United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (Photo: Flickr/World Economic Forum)

The tea party has added another item to its list of reasons to fear the United Nations: Some in the movement say the U.N. is planning to intervene in the United States’ upcoming elections.

This week, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his speech on voting rights, the Texas group True the Vote called for a protest of the event because “Holder is for NAACP Plans to involve the United Nations in US Elections.” [Their emphasis.]

True the Vote, a voter integrity initiative launched by the Houston tea party group King Street Patriots, held a national summit this year featuring some of the right’s most incendiary speakers, such as Andrew Breitbart, The Texas Independent reported. According to the Independent, “representatives from more than 25 states attended the two-day national summit in Houston to receive training and information about the conservative organization’s efforts to combat voter fraud.”

The Independent reported back in March that the group was a 501(c)4 nonprofit and had applied for 501(c)3 nonprofit status.

Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of King Street Patriots, said during the group’s summit that she was hoping to mobilize teams of three people to oversee each voting precinct in the country. That would add up to roughly 1 million right-wing tea party volunteers nationwide by the 2012 general election, the Independent reported.

Tea Party Manatee, based in Southwest Florida, sent out an email newsletter this week, echoing the King Street Patriots’ latest fight and warning that the U.N. is “trying to Intervene in 2012 Elections.”

According to group’s email:

• In November 2012 Foreign bureaucrats will appear at your polling station to ensure you adhere to their vision of a ‘fair’ election.
• Local polling officials who dare to enforce state clean election laws will be subject to lawsuits and arrest.
• Conservative political speech will be deemed hateful and be suppressed.
• Just enough voter fraud will be allowed to ensure a second term for Barack Hussein Obama.

This is not a fantasy – next week it will start to become reality when a delegation of leftist Obama supporters will meet with the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. And there they will lay the groundwork to ensure the United Nations takes action in time to save Barack Obama.

You see, the Democratic Left is terrified of the new clean election laws being passed across America. These laws have cleared our voter lists of the dead and the ineligible, require voter identification for everyone and insist that our military be allowed to vote.

And clean elections are the single greatest weapon we have to ensure an honest vote in 2012 and a single term for Barack Obama. And the Left can’t allow that to happen.

So they will make their case for action to the UN Human Rights Council – an international government origination so biased that even Hillary Clinton has denounced it.

Council members like Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Mexico and China will review your election laws and judge if you measure up to their idea of democracy. How can we accomplish any of our goals, like repealing health care rationing, securing the borders and balancing our budget if we can’t even control our own elections?

That’s why we need to send a clear message to the UN – stay out of America’s elections and abandon Barack Obama to the judgment of the American people. I need you to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to send that very message to the United Nations – by any means necessary.

It’s difficult to trace the exact origin of this particular hysteria, but one of the earliest mentions of the NAACP’s plan to involve the U.N. came in a report by Fox News.

According to Fox:

The NAACP is calling on the United Nations to intervene as it claims state governments are colluding to “block the vote” for minority communities ahead of the 2012 election — a charge those governments vehemently deny.

The nation’s biggest civil rights organization this week released a report that claimed a raft of new voting laws at the state level would disenfranchise minority voters. The report said 14 states passed 25 measures “designed to restrict or limit the ballot access of voters of color.”

…

Supporters of the laws describe them as common-sense measures meant to ensure the integrity of elections. In Tennessee, which is implementing a new photo ID law, elections coordinator Mark Goins dismissed the criticism and questioned why the NAACP would flag the United Nations over its concerns, calling that effort “a bit extreme.”

“I don’t know what the benefit of going to the U.N. would be,” he said. “I can’t imagine any authority whatsoever that they would have here in Tennessee.”

But the NAACP described the new measures as part of a “concerted” effort to drive down minority turnout and is planning a multi-stage campaign to attract international attention.

To start, the group is planning a “Stand 4 Freedom” rally this Saturday across from the U.N. headquarters. Supporters are being asked to sign an online pledge which, among other demands, calls on the United Nations to “investigate and condemn voter suppression tactics in the United States.”

Copies of the latest report are being sent to the United Nations, as well as attorneys general across the country and the Department of Justice. According to one newspaper report, the NAACP will follow up in March when it sends a delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, to present its case before the U.N. Human Rights Council — a group known more for its sustained criticism of Israel than its attention to voting rights.

