Speaking at the White House last week, Pope Francis echoed the call in his latest encyclical “Laudato Si” (Praise be to You) emphasizing “sustainable development” which moves away from unfair capitalism and fossil fuels and towards wealth redistribution and renewable energy.
He also said that “it seems clear to me that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation.”
While saying little about the topic during his talk to a joint meeting of Congress last Thursday, Pope Francis made up for it during his lecture to the U.N. General Assembly the following day which, as he noted, began the sustainable development lead up to a December world climate summit in Paris.
Pledging his support and prayers, he urged the membership to negotiate a robust climate change treaty agreement.
Affirming the “rights of the environment” Francis admonished against “a selfish and boundless [capitalist] thirst for power and material prosperity [which] leads both to the misuse of available natural resources and to the exclusion of the weak and disadvantaged.”
It will come as no surprise to those of you who are at all familiar with published U.N. mantra, its Agenda 21 programs in particular, that sustainable development offers a great cover story to transfer “unfair” wealth from the industrialized West to their underdeveloped majority, to advance global socialism, and to establish world governance under the banner of “save the planet” environmentalism.
Nor is it any secret that the Vatican has totally bought into the U.N.’s alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports as the basis for its pontifical academy’s finding that “This century is on course to witness unprecedented environmental changes.
In particular, the projected [IPCC] climate changes or, more appropriately, climate disruptions, when coupled with ongoing massive species extinctions and the destruction of ecosystems, will doubtless leave their indelible marks on both humanity and nature.”
This “unprecedented” change was attributed to record high atmospheric CO2 levels from fossil fuel emissions, ignoring the obstinate fact that the climate was just as warm during the “Medieval warm period” one thousand years ago . . . and also during the “Roman warm period” 1,000 years before that when Christianity was born.
As a matter of fact, it was at least as warm during the 1930s through mid-’40s when atmospheric CO2 concentrations were lower.
Agenda 21 envisions a global scheme for healthcare, education, nutrition, agriculture, labor, production, and consumption.
A 1993 summary version titled “Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet” calls for “a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced — a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources.”
The report emphasizes that “This shift will demand a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
As Gary Lawrence, an advisor to the Clinton-Gore administration’s Council on Sustainable Development commented at a 1998 UN Environmental Development Forum in London: “Participating in a UN-advocated planning process will very likely bring out many . . . who would work to defeat any elected official . . . undertaking Local Agenda 21 . . . So we will call our process something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.”
And what constitutes “smart growth”? It revolves around an emphasis upon high density development emphasizing high rise “pack and stack” housing developments where private cars are discouraged in favor of public transportation, bicycles and walking to conserve energy use and reduce climate ravaging CO2 emissions.
So there you have it. “Comprehensive planning,” “growth management,” and “smart growth” (Agenda 21 with new names) all mean pretty much the same thing: centralized control of virtually every aspect of urban life: energy and water use, housing stock and allocation, population levels, public health and dietary regimens, resources and recycling, “social justice” and education.
Nearly every county in America now has U.N.-crafted sustainable development directives guided and administered by federal and state agencies, NGOs, and/or ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability which lobby politicians and recruit “strategic partners” to build pressure for those policies.
So according to U.N. goals, how is the term “sustainable development” actually defined?
According to the 1996 “Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide” published by ICLEI, the International Development Research Center (IDRC) and U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP): “The realities of life on our planet dictate that continued economic development as we know it cannot be sustained . . . Sustainable development, therefore, is a program of action for local and global economic reform — a program that has yet to be defined.”
Whatever that evolving program definition ultimately becomes, be assured it will bring a cold smile to Karl Marx’s corpse.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom”(2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012). Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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