Yvo de Boer resigned yesterday as Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Here are three key passages from the official announcement at the UN’s web site:
The top United Nations climate change official said today that he has made the “difficult decision” to step down from his position, citing his desire to pursue new opportunities to advance progress on the issue in both the private sector and academia.
…. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement that he was informed by Mr. de Boer of his decision two days ago and respected his decision, but “with regret.”
“Developing countries need to move as quickly as possible toward a future of low-emissions growth and prosperity,” he stressed, noting that millions of people in Africa and around the world are suffering from climate change’s effects.
These people are still living in the fantasy world they have constructed over the past two decades.
Sadly, so is the Associated Press.
Friday, the AP’s Arthur Max composed a pathetic pity piece for de Boer while avoiding any mention of ClimateGate or the shocking admissions of Phil Jones, the true root causes of de Boer’s demise. As you’ll see, Max even took the opportunity in his third paragraph to put in a plug for human-caused global warming as a cause of bad weather in general:
A weary U.N. aide quits climate post
The sharp-tongued U.N. official who shepherded troubled climate talks for nearly four years announced his resignation yesterday, leaving an uncertain path to a new treaty on global warming.
Exhausted and frustrated by unrelenting bickering between rich and poor countries, Yvo de Boer said he would step down July 1 to work in business and academia. With no obvious successor in sight, fears were voiced that whoever follows will be far less forceful than the skilled former civil servant from the Netherlands.
His departure takes effect five months before 193 nations reconvene in Cancun, Mexico, for another attempt to reach a worldwide legal agreement on controlling greenhouse-gas emissions, blamed for the gradual heating of Earth that scientists predict will worsen weather-related disasters.
The resignation “comes at the worst time in the climate-change negotiations,” said Agus Purnomo, Indonesia’s presidential assistant on climate change. “His decision will ultimately add to the difficulties we already have in reaching a successful outcome in Mexico.”
But others said the talks would move ahead unhindered and could even be a window for shifting course. “There’s certainly no reason his resignation should slow progress,” said Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. “The key to progress remains with the major countries.”
De Boer made the announcement two months after a disappointing summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, that ended with a nonbinding accord brokered by President Obama promising emissions cuts and immediate financing for poor countries – but even that failed to win consensus agreement.
Todd Stern, Obama’s climate envoy, praised de Boer as “an enormously dedicated leader” who made a major contribution to fighting climate change.
Readers need to recall what de Boer really wanted to resolve in Copenhagen, as originally reported at the conference’s web site (link is to Google-cached copy, as the original link no longer works):
1. How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?
2. How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?
3. How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?
4. How is that money going to be managed?
“If Copenhagen can deliver on those four points I’d be happy,” says Yvo de Boer.
As Lord Christopher Monckton pointed out ahead of the conference last year, Copenhagen was about creating the shell of a worldwide government with genuine authority to unilaterally enforce its will, and about the transfer of vast sums of money from rich nations to poor nations in the name of repaying so-called “climate debt.”
Yesterday, shortly after de Boer’s announced resignation, Claudia Rosett at Pajamas Media told us why that effort really failed, and why his usefulness had ended (internal links were in original):
Polar bears may be doing fine, but the climate commissars of the United Nations are feeling the heat, as their claims of scientific “consensus” melt under them.
… De Boer’s departure can’t come soon enough. For almost four years, this ramped-up Dutch bureaucrat has been one of the chief purveyors of climate alarmism, carbon-emitting his way around the globe from Bonn to Bali to Copenhagen, pushing UN plans for a global “climate change regime.”
… No one elected de Boer to his high-level perch. He was appointed in August, 2006 as one of the parting gifts to the world of the same former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who presided as the UN’s chief administrator of the giant scam known as Oil-for-Food. De Boer is neither a scientist nor an economist.
… Not that de Boer is recanting any of his own cant. In announcing his resignation, he tried to slide around the mush of the UN’s Copenhagen climate summit last December. He made no mention of such climategate revelations as the leaked East Anglia emails or the recent BBC interview in which one of the pillars of UN climate “science,” Phil Jones, admitted that for the past 15 years he has found no statistically signficant evidence of global warming (not that Jones seems able to keep track of his own data).
Instead, de Boer told the press: “I have always maintained that while governments provide the necessary policy framework, the real solutions must come from business.” And so, never a man to abandon his beliefs, he now believes “The time is ripe for me to take on a new challenge, working on climate and sustainability with the private sector and academia.” Apparently, his concern for the planet now impels him to move on to a consultancy with the well-heeled accounting firm of KPMG.
The only things worse than having an apparatchik like de Boer taunt the world over its refusal to totally restructure itself in the name of the now unproven and unsupported nonsense I often refer to as “globaloney” are first, knowing that a Big Four accounting firm is willing to provide him a rich refuge, and second, realizing that the establishment media in the U.S. is so invested in globaloney that it won’t acknowledge reality when it delivers multiple smacks to the face.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
