The Global Covenant of Mayors on Climate and Energy, created by the European Commission in 2008, was thrown into uncertainty last June when U.S. President Donald Trump took a cold shoulder on “global warming” and announced he would pull the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Coincidentally or not, Trump made the announcement in early June 2017, just as the 65th Bilderberg Conference was taking place in Chantilly, Virginia, not far from Washington. The Washington Postdelivered a scathing critique of President Trump's stance on Paris over the weekend, at the end of the elite's secretive Bilderberg meeting.
Well-funded thanks to the leadership of well-heeled individuals including former New York City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, this mayoral vanguard bided their time and partnered with the City of Chicago to convene the first North American Climate Summit at Chicago's Sheraton Grand Hotel from December 4 to 6. Around 50 mayors from around the world attended, amid hyperbolic claims that 7,500 cities were subject to the compact's “climate change” worldview.
All the mayors in attendance unanimously maintained that climate change caused by human industrial, agricultural and other everyday emissions is an indisputable fact, and therefore they no longer use more precise terms like “global warming.”
Instead, of course, they incessantly chant the vague “climate change” mantra, which allows them to attribute all seemingly extreme temperature changes, extreme storms, and droughts to everyday human emissions into the atmosphere without considering other possible causes.
The mayors signed the Chicago Climate Charter, calling on participating cities to implement projects and policies that meet or exceed the emissions limits set by the Paris Agreement, and, in the latest move, are meeting again in Paris on December 12 for the One Planet Summit.
There were two big breaking news announcements, one of which said, “The World Bank is partnering with the Global Covenant of Mayors to provide $4.5 billion (USD) to help 150 cities secure financing to increase sustainability, resilience, and implement initiatives to combat climate change.”
Another announcement highlighted that two years after the Paris Agreement was ratified, three new initiatives and partnerships will “accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement in cities and local governments around the world,” including:
- The One Planet Charter is described as “a new initiative to help cities take rapid action to ensure the goals of the Paris Agreement are met.”
- Second, a new set of “groundbreaking partnerships with the EU, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)” under the umbrella of “Global Urbis.” This additional debt expansion for climate action “will help close the financing gap for cities that is currently preventing many cities from implementing their action plans.”
- The Covenant also calls for the vertical integration of local governments in national climate investment plans, “recognizing the need to demonstrate the importance of cities as economic actors contributing to the climate finance opportunities potential in the Paris Agreement.”
This last point “emphasizes the need to provide pathways for the active participation and involvement of local governments in the development of national climate investment plans aligned with the Paris Agreement,” the agreement's news release states, including “the acceleration of local government financing for Latin American cities, whose mayors, working with city networks and financial institution partners, aim to present so-called 'vertically integrated investment plans' in 2018.”
What's more, city leaders from the participating cities (around 40 in the UK alone, from Manchester to Liverpool to London) “will bring a detailed description of their efforts to the 2018 Global Action Summit in California.”
A careful reading of the statements, remarks and news releases surrounding this issue reveals that a key aspect of this issue is that these “climate mayors”, like leaders of the broader “global cities” movement, have little to no hesitation in usurping the role of national leadership.
Certainly, greater local autonomy may be a good thing in certain policy areas, but this “grassroots globalism” seems like a revolutionary way of weakening state power from below, so to speak.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has already shut down two local coal-fired power plants as part of the Windy City's strategy, said in a news release that “even if Washington fails to act, cities have the power and the will to take decisive action.”
And Bloomberg, the movement's leading figure, put it more bluntly: “Having every city in America sign on[to the Chicago Climate Charter]sends a strong message to the world that with or without Washington, we will continue to move forward toward the goals of the Paris Agreement.”
Additionally, former President Barack Obama, speaking at the Chicago Summit on December 5, said that cities, states and nonprofits are emerging as the “new face of leadership” on climate change.
Beyond these governance shifts, the mayors are calling for sweeping changes in energy sources, along with deep cuts in emissions and a fundamental overhaul of urban infrastructure, to enable participating cities and their surrounding regions to meet or exceed the ambitious emissions reduction standards of the Paris Agreement.
The Chicago Climate Charter, signed by the mayors, references the “nationally determined contributions” adopted when representatives from each country agreed to emissions reduction targets set out in the Paris Agreement (under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).
“The Global Compact requires member cities to set targets at least as ambitious as their respective countries' nationally determined contributions, and through their commitments, North American cities have already achieved a reduction of 2.72 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030, the equivalent of taking 585 million cars off the road,” the Chicago Charter states.
CO2e is carbon dioxide equivalent, a standard unit of measurement. Carbon Footprint Each expresses a different influence Greenhouse gases In terms of quantity carbon dioxide That would produce the same amount of warming.
This doesn't mean that summit proposals such as greater use of wind and solar power (including designing buildings to increase their own power generation capacity) are unwise in themselves; known vulnerabilities in the power grid could be mitigated if more buildings were made self-sufficient. This is a more common-sense reason to pursue such energy policies than unfounded claims about man-made warming. But the fact that the individual proposals may have merit tends to cloud the apparent power grab in which these mayors are engaged.
Meanwhile, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Midwestern equivalent of Chatham House, will hold a summit kickoff panel discussion on December 4th, The New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman. This indicates the near-total support of the mainstream media for this movement of mayors and the need to combat “climate change” in general. This and other discussions suggest that these mayors appear committed to making sweeping policy changes with the tacit approval of the mainstream media and little to do with the direction of national policy.
“A city-dominated planet represents a new paradigm of global governance: democratic glocalism instead of top-down imposition, horizontalism instead of hierarchy, pragmatic interdependence instead of outdated ideologies of national independence. The foundations of this new world are being laid in our time, as cities work together.” – If mayors ruled the world: Dysfunctional states, rising cities Benjamin R. Barber (deceased) Founder of the World Council of Mayors Movement.
