The Next Big Green Thing

With the slow fade of the climate change issue toward political oblivion, the green authoritarians need a new bandwagon to jump on and flog.  And so this headline in Scientific American online is manna from heaven: “World Governments Establish Biodiversity Panel.”  It’s clearly from the “if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed-at-the-UN-try-try-again” school:

Governments from more than 90 countries have agreed to establish an independent panel of scientists to assess the very latest research on the state of the planet’s fragile ecosystems. The decision, which will create a body akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was made in Panama City this weekend, after years of negotiations.

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) will be responsible for producing international scientific assessments on issues such as ocean acidification and pollination, to help policy-makers to tackle the global loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystems.

“I hope that this body will allow biodiversity to be better taken into account in sustainable-development strategies, as the IPCC has for climate change over the past 20 years,” says Irina Bokova, director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), based in Paris.

There’s more, but this is enough.  (And yes, this would be the same UNESCO that has proposed UN censorship of the media, among other tyrannical ideas.)

Now, as I have said here on Power Line in the past, I think the bundle of issues we lump under the “biodiversity” banner (species extinction/habitat fragmentation/ecosystem health) are the most serious environmental issues on the global scale—much more so than climate change, but two things need to be kept in mind.  First, as always, environmentalists overestimate the magnitude of the problem (though in this case we really don’t have a solid grasp of the dimensions of the problem—even the BBC gets this), and second, environmentalists will politicize the science and propose their usual authoritarian, centralizing, power-grabbing solutions that will maximize political conflict, and fail to solve the problem, when it doesn’t make the problem worse. As I like to say, the environment is too important to leave to environmentalists; they’ll just make a mess of things, as they have with climate change.

I’ll say it again because it never gets old: Losers.

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