My Look Inside the United Nations

Life is a lot more entertaining with cool friends.

In 1999, my friend Henry Lamb mentioned that he had been attending UN meetings. I thought it sounded intriguing and asked for details. After all, reading about an organization is one thing; actually attending its meetings is another. And because I was so enthused, Henry offered to get me in to the Kyoto accord meetings in Bonn, Germany.

I had preconceptions about the United Nations, of course, but I was looking forward to seeing the real thing in person; only then would I know if my guesses had been correct. So, I made my plans.

Arrival

The meetings were held in a magnificent hotel, surrounded by hundreds of soldiers and policemen. Everything was absolutely first class. To this day I don’t think I’ve seen its equal in terms of high-end, well-run meetings. Everything was pristine; every need had been considered and addressed in advance.

There were several days of meetings scheduled, some in smaller meeting rooms and others in the big auditorium, complete with language-specific headphones and a bank of professional translators. Again, absolutely first class.

On the second floor of the facility was a huge computer room. There must have been fifty terminals available. The connections were excellent (especially for 1999), and there were always open machines. This was a courtesy, not only for the participants, but especially for the press.

The attendees, as you might suspect, were all well-dressed, and all appeared to be feeling special about attending such impressive, elite meetings. I, on the other hand, had a bit of a Groucho Marx moment: “I can’t believe they let me into this place.” 🙂

The Meetings

The meetings, however, were a different story. While all the externals of this event were spectacular, the content of the meetings was less than pedestrian. The presenters dressed well and tried to use impressive words. The PowerPoint slides were perfect, but the actual content was… lame. A local VFW or Women’s Auxiliary could have done as well.

I heard one speech – in the impressive ‘headphone’ amphitheater – where the speaker said that vast areas of her home country would be entirely underwater in ten years (which would have been 2009) and that every soul living there would be dead. As evidence, she referred to impressive names and organizations, who had “said so.”

And that was the way the whole conference went. The ‘science’ of one group referred to the ‘science’ of another, then another, and then still another, who referred back to the first! Intellectually, the entire show was a sham. I kept thinking that there had to be someone there who was competent, that perhaps they were having the real meetings in some back room somewhere. If so, I never found them, and I had what appeared to be free run of the place.

The Test

There’s a little test that I run in my mind in cases like this. I ask myself: If I owned a convenience store, would I feel good about having this person manage it for me when I was out of town for a week?

I applied my test to the entire assemblage of impressive-looking people at this event. There was only one person that passed, and that man was a Dutch journalist, not involved with the UN or any of its orbiting NGOs.

As best I could tell, nearly every person at this event was someone making a living from global warming, or some official’s son, daughter, brother-in-law, or cousin. I found none that had any real substance. They were flying first class, staying at magnificent hotels, eating in the finest restaurants, and, as I later learned, hiring the best local prostitutes. And they were doing it all on some government’s tab.

I was able to get my hands on some of the UN’s internal documentation (which I’ve since lost, sadly). It showed that nearly every dollar they had spent on global warming – and it was many, many millions — was spent on meetings. Of course, they used lots of fancy euphemisms for “meetings,” like “plenary sessions.”

There were two primary types of officials present: those from the big states, who were looking for a new bureaucracy to run, and those from the small states, looking for a handout.

In the End

My thoughts while walking away from these meetings were these:

If, tomorrow, new research emerged, proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that global warming was false, these people would not be ashamed. Rather, they’d stand up, look around at each other, and say, “Well, what should we do next?”

As I’ve mentioned before, the people who are trying to run the world are not smarter than you. My experience at the UN is part of what led me to that conclusion.

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Paul Rosenberg knows a lot about a lot of things. An adventure capitalist with a broad range of interests and experiences under his belt, current passions include philosophy, theology, history, psychology, and physics. This diverse interest base is reflected in his extensive repertoire of published titles, including A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, The Words of the Founders, and Production Versus Plunder, not to mention 55 engineering and construction books.

Prior to this, his highly successful engineering career saw him called as an expert witness in numerous legal cases and recruited as a consultant to a number of high profile organizations, such as NASA and the US military. He developed and taught 19 continuing education courses for Iowa State University’s College of Engineering. He also co-founded the Fiber Optic Association and wrote the first ever standard for the installation of fiber optic cables.

Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.