True Discernment

from Fox News:

An environmental report issued by an agency of the United  Nations last month has some critics sounding the alarm, saying it is a  clarion call for “global governance” over how the Earth is managed.

The report, “21  Issues for the 21st Century,” from the United Nations Environment Program  (UNEP) Foresight Process, is the culmination of a two-year deliberative process  involving 22 core scientists. It is expected to receive considerable attention  in the run-up to the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which will be held in Rio, Brazil, in  June.

The scientists who wrote the report say it focuses on identifying emerging  issues in the global environment, and that it is not about mandating  solutions.

But its critics see an agenda lurking in its 60 pages, which call for a complete overhaul of how the world’s food and water are created and distributed — something the report says is “urgently needed” for the human race to keep feeding and hydrating itself safely.

“This is more utopianism, pie-in-the-sky pleading for ‘global governance,’ including what they acknowledge as ‘novel governance arrangements,’ including, ‘alliances between environmentalist and other civil society groups,’” charged  Chris Horner, author of Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats,  Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed, and a senior fellow for energy and  environment at the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in  Washington, D.C.

The Foresight Report suggests actions to save humanity from starvation, the  overheating planet and the collapse of the world’s oceans — options that  include new “constitutional frameworks,” “international protocols” and a “shared  vision” for land and water management that essentially rewire existing treaties  and governments.

But the group insists it’s not a call for global governance.

“We are not talking about a world government,” said Dr. Oren Young, professor  of institutional and international governance and environmental institutions at  the University  of California at Santa Barbara, and one of the scientists who issued the  report.

He said the panel’s conversations included questions like, “How do we resolve  these problems without creating this monster entity?”

Young said the panel wasn’t tasked with finding all the answers.

“We realize that government can be part of the problem,” he told FoxNews.com. “But we can’t close our eyes and say, ‘oh well, everything will work out,’ without us even looking at it.”

Even environmentalists don’t believe that planet-wide accords are  particularly popular.

“I don’t think there is a global appetite right now for new institutions … or  a world environmental organization like we have, say, with the World Trade  Organization,” said Janet Redman, co-director of the Sustainable  Energy and Economy Network at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies  in Washington, D.C.

“There are a lot of places — especially the oceans and food security — where everyone is saying that doing this piecemeal is not going to address the  bigger sense of these environmental issues.” . . . . . .