National Post’s Peter Foster on the Flight of the Earth Council from Costa Rica: Maurice Strong Again

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National Post’s Peter Foster on the Flight of the Earth Council from Costa Rica

by LifeSiteNews.com

Fri May 14 11:15 AM EST

TORONTO, May 14, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a Financial Post feature, titled Earth Council flees Costa Rica, Peter Foster exposes a recent debacles of Maurice Strong’s Earth Council. The Costa Rican government is pursuing the Earth Council for payment of US$1.65-million, for the wrongful sale of a tract of land it donated to the Council. The land was donated by the Cost Rican government with the agreement that, if the Earth Council moved, it would have to return the land.  “In the wake of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, Mr. Strong—perennial United Nations player-referee and now a key advisor to Prime Minister Paul Martin—set up the Earth Council as a ‘watchdog’ on the process he had started himself,” Foster explains. “It was to keep up the pressure for Agenda 21, Rio’s doorstop socialist wish list, as well as for global restrictions on carbon emissions (which brought us the horrors of Kyoto).”  Foster describes the Earth Council’s mandate to “spread the gospel of sustainable development, and push the notion of an ‘Earth Charter,’ which had been rejected at Rio.”“Intriguingly,” Foster continues, “the funds to build the new headquarters were to come from part of the proceeds of issuing Costa Rican Carbon Bonds, a Swiftian emissions trading instrument which entitled the bearer to emit CO2 if he paid the government of Costa Rica not to torch its own rain forest. Hence ‘value’ would be created literally from thin air, with the proceeds to flow to part of Mr. Strong’s master plan to save the world from capitalism. At least capitalism as practiced by others.”  In 1996, Costa Rica granted the Council the land in question and the trouble started when the Earth Council sold the land that was not theirs to sell. “The government cried foul, and the Earth Council upped and departed the country, citing the drain of the legal fight.”  The Earth Council has resettled in Toronto; the United Nations’ University of Peace, with whom the Council shared residence in Costa Rica, is likely to follow, Foster contends.  “The world would be a safer place without the Earth Council,” argues Foster. “Beneath all the boilerplate about compassion and shared visions lies the fact that Mr. Strong wants nothing less than a destruction of the Western way of life,” Foster concludes.