Agenda 21: The United Nations Threat To Control Our Lightbulbs, Our Lifestyles and Our Lives

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/08/agenda-21-the-united-nations-plot-to-control-our-lightbulbs.php

Agenda 21: The United Nations Threat To Control Our Lightbulbs, Our Lifestyles and Our Lives

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 08. 5.11

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/08/how-climate-change-litmus-test-republicans.php">I disagreed with TreeHugger Brian the other day, about what is driving the Tea Party madness in Washington. He said money; I said ideology. Here's why.

In my spare time, I am active in the Heritage Preservation movement; I think old buildings and communities are more than http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/06/heritage-is-green-lessons-from-the-conservancy.php">relics from the past, they are templates for the future. For the last year I have been trying to determine the cause of a remarkable rise in the belief that property rights are sacrosanct, even in Canada where they were consipicuously left out of the constitution and have not ever really existed. Where heritage preservation used to be derided by many as conservative and reactionary, a bunch of old whiners trying to stop change, now it is suddenly socialist. The more I read, the more I kept coming up against a new term: Agenda 21. And it underpins the ideological opposition to everything from streetcars to planning to lightbulbs to climate change.



The http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_09.shtml">actual Agenda 21 document from the United Nations started goes back to Rio in1992 and is pretty innocuous, given that nobody really pays much attention to these things, and they are not exactly the law of the land. It includes goals such as:

…


Image credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/5854180927/">Gage Skidmore
But as Tim Murphy of Mother Jones recently posted in http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/michele-bachmann-light-bulbs-agenda-21?page=1">First They Came for the Lightbulbs, in the mind of a Michele Bachmann it becomes the intellectual basis for her war on lightbulb legislation.

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[CanonRay]

1. I was at a Move to Amend meeting

recently and a guy got up and started babbling about this bullshit. It was a good meeting up to then. Fortunately he left right after giving his schpeel. These people are deranged.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. I understand they plan to take our lightbulbs away

in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_helicopter">black helicopters.

[kristopher]

3. The Rio Earth Summit was a declaration of war against fossil fuels

At least, that is how it was perceived by the industries that saw themselves being targeted for extinction.

These papers form a set that documents events before the TeaBagger total break with rationality.

Jacques rearguard of modernity
Theory:
Rearguard of Modernity

in the journal Global Environmental Politics

Environmental skepticism denies the reality and importance of mainstream global environmental problems. However, its most important challenges are in its civic claims which receive much less attention. These civic claims defend the basis of ethical authority of the dominant social paradigm. The article explains how political values determine what skeptics count as a problem. One such value described is “deep anthropocentrism,” or the attempt to split human society from non-human nature and reject ecology as a legitimate field of ethical concern. This bias frames what skeptics consider legitimate knowledge. The paper then argues that the contemporary conservative countermovement has marshaled environmental skepticism to function as a rearguard for a maladaptive set of core values that resist public efforts to address global environmental sustainability. As such, the paper normatively argues that environmental skepticism is a significant threat to efforts to achieve sustainability faced by human societies in a globalizing world.

Download here: http://ucf.academia.edu/PeterJacques/Papers/71775/Rearguard-of-Modernity



Study to test theory:
The Organization of Denial: Conservative Think Tanks and Environmental Scepticism

Co-authored with Riley E. Dunlap and Mark Freeman published in the journal Environmental Politics, June 2008

Environmental scepticism denies the seriousness of environmental problems, and self-professed 'sceptics' claim to be unbiased analysts combating 'junk science'. This study quantitatively analyses 141 English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005. We find that over 92 per cent of these books, most published in the US since 1992, are linked to conservative think tanks (CTTs). Further, we analyse CTTs involved with environmental issues and find that 90 per cent of them espouse environmental scepticism. We conclude that scepticism is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.

download here: http://ucf.academia.edu/PeterJacques/Papers