Copenhagen Update: Goodbye, UN, Goodbye?

Could it really be for real?

When a newspaper devotes its front page [see left] to an editorial announcing that "humanity faces a profound emergency" unless the politicians in Copenhagen do the right thing about carbon dioxide in the next 14 days, you know that newspaper is being printed in green ink.

Perhaps for this reason, somebody chose to leak to the Guardian what is claimed to be a draft of a secret agreement between "rich nations" to cheat "poor nations" out of their piece of the carbon pollution pie. As reported by the Guardian's environment editor, John Vidal: 

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.

Taking that report with a gallon of salt, it is nevertheless an interesting exercise to imagine the UN with less ability to make decisions affecting the world. Its track record is below abysmal.

• The UN is an organization so inept that it sent a Peacekeeping mission to war-torn Rwanda without also giving that mission the authority to use force to protect either themselves or civilians. Result: genocide. 
  

• The UN Human Rights Commission is so corrupt that it lures some of the worst human rights offenders to serve on it by offering them immunity from censure from human rights abuses. Result: the Commission aims 80% of its human rights violation censures at Israel. 

• The UN Security Council is so unscrupulous that it invented an "Oil for Food Program" for Iraq whose main feature was graft. Result: a) millions of dollars of financial kickbacks to Saddam Hussein and UN officials; b) food sent to Iraq that was mostly unfit for consumption. 

According to Vidal, one senior diplomat described the secret agreement as "a very dangerous document for developing countries" that is "a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations." One thing the agreement, if signed, would do is "weaken the UN's role in handling climate finance." "The big risk," said Antonio Hill, climate policy advisor for Oxfam International, is that "it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN."

The Copenhagen Climate Conference is starting to look less like a scheduled performance by the Green Choir and more like a Clash between Corruptocrats. More chaos is sure to come.

(H/t: Minnesotans for Global Warming)
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• Copenhagen: The Climate Fiction Experience Begins Today
  
• Copenhagen Countdown: 3
• Copenhagen Countdown: 4
  
• Copenhagen Countdown: 5
  
• Copenhagen Countdown: 6
  
• ClimateGate: New Zealand Climate Scientists Aren't So Hot
  
• What ClimateGate Really Means
• Meditation: Issac Newton on Truthful Reporting of Data
• ClimateGate Who's Who
• Make Way for the Code Breakers
• Obama's Science Czar Holds a Whip in the Tree-Ring Circus
  
• What You Did Was Such a Crime
• Heh, Heh, Heh. Vincit Omnia Veritas