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As I predicted here, the UN can see what it thought was its free ticket to global government (climate change) disappearing before its very eyes, so it is now on the lookout for another cause through which to regulate, tax and generally interfere in the lives of ordinary people – and here it is:

The economic case for global action to stop the destruction of the natural world is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change, a major report for the United Nations will declare this summer.

The Stern report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around 1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure.

The UN’s biodiversity report – dubbed the Stern for Nature – is expected to say that the value of saving “natural goods and services”, such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher – between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.

Read it here.

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If it’s not climate it will be something else. The UN is watching its plan for world government through climate alarmism disappear in smoke, as the public realise that there are more important things to worry about, like erupting volcanoes and Greek financial crises and Islamic terrorism. So it’s now looking elsewhere for some other “cause” via which to regulate, tax and control the globe. This time it’s the extinction of species. As you read this report, just notice how often they have simply taken the climate alarmists’ dictionary, and applied it to extinctions:

• “Business as usual no longer an option”
• World needs a “new vision”
• “Sustainable future”
• “Tipping points”
• “Irreversible” damage to the planet unless we “act now”

As the Sydney Morning Herald breathlessly reports:

KEY natural processes that sustain human life, such as crop production and clean water, face a high risk of ”rapid degradation and collapse” because of the record rate of extinction of animal and plant species.

That is the key finding of a major United Nations report, the third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook.

The executive-secretary of the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity, Ahmed Djoghlaf, said: ”The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history – extinction rates may be up to 1000 times higher than the historical background rate.

”Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet.”

The Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, said the world needed a ”new vision for biological diversity for a healthy planet and a sustainable future for humankind”.

The outlook finds extinction rates of plant and animal species will continue and potentially accelerate far above the natural rate across this century. Threatened species are on average moving closer to extinction due to the impact of humans and climate change. Coral and amphibians are under the most stress.

The report states that if the rate of species extinction hits crucial ”tipping points,” not yet identified, there is a high risk that natural systems that help crops grow and keep water clean could be damaged irreversibly. (source)

Just replace the word “extinction” with “climate change” and we’ve heard it all before. So the next logical steps will be:

• develop computer models that predict that species extinctions will rapidly get out of hand (just ask Michael Mann for his cast offs)
• tweak those models to demonstrate that extinctions are directly related to something easily regulated, such as land use
• ensure that the models play down all other factors, especially those that are natural in origin
• organise regular conferences to decide that the world needs to “urgently tackle extinctions”
• describe extinctions as “the greatest moral challenge of our time”
• require countries to sign a treaty promising not to expand land use, unless they pay a new “land tax”
• companies can trade permits to build on undeveloped land in a Land Trading Scheme
• in no time at all, fraudsters will account for 90% of all trading on the Land Permit exchanges

and we’re back to square one.

Think I’m kidding? Just you wait!

UPDATE: And of course the Greens can’t wait to jump on any passing bandwagon. Cue Bob Brown:

Humanity is sealing its own fate by rapidly destroying the planet’s ecological diversity, the Australian Greens have warned.

“It’s not going to change while we have governments who don’t care and governments who are making things worse,” [Brown] told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday.

“It is a prescription for our own fate if we don’t stop to consider the value, of least to ourselves, of wildlife and biodiversity.” (source)