The Heritage Foundation’s Steven Groves and Ben Lieberman are live at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference reporting from a conservative perspective. Follow their reports on The Foundry and at the Copenhagen Consequences Web site.
The main impression of many attendees at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen is just how poorly organized it all is. The check in time for non-governmental delegates (like Heritage’s attendees) on December 14 was over 8 hours. Hundreds had to wait for hours outside, where global warming has had no apparent impact on December Copenhagen temperatures, and many never even got in.
Mind you, this conference was two years in the making, and these delegates had already gone through a time-consuming application process in the months before the conference. Worse, the conference is less well attended than anticipated earlier this year, when expectations were higher for a major deal.
The UN is doing a terrible job handing this conference – and now it wants to all but run the U.S. and world economies.
The latest proposal calls for a 25 to 40 percent emissions cut from the U.S. and other developed nations by 2020 based on a 1990 baseline, much more stringent than the 17 percent based on a 2005 baseline in the House Waxman-Markey bill and offered up by President Obama as an initial position at Copenhagen. It would be a massive energy tax, and an energy tax administered at least in part by UN bureaucrats. Those same bureaucrats that left hundreds if delegates in the cold are certainly capable of leaving the economy in the cold as well.