning for a global peace keeper to prevent such wars is the context that gave birth the the idea of a global peace keeper. This peacekeeper is envisioned as an independent body, representing all nation states but beholden to none, such that it can intervene, resolve disputes, and prevent war among nation nations. Yet, it should obvious that if these independence criteria are met, the peace keeping body becomes a public service organization with no mechanism for accountability, oversight or discipline, a condition well known to cultivate corruption and a self-serving agenda. The unanswered question is ” If we need a UN run by mortals to discipline nations run by mortals, who will discipline the mortals as the UN? ”

(2) CORRUPTION IN PUBLIC SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS: It is well known and well established that public service organizations without adequate accountability, oversight, and discipline mechanisms in place serve themselves and not the public. This flaw in the global peace keeper idea has been overlooked. If the global peacekeeper body will discipline the world’s nation states, who will discipline the global peacekeeper? This question was asked by Henry Cabot Lodge a hundred years ago but it has since been forgotten and it remains to this day an unanswered question. This is the fundamental flaw in the global peacekeeper idea. It gave us the monster that is the UN.

(3) CONSEQUENCES OF STRUCTURAL WEAKNESS: Here we examine the consequences of this structural weakness with specific applications to the ambition of the United Nations to extend its role from global peacekeeper to that of a global environmental protection agency with the argument that certain global environmental issues transcend national boundaries and can only be assessed and controlled on a global basis. Here we argue that this extension of the function of a world peacekeeper is inconsistent with the idea of a world of humans that consists of independent nation states.

(4) THE PARIS AGREEMENT OF 1919: The global peacekeeper idea was born after the first global war in World-War-1 when the League of Nations was formed after the 14-points speech by progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1918 in which he envisioned a global body that would resolve disputes and prevent warfare. Henry Cabot Lodge (HCL) argued against the plan saying that such a powerful global body overseeing nation states without oversight and discipline by the nation states will end up subverting national sovereignty. Although the global peacekeeper idea was thus stalled in the US by the HCL argument, it created a great sense of euphoria and strong support for the Wilson proposal on the other side of the Atlantic where they had a hippie moment envisioning global love and peace. And that that led to the Paris Agreement of 1919 and the Geneva Covenant of 1920 and The League of Nations was thus created with a membership of 48 countries. History Dot Com writes that the League had a mixed record of success and failure, sometimes putting self-interest before becoming involved with conflict resolution, while also contending with governments that did not recognize its authority. It died peacefully during World War II which it had failed to prevent. [LINK TO HISTORY DOT COM] .

(5) AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR: The 2nd World War ended in 1945 and the idea of a global body to prevent future wars re-surfaced. A series of meetings of the victors were held to draft a charter for the new improved League of Nations to be called the United Nations this time. The failure of the League of Nations was attributed, not to too much power of a public service organization with inadequate supervision and accountability but to not enough power. The final decisive meeting that created the Charter for the United Nations was held in San Francisco in 1945. The UN we know today was thus created with an initial membership of 51 countries. The Charter lists 4 functions and duties of the United Nations. They are (1)Maintain international peace and security. (2)Develop friendly relations among nations. (3)Achieve international cooperation in solving international problems. (4)Be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

(6) FLAWS IN THE 1945 CHARTER GAVE US AN UNCONSTRAINED BUREAUCRACY: This charter reveals two significant problems with regard to the accountability and oversight issue. It appears that these organizational weaknesses had been built into the structure and function of the UN at the very outset by the Charter itself. The UN was conceived for the single purpose of preventing future wars. That function is found in Charter-Item#1: Maintain international peace and security. The other three functions, #2, #3, and #4 having to do with “friendly relations”, “international cooperation”, “problem solving”, and “harmonizing actions” etc have been arbitrarily thrown in by the Charter writers and they are at the root of the structural flaws that have created the rogue organization we see today.

(7): PROBLEMS CREATED BY CHARTER ITEMS 2, 3, & 4: The problems created by Charter items #2, #3, and #4 are first, that they have expanded the role of the UN well beyond its conceptual definition as the prevention of warfare particularly with reference to world wars among multiple nations; and this fundamental structural expansion of this new public service organization was done without inserting anything in the Charter in terms of constraints, limits, accountability, oversight, and discipline measures. There is nothing in the Charter that draws the line beyond which the UN may not go. It says what they can do but does not say what they can’t do. This error is confounded by yet another fatal error in the charter: There is no oversight and accountability measure in the Charter. This combination of the absence of limits and the absence of oversight is a dangerous formula for public service organizations because it is a formula for rogue organizations.

(8) PUBLIC SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS WITHOUT OVERSIGHT & ACCOUNTABILITY SERVE THEMSELVES AND NOT THE PUBLIC. As a rule, in public service organizations, particularly so for unelected bodies, the powers, budget, and reach of the organization must be balanced against the accountability, oversight, and discipline (AOD) measures such that the greater the powers, reach, and budget the greater and more effective must be the AOD measures. Instead, what the Charter has done is to throw in arbitrary UN functions #2, #3, and #4 in vague language and with no corresponding AOD measures such that UN bureaucrats can interpret and extend these vague functions as they wish; and with no accountability. There are no constraints in the Charter. For example, it does not say that the UN must not violate national sovereignty of the member states such that the UN was able to launch the “Smart Cities” program in which it went around the Trump Administration’s rejection of the Paris Agreement to work directly with local government in the USA to implement the Paris Agreement.

