Sustainable Development Puts American Lifestyles in UN’s Crosshairs

Americans do not like having our standard of living in the United Nations’ crosshairs, especially considering we pay 22% of its $2.5 billion regular budget, plus 27% of its $9.5+ billion peacekeeping budget.

Since 1987, the UN has plied a borderless issue called “sustainable development” to demean American lifestyles and demand economic, social and environmental “justice.” They use it to agitate class warfare and control the behavior of people, businesses and organizations. It is the UN’s cure-all for the world’s real and imagined problems including global warming/climate change, poverty, conflict, etc.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was the UN’s first major sustainable development conquest, putting mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions in only 37 industrialized countries, intended to force moving industrial wealth from rich to poor countries. Even though the U.S. Senate did not ratify that treaty, former President Bill Clinton created the President’s Council on Sustainable Development that uses federal grants to infiltrate every classroom and countless local governments with sustainable development.

The UN has a new weapon in its sustainable development arsenal: government benchmarks for “consumption and production.” Targeting 1.4 billion “rich” people in every nation, it accuses them of greedily consuming 80% of global output.

The proposal’s author, Mohan Munasinghe, a native of Sri Lanka, is Director-General of the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester, U.K. As vice chair of the International Panel on Climate Change, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. His proposal, called “Millennium Consumption Goals: How the Rich Can Make the Planet More Sustainable,” would replace “unsustainable values like greed...especially among the young” with government benchmarks for consumption and production.

Munasinghe complains that “governments quickly found over $5 trillion for stimulus packages...to prop up banks and promote unsustainable consumption.... Meanwhile, only about $100 billion per year are devoted to alleviate poverty and far less to combat climate change.” Concerning national defense, he adds, “Some types of [government] expenditures...also need to be targeted--e.g., the U.S. $1.5 trillion per year spent on armaments worldwide.”

The MCGs’ objective is to “compliment” the Millennium Development Goals, signed by former President Clinton at the 2000 Millennium Summit. Both MCGs and MDGs define sustainable development’s three Marxist pillars to equalize the world economically, socially and environmentally, claiming it safeguards the “future survival of humanity.”

The Millennium Development Goals are to:

• Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger  
• Achieve universal primary education 
• Promote gender equality and empower women (Advocate for CEDAW, the international Equal Rights Amendment, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) 
• Reduce child mortality and promote child health (Advocate for the UN Treaty on the Rights of the Child to usurp parental rights and empower the UN) 
• Improve maternal health (Advocate for UN Family Planning, including taxpayer funded abortions) 
• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases (Advocate for condom use) 
• Ensure environmental sustainability (Advocate for sustainable development) 
• Develop a global partnership for development (Advocate for wealth redistribution)

Munasinghe’s Millennium Consumption Goals eerily parallel President and Mrs. Obama’s agenda for:  

• Conservation of scarce resources like energy and water (Advocate for cap & tax legislation) 
• Efficient transport (Advocate for expensive public transportation and discourage private cars) 
• Sustainable dwellings 
• Healthier diets and obesity reduction (Advocate for the First Lady’s pet $2.5 billion project) 
• Healthier lifestyles and greater fitness 
• Progressive taxation and taxes on luxury goods (Advocate for tax-the-rich schemes) 
• Sustainable livelihoods (Destroy freedom with government master planning) 
• Reduced workweek and improved working conditions, etc. (Advocate for labor unions)

At the May PrepCom for the Rio+20 meeting in New York City, a proposed 10-year “Framework of Programs” for sustainable consumption and production was rejected, so Munasinghe’s site is now set on the 2012 Earth Summit, Rio+20, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Americans must elect a new president in 2012 who rejects sustainable development’s Marxist intentions and will eliminate all federal grants that advance it.