Green New Deal Plagiarized From 2009 UN Environment Programme Report?

Op-Ed by Patrick Wood

In a stunning revelation from a 2009 UN document titled “Rethinking the Economic Recovery: A Global Green New Deal“, it is discovered that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ (AOC) Green New Deal is not a new movement of the people, but rather a crafty creation of a small group of global elite working through the United Nations.

This 144-page report was headed by Edward B. Barbier, a professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Wyoming at the time, but specifically prepared for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

It was UNEP that sponsored the infamous 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that catalyzed the doctrine of Sustainable Development and produced the Agenda 21 book labeled The Agenda for the 21st Century. UNEP has been at the root of every intellectually bankrupt scheme to flip the world into its resource-based economic system while driving a fatal nail into Capitalism and Free Enterprise. In my books Technocracy Rising and Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order, I have extensively documented that Sustainable Development is nothing more than warmed-over Technocracy from the 1930s.

Barbier credits a number of people as important contributors to his paper, but two in particular ring a loud bell: the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE).

Center for American Progress

CAP was founded by John Podesta, a prominent member and operative of the Trilateral Commission. Podesta was the principal architect for the U.S. environmental policy for well over 2 decades. He served as Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff, Special Counselor to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign Manager. In July 2002, the UN Secretary-General appointed him to the High-Level Panel On Post-2015 Development Agenda that created the text for the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015.

The Board of Directors for CAP includes Sen. Tom Daschle (Chairman), Stacey Abrams, Donald Sussman, and California billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer.

Peterson Institute for International Economics

PIEE was founded by Peter G. Peterson (1926-2018), a principal member of the Trilateral Commission for decades. PIEE’s Board of Directors is a Who’s Who of the Trilateral Commission and includes Lawrence Summers, C. Fred Bergsten, Richard N. Cooper, Stanley Fischer, Robert Zoellick, Alan Greenspan, Carla A. Hills, George P. Schultz, Paul A. Volcker, and Ernesto Zedillo. The PIEE paper cited by Barbier was A Green Global Recovery? Assessing US Economic Stimulus and the Prospects for International Coordination

Familiar Language

Echoing AOC’s rhetoric,  the Barbier’s UNEP report states,

The multiple crises threatening the world economy today demand the same kind of initiative as shown by Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, but at the global scale and embracing a wider vision. (p. 5)

In an article by VOX titled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is making the Green New Deal a 2020 litmus test, it stated,

Until now, the Green New Deal has been more of an idea than an actual policy. This week, an Ocasio-Cortez resolution is set to make its debut. The plan prioritizes climate change, but its strength lies in its symbolic ties to one of the Democratic party’s biggest historical successes: the original New Deal under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The comparison to Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been prominent from the first day that Ocasio-Cortez became a public figure.

The official Global Green New Deal objectives are also reminiscent of the modern propaganda:

• Revive the world economy, create employment opportunities and protect vulnerable groups.
• Reduce carbon dependency, ecosystem degradation and water scarcity.
• Further the Millennium Development Goal of ending extreme world poverty by 2015.

If rewritten to current Green New Deal standards, it would look like this:

• Revive the U.S. economy, create employment opportunities and protect vulnerable groups.
• Reduce carbon dependency, ecosystem degradation and water scarcity.
• Further Sustainable Development Goal #1 of ending extreme world poverty by 2030.

Under the section, Reducing Carbon Dependence, more Green New Deal language, almost word-for-word, is discovered:

• Retrofitting buildings to improve energy efficiency
• Expanding mass transit and freight rail
• Constructing a “smart” electrical grid transmission system
• Developing renewable energy, i.e. wind power, solar power, next-generation biofuels and other bio-based energy.

Five Crazy – and Failed – Predictions

The report Rethinking the Economic Recovery: A Global Green New Deal made five nutty predictions, all of which have failed miserably.

• Global energy demand will rise by 45 per cent by 2030, and the price of oil is expected to rise to US$180 per barrel.
• Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will increase by 45 per cent by 2030, leading to an increase in the global average temperature up to 6oC.
• The world economy will sustain losses equivalent to 5-10 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) and poor countries suffer costs in excess of 10 per cent of GDP.
• Ecological degradation and water scarcity will increase.
• There will be over 1 billion people living on less than US$1 a day and 3 billion living on less than US$2 a day by 2015.

Currently, the price of oil is $59, the rise in greenhouse gas emissions is not on its way to a 45 percent increase by 2030, the world economy never sustained losses of 5-10 percent of GDP, ecological degradation is not quantifiable, water scarcity is a myth and poverty levels of people with less than $2.00 per day is only 767 million (World Bank, 2018).

The predictions from the current iteration of the Green New deal are just as crazy as the Global Green New Deal from 2009.

Conclusion

The modern “creators” of the Green New Deal claim that they developed it over a weekend. If true, it was only because they had a copy of Rethinking the Economic Recovery: A Global Green New Deal sitting in front of them to copy text and then localizing it for the United States.

Furthermore, these policies are not popular with the American people, as constantly claimed, but have been consistently rejected by citizens.

The Green New Deal is simply not a movement of the people, nor has it ever been. Rather, it has been purposely created by the same global elite that started Sustainable Development in the first place, namely, by members of the Trilateral Commission and the Club of Rome working through the auspices of the United Nations Environmental Programme.

Shame on you Green New Deal ideologues. Plagiarism by any other name is still plagiarism. You will be rejected as certainly as the global elite has already been rejected.

Note: tip of the hat to Dr. Willie Soon for forwarding this story to me, as originally highlighted in an email by Richard Bast of The Heartland Institute

You can read more from Patrick Wood at his site Technocracy News and Trends, where this article first appeared.