George Russell
FoxNews.com
7/21/2014
End global hunger and all forms of malnutrition and poverty by 2030, along with all urban slums around the world. Halve the number of deaths from road traffic accidents globally (an estimated 1.24 million in 2010, according to the World Health Organization) by the same date—and “reduce levels of violence and halve related death rates everywhere” by then too. Make sure that the income of the bottom 40 percent of the population in all countries grows faster than the national average. Achieve “global resource efficiency,” and try to separate economic growth from “environmental degradation and resource use” everywhere over the next decade and a half.
All of those lofty, ambitious –and for critics, improbable and not-very-closely-linked—objectives, as well as many more, are currently being bundled, massaged and repackaged at the United Nations, to be formally unveiled in September as the ”sustainable development goals,” the centerpiece of the latest multi-trillion-dollar U.N. bid to reshape the planet along largely socialist or progressive lines.
That is the idea, anyway. According to critics of the notion, the exercise amounts to more of a grab-bag of often meaningless and hard to measure social and economic objectives, held together largely through their argued relationship to the concept of “sustainability,” a term that has not yet been very precisely defined…
…The sum of the processes would bind all 193 U.N. members, including the U.S., to a “universal sustainable development agenda” with the SDGs as signpost highlights, along with new targets for carbon emissions to replace the now-defunct Kyoto Protocol. Whether—and with what—the Protocol will be replaced is still very much an open issue, as defections from the Protocol, which the U.S. never ratified, had already undermined it severely…
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