"I'm in Rio for the carnival," said the voice on the telephone. It was Henny-Penny.
"You're a few weeks late," I said.
MS. H-P: I don't mean that Carnival, I mean the annual Doomsayers' Carnival, where they get together to stroke their chins and proclaim disaster for the planet if everyone doesn't adopt their political agenda. They do it every year and their prescription is always the same.
ME: I'm surprised that you're welcomed there since you resigned as founder and Recording Secretary of the Holy Order of The Sky Is Falling, then denounced it and its pontiff, Al Gore. Now you're a leading global warming skeptic.
MS. H-P: I'm not being welcomed by the delegates. I'm here as the climate correspondent of an important publication, The Egg Layers' Gazette. My boss, the farmer, is giving me the week off to do it.
ME: So what's on the conference agenda?
MS. H-P: The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, will propose several things that will take our taxpayers' breath away, along with their money. One proposal would have industrialized countries transfer about $2 billion a year to non-industrialized ones. Another would be a new Carbon Tax that would cost U.S. taxpayers $250 billion a year by 2020. A third "reform" in the name of establishing a new "Green World Order" would result in price increases for most anything derived from agriculture, fishing, forestry, and other kinds of land and water use. All these endeavors would be reorganized, according to the Moon plan, in order to "contribute to a more level playing field between established 'brown' technologies and newer, greener ones."
Along with all this, there would be new global social spending programs to provide nearly everything free for those put out of work in fossil fuel industries, including "access to nutritious food, health services, education, training, retraining and unemployment benefits."
ME: Sounds as if it will create a new class of people dependent upon their government.
MS. H-P: That's right.
ME: I thought these conferences were made up of scientists.
MS. H-P: Some have been trained as scientists, but a lot of these depend upon grants from governments and foundations which promote global warming (now called "climate change") and expect the subsidized scientists to do the same.
Most of the those attending are seconded by their home countries (many of them non-industrialized) to the United Nations, which would oversee this One World operation. They are the authors of these plans and this is their carnival.
ME: Haven't they been pushing similar stuff for about a decade?
MS. H-P: Yes, but China and India haven't agreed to any of it because they don't want their economic growth thwarted. So far, the U.S. has said it won't sign on unless they do. Even if that were to happen, I can't imagine the U.S. Senate ratifying such a radical treaty in an election year. On the other hand, if Obama is re-elected and brings with him a strengthened Democrat majority in the Senate, next year it may be Katie, bar the door!
ME: Still, the alarmists have quite a cheering section.
MS. H-P: They sure do. The Sierra Club and its allies profess to be concerned about the environment. The specific concerns -- spotted owls and such -- are just devices for pushing their real agenda, which is to reduce industrial production and get us all used to having a lower standard of living.
You see, they really believe that the planet's resources are finite; that we have overused them and overpopulated the world it and that we must now go in the opposite direction.
ME. Some carnival. I hope it will prove as fruitless as all the previous ones.
MS. H-P: Even though I'm here as a journalist, you can bet I'll be working behind the scenes to make sure of it.
Mr. Hannaford first met Henny-Penny several years ago when she was touting global warming.
