By Joseph A. Klein, CFP United Nations Columnist ——Bio and Archives--September 11, 2023
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New Yorkers are gritting their teeth in anticipation of the massive gridlocks that will accompany the upcoming annual circus at the United Nations later this month, known as the General Assembly High-Level Week. As the 78th session of the General Assembly gets underway, about 145 world leaders will appear before the chamber, pontificate on a wide variety of global issues, and find reasons to avoid accountability for their own countries’ troubles and misconduct.
High-Level Week will kick off with the United Nations’ SDG Summit on September 18-19 to discuss the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that is now at its midpoint. The succession of speeches in the General Assembly chamber by heads of state, prime ministers, and foreign ministers of the UN’s 193 member states will begin on September 19th. While this parade of speeches is going on, there will also be a summit on “climate ambition,” which is to take place on September 20th. And a ministerial meeting will be held to discuss preparations for what the United Nations has grandiosely branded as its 2024 Summit of the Future.
The United Nations has described the SDG summit as the centerpiece of this year’s High-level Week of the General Assembly. That is fitting since the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and how to achieve them, embrace the globalist philosophy that such intractable problems as poverty and inequality can be solved by global wealth redistribution guided by multinational left-wing governance institutions.
“To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals,” the UN states on its SDG website, “annual investment requirements across all sectors have been estimated at around $5-7 trillion. Current investment levels are far from the scale needed.” (Emphasis added)
The UN wants to channel much of what it estimates to be more than $200 trillion in global financial assets “towards sustainable development at the scale and speed necessary to achieve the SDGs and objectives of the Paris Agreement on climate change.”
The Climate Ambition Summit will serve as another opportunity for the UN to convene world leaders to hear apocalyptic warnings about the disastrous impacts of human-caused climate change. The objective of the summit is to go beyond the commitments that countries made in 2015 as part of the Paris agreement on climate change. UN member state governments and private sector stakeholders are expected to step forward with detailed plans of action to combat climate change with mitigation and adaptation measures, and to deliver commitments for funding the achievement of “climate justice.”
“The Summit represents a critical political milestone for demonstrating that there is collective global will to accelerate the pace and scale of a just transition to a more equitable renewable-energy based, climate-resilient global economy,” the UN’s Climate Ambition Summit website states. “Government leaders (especially major emitters) will be expected to present…updated net-zero targets; energy transition plans with commitments to no new coal, oil and gas; fossil fuel phase-out plans; more ambitious renewable-energy targets; Green Climate Fund pledges; and economy-wide plans on adaptation and resilience.”
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United Nations Secretary General António Guterres uses alarmist rhetoric when describing the threat posed by climate change. For example, he recently said that the “era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived.”
Discussing the upcoming summit, he declared, “Now must be the time for ambition and action. I look forward to welcoming first movers and doers at my Climate Ambition Summit in September. The world is watching – and the planet can’t wait.”
The recently appointed head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jim Skea, warned against issuing such dire warnings. "If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyzes people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change," he said. Mr. Skea also pointed to the vital role that innovative technology “like the underground capture of CO2” can play in providing real solutions to the climate change problem.
The new IPCC head warned against efforts to tell people how to live or what to eat as the way to address climate change. "With all these things it's about real people and their real lives, not scientific abstractions,” he said. “We need to come down a level."
However, anti-capitalist globalists and climate activists are too invested in what is known as the climate-industrial complex to listen to reasonable advice from an expert who contributed to the work of the IPCC for years before becoming its chair.
As for the 2024 Summit of the Future, it is supposed to lead to a so-called Pact for the Future among the UN’s member states. At best, we can expect another UN document full of nice-sounding platitudes while aggressive nations such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran continue to flout the provisions of existing treaties, especially the UN Charter.
President Biden is scheduled to address the General Assembly on September 19th as well as Ukrainian President Zelensky. But it looks like the heads of Britain, China, France, and Russia – four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – will be no-shows this year.
The United Nations has had a very rough 2023 so far. And it is becoming less and less relevant in solving real problems besetting the world today.
The UN-sponsored Black Sea Grain Initiative has fallen apart while Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine rages on. Iran is exporting drones to Russia in violation of the Security Council resolution approving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. At the same time, Iran has been accelerating its enrichment of uranium to near weapons-grade and hiding relevant information from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
North Korea continues to brazenly launch intercontinental ballistic missiles in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions.
Military coups are becoming routine in Africa – most recently in Niger and Gabon. Mali’s military junta has demanded the withdrawal of the UN’s peacekeeping forces from that West African nation. War-torn Sudan has denounced the head of the United Nations mission in the country, Volker Perthes, and declared him “persona non grata.”
Allegations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers, corruption by UN officials, and retaliation against whistleblowers have continued to mount. The UN Human Rights Council and other UN bodies apply a double standard in condemning Israel for alleged human rights and other violations of international law against Palestinians while whitewashing real violations by Palestinian terrorists and rogue nations such as Iran.
Instead of addressing these problems head-on in a meaningful way, the UN’s annual High-Level Week will be devoted to meaningless speechifying and grand plans to redistribute the world’s wealth. Another in a long trail of wasted opportunities.
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Joseph A. Klein is the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom.