COP-15 Agreement Criticized as Threat to Prosperity and Freedom

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault (L) shakes hands with Bhupender Yadav, environment minister of India, at the COP15 UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal on Dec. 18, 2022. Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press

News Analysis

Critics are raising concerns about the new COP15 global biodiversity agreement to set aside vast swaths of land and water, reduce consumption, and dedicate massive spending to protect ecosystems.

On Dec. 19 in Montreal, nearly 200 nations agreed to adopt the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which consists of four groups of goals with 23 targets for 2030. The agreement calls for at least 30 percent of the world’s lands, inland waters, coastal areas, and oceans to be placed under conservation by 2030. An additional 30 percent or more of areas with degraded ecosystems are to be put “under effective restoration.”

Dan McTeague, president of Canadians for Affordable Energy, said the agreement brokered under the auspices of the United Nations threatens liberty and prosperity.

“This has nothing to do with environment—this is about control of society and population. And this is also dramatic and significant interference into the sovereign conduct of affairs of any nation, and it ought to be rejected,” McTeague told The Epoch Times.

“Certainly, it is deserving of scrutiny.”

The agreement says a US$700 billion per year “biodiversity finance gap” must be met to achieve its goals. By 2030, US$500 billion per year in subsidies that “harm biodiversity” currently going to agriculture, industrial fishing, and oil and gas extraction is to be redirected to what are termed as more sustainable practices. An additional US$200 billion per year is to be raised from public, private, and philanthropic sources for national biodiversity strategies, and at least US$30 billion in annual aid is to flow to the developing world by 2030.

McTeague said the plan adds to the financial burdens created by the rest of the framework’s approach.

“[COP15] was a ridiculous idea in terms of how to destroy the ability for people to make ends meet, more importantly, how they’re going to feed themselves,” he said.

“These modern-day Malthuses ... [are] pushing an agenda—an agenda which upon closer scrutiny would be rejected by sane and rational people.”

Target 7 calls for pollution reductions that include slashing “excess nutrients lost to the environment” by at least half, with a similarly reduced “risk from pesticides and highly hazardous chemicals.”

McTeague believes the thinly veiled goal is to reduce the world to subsistence living.

“It’s obvious what they want is to send us back to the days of horse and buggy. They don’t like progress. It’s the same folks calling for our entire farming infrastructure to be returned to homesteads,” he said.

The Epoch Times contacted Environment and Climate Change Canada for comment but didn’t hear back by publication time.

Other Targets

The goals could have been even more onerous. Sylvain Charlebois, a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said a failed motion at COP15 would have advocated for the EAT-Lancet diet that reserves only 10 percent of consumption to meat, dairy, and seafood.

“The idea is to save the planet, [so] let’s make sure that we don’t eat meat anymore. It is absolutely preposterous because in a few days from now [at Christmas], a lot of people will gather as families and with friends, around probably a piece of meat or two, and you want to mandate the government to condemn such acts? Come on,” Charlebois said in an interview.

“The thing about these discussions that make me and make a lot of people uncomfortable is that we tend to forget that food is culture. Food is about traditions, family values, real life.”

Government signatories seem ready to increasingly smother these personal choices. Target 16 calls for policies, regulations, and education to enable sustainable practices to “reduce the global footprint of consumption in an equitable manner” and “halve global food waste.”

Charlebois sees more validity in the latter than the former.

“The whole consumption part is really about reducing the amount of protein because it requires a lot of fibre, a lot of grains, to produce animal protein, and that’s something that I don’t think Canadians are up for at all. But the food waste approach is a good one, it’s a sensible one, it’s a responsible one, and you can rally a lot of people around that,” he said.

Some of the other targets bring more regulatory burdens. Target 15 requires large and transnational companies and financial institutions to monitor, assess, and disclose their operational impacts on biodiversity.

Target 22 calls for “full, equitable, inclusive, effective and gender-responsive representation and participation in decision-making, and access to justice and information related to biodiversity by indigenous peoples and local communities ... as well as by women and girls, children and youth, and persons with disabilities and ensure the full protection of environmental human rights defenders.”

‘Central Planning’

Ian Madsen, senior policy analyst for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, believes the sustainability approach embodied by COP15 will result in unsustainable failures for any nation that embraces it.

“The poster child for this is Sri Lanka, which got a whole bunch of great press and promises of aid and loans when the government there went into a sustainable agriculture policy mode,” he said.

“It was a disaster. Their agricultural yields plummeted and their ability to feed themselves, let alone export any rice or any other products, drastically plummeted and resulted in the government being overthrown and the nation being reduced to penury and insolvency.”

Masden characterizes the agreement as “another collectivist, social engineering, central planning” agenda.

Malcolm Bird, political science professor at the University of Winnipeg, said issues such as high interest rates are more urgent for governments and citizens as debt-servicing costs ramp up and affordability pressures bear down.

“It really matters about how we prioritize our goals, and I think for most Canadians, especially working folks, an abstract matter of global biodiversity is probably not their first concern. So in that regard I see this as being somewhat tone-deaf,” he said in an interview.

“For most Canadians, and definitely many people throughout the world, this is a secondary, tertiary issue, when there’s really much more serious, acute matters at hand.”