the earth hour conspiracy
Hey, did you know that the recent campaign asking people to turn off their lights for an hour was actually an evil ploy by the UN to set up a powerful One World Government which seeks to dismantle American industry and redistribute the world’s wealth though an insidious campaign of fear and disinformation about the state of our environment? I certainly didn’t catch on to this nefarious scheme but apparently the fine folks at Fox News are looking out for all of us which is why they devoted some time and attention to it while many of us went on about our day, not suspecting the sinister horrors that will one day befall us all.
No, April Fools didn’t come early to Weird Things. Fox News really did feature people who took the issue of global warming and deep suspicions of any global organization to concoct a conspiracy theory. It’s not very elaborate, just a lot of vague and ominous threats that use the typical red- baiting techniques of the Cold War and 1950s style Red Scares. If you believe them, the whole global warming thing was dreamt up for the UN so it can dictate how many polluting gases a country can emit and enforce environmental protocols all over the world. Why? The UN is expecting to make money form these edicts and reorder economies by using credits, tariffs and taxes as carrots and sticks. Doesn’t that just send shivers down your spine? Really? Not at all? Yeah, me neither since this conspiracy doesn’t make any political or economic sense.
The idea that the UN would create a global system of tax credits and tariffs would mean that an international body with no power to regulate or charge other nations, just pressure them when it gets enough support from its members, would all of a sudden be able to not only dictate the trade laws of every country in the world but also enforce them. With no legal authority or some sort of supervisory agency that has real power to punish violators, the UN would have a rather tough time doing that. How exactly do you impose taxes when you’re not allowed to collect the receipts? And what do you do when nations don’t comply? Let’s remember that the right wing decried UN as weak and for all intents and purposes useless, for many years. Now, after a documentary about global warming by Al Gore, they’re a New World Order.
I’m not a huge fan of environmentalism being used to further the personal agendas of certain green groups and I’m even less thrilled about a heavy injection of politics into science. But the notion of the UN magically gaining incredible legal powers out of thin air to assault economies of the U.S. and its allies for a nefarious socialistic scheme on the sole basis of environmental issues in the media seems rather far fetched. However it does illustrate the different styles of the old One World Government conspiracies from the left and from the right. Liberal conspiracy fans tend to cast multinational corporations, military actions and neo-conservative leaders as their villains. Conservative conspiracy theorists will look towards globalization and their fears of almost anything that can be branded with an “-ism,” other than capitalism of course, hence an international organization is the culprit in their New World Order theories.