(9) A rogue public service organization is here defined as one that serves its bureaucrats and not the public that it was formed to serve. An added weakness is that UN bureaucrats are appointed for the relatively long period of 5-year terms and often re-appointed multiple times. These terms should be greatly reduced with no possibility of re-appointment. The organization is funded by a few member states but the UN is not accountable to those taxpayers and the budget of the UN is not constrained. The unconstrained budget makes it possible for the UN to invent new functions and programs and will and pass the new expanded budget in the general assembly. The function and reach of the UN are also not constrained by the Charter. The UN must be reformed in ways that it serves its constituents and not itself.

(10) THE IPCC IS AN AGENCY OF THE UN: THE UN’S MISSION IS TO IMPOSE CLIMATE ACTION AND THE IPCC’S JOB IS TO PROVIDE A “SCIENTIFIC” RATIONALE FOR CLIMATE ACTION. THE EXPLANATION FOR THE ODDITY THAT ALL CLIMATE IMPACTS ARE BAD, THAT ALL BAD THINGS ARE CLIMATE IMPACTS, AND THAT IN THE SCIENCE OF CLIMATE IMPACTS THERE ARE NO GOOD IMPACTS AND NO ATTRIBUTION FAILURES DUE TO UNCERTAINTY IS THAT IPCC SCIENCE IS NOT UNBIASED OBJECTIVE SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY BUT AGENDA DRIVEN TO PROVIDE THE RATIONALE NEEDED BY THE UN FOR ITS PRE-DETERMINED CLIMATE ACTION AGENDA SUCH THAT THE CLIMATE ACTION MEASURES DEMANDED ARE NOT DERIVED FROM THE CLIMATE SCIENCE BUT RATHER, IT IS THE CLIMATE SCIENCE THAT IS DERIVED FROM PRE-DETERMINED CLIMATE ACTION DEMANDS OF THE UN. [LINK] .

(11) THE WMO IS AN AGENCY OF THE UN: The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has released its State of the Climate report for 2018. The report begins with a statement by the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres which states that: “The data released in this report give cause for great concern. The past four years were the warmest on record, with the global average surface temperature in 2018 approximately 1°C above the pre-industrial baseline. These data confirm the urgency of climate action. This was also emphasized by the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C. The IPCC found that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C will require rapid and far-reaching transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities, and that global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide need to fall by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching “net zero” around 2050. To promote greater global ambition on addressing climate change, I am convening a Climate Action Summit on 23 September. The Summit aims to mobilize the necessary political will for raising ambition as we work to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. Specifically, I am calling on all leaders to come to New York in September with concrete, realistic plans to enhance their nationally determined contributions by 2020 and reach net zero emissions around mid-century. The Summit will also demonstrate transformative action in all the areas where it is needed. There is no longer any time for delay. I commend this report as an indispensable contribution to global efforts to avert irreversible climate disruption. (A. Guterres United Nations Secretary-General) [LINK]

(12) THE UN IS AN UNCONSTRAINED BUREAUCRACY: THE UNITED NATIONS IS AN UNCONSTRAINED BUREAUCRACY. It is financed mostly by taxpayers from a few donor countries but the large and growing bureaucracy is too far removed from those taxpayers to be directly accountable to them. It is run by unelected, unaccountable, undisciplined, and incompetent bureaucrats. The organization’s size, budget, and scope are unconstrained. The budget funding process provides perverse incentives for these bureaucrats to increase the size and scope of their organization simply by creating multitudes of agencies and programs, and by inventing problems and environmental crises set on a global scale. [LINK] .

REFORM PROPOSALS BY THE US CONGRESS

Blanchfield, Luisa. United Nations reform: US policy and international perspectives. DIANE Publishing, 2010. Since its establishment in 1945, the United Nations has been in a constant state of transition as various international stakeholders seek ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the U.N. system. Recent controversies, such as corruption of the Iraq Oil-For-Food Program, allegations of sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers, and instances of waste, fraud and abuse by U.N. staff, have focused renewed attention on the need for change and improvement of the United Nations. Many in the international community, including the United States, have increased pressure on U.N. member states to implement substantive reforms. The 111th Congress will most likely continue to focus on U.N. reform as it considers appropriate levels of U.S. funding to the United Nations and monitors the progress and implementation of ongoing and previously-approved reform measures. In September 2005, heads of U.N. member states met for the World Summit at U.N. Headquarters in New York to discuss strengthening the United Nations through institutional reform. The resulting Summit Outcome Document laid the groundwork for a series of reforms that included establishing a Peace-building Commission, creating a new Human Rights Council, and enlarging the U.N. Security Council. Member states also agreed to Secretariat and management reforms including improving internal U.N. oversight capacity, establishing a U.N. ethics office, enhancing U.N. whistle-blower protection, and reviewing all U.N. mandates five years or older. Blanchfield, Luisa. United Nations reform: background and issues for congress. Congressional Research Service, 2015 LuisaPDF Summary: Since its establishment in 1945, the United Nations (U.N.) has undergone numerous reforms to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. Recent controversies include corruption in the Iraq Oil-For-Food Program, allegations of sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers, and instances of waste, fraud, and abuse by U.N. staff. There is an urgent need for the reform of the United Nations. The 114th Congress may focus on U.N. reform as it considers levels of U.S. funding to the United Nations and monitors the progress and implementation of reform measures. Some Members are particularly interested in U.N. Secretariat and management reform, with a focus on improving transparency and strengthening accountability and oversight . In the past, Congress has enacted legislation that links U.S. funding of the United Nations to specific U.N. reform benchmarks . Supporters of this strategy contend that the United Nations has been slow to implement reforms and that linking payment of U.S. assessments to progress on U.N. reform is the most effective way to motivate member states to efficiently pursue comprehensive reform . The World Summit at U.N. Headquarters in New York to discuss strengthening the United Nations through institutional reform .