An NAACP spokesman says the organization is just doing its duty as one of the 3,500 groups that “has consulting status” with the U.N. The group simply works with the international organization to make sure the United States is “living up to its commitment” to an initiative to eliminate discrimination, the spokesperson says.

He also says that the U.N. does not have the power to actually intervene in state matters, and can only interview people and create reports through the Human Rights Council.

“We are just working to make sure the U.S. remains a beacon of democracy,” the NAACP spokesperson says.

The NAACP will be giving a presentation in Geneva to the Human Rights Council in March 2012 as part of its consulting status.

The United West is the current incarnation of the Florida Security Council, an anti-Sharia group that was founded by U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hasner and Tom Trento.

Swier, a figure in the anti-Sharia movement in Florida, has embroiled himself in controversy over a Muslim leader in South Florida who tried become a member of the Broward Republican Executive Committee in order to create a Muslim Republican Club. The man, Nezar Hazme, was eventually denied membership.

Salon’s Justin Elliott reported that Swier questioned Hazme’s religious convictions during the controversy. Swier wrote in a blog post published on Tea Party Nation that if Hazme was a “true believer … [he] would not embrace the U.S. Constitution as supreme because it is accepted Islamic doctrine, under shariah, that the Qur’an must supersede any document written by man.”

Swier’s latest post touts “a growing movement in Florida” aimed at fighting “sustainable development” projects in local communities.

Agenda 21 is a non-binding United Nations program that provides local communities that seek to grow in a manner that is kind to the environment with resources such as grant and conference announcements. The organization that provides the resources is the International Council for Local and Environmental Initiatives (known as ICLEI). Almost 600 cities all over the United States are “global members” of ICLEI, including more than 30 cities, municipalities and counties in Florida.

Right-wing groups are convinced ICLEI is secretly aiming to subvert property rights and U.S. sovereignty.

Swier writes that local officials taking part in ICLEI “are in fact implementing the ICLEI agenda.”

“ICLEI sustainable development rules are designed to implement globally a new system of justice and a new system of economics,” he writes, “while pretending to use the environment as every society’s central organizing principle.”

The conspiracy theory is one that has even been extolled by GOP U.S. Senate candidates in Florida. Several weeks ago, Senate candidates George LeMieux, Mike McCalister, Craig Miller and Adam Hasner took part in a debate hosted by the Central Florida Tea Party and the Florida Family Policy. Each candidate stood behind the tea party’s anti-sustainable growth stance, because they say they want to protect the country’s “sovereignty.”

Now “agenders” are convinced their movement is gaining speed, citing Plantation’s recent decision to not renew its ICLEI contract as evidence.

But Plantation Mayor Diane Veltri Bendekovic tells The Florida Independent the city’s membership was canceled due to “budgetary reasons.” She says the $1,200 subscription become too expensive for the city.

She also says she was not influenced by members of the community that have been protesting ICLEI. She says the protesters who discuss ICLEI typically spout radical ideas.

“It’s always the same four people,” she says. “They are regulars. If it’s not taking back the Panama Canal, it’s something else.”

Swier urges “agenders” to continue “educating” local officials to “question how they intend to enforce [ICLEI] policy (such as having government agents come into your home).”

“Knowledge is power and understanding what sustainable development really means is critical,” he writes. “Educate, motivate and activate your local elected officials. Ask them to stop the taking of your and my property rights. Instead ask them to protect our unalienable right to do with our property as we, not they, will.”

Nokero International, which supplies solar-powered lights and mobile chargers, will work with Eagle Energy, a non-profit formed by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s son, Doug. The two companies will work with Navajo Nation leaders to provide light in homes that often go dark when the sun sets, hopefully replacing dangerous and unhealthy kerosene lanterns and heaters.

The project was announced as the U.N. brought together numerous alternative energy experts and advocates to discuss the organization’s “International Year of Sustainable Energy For All” in 2012.

“It is a great honor for Nokero to be invited to this event,” said Steve Katsaros, founder and CEO of Nokero Internaional. “Many of the 1.4 billion people living without access to electricity live outside the United States, but we felt it was important to use this opportunity to shine a light on the challenges facing off-grid communities in our own country.

“There’s no better way for us to do that than to support the effort of Navajo Nation leaders to bring renewable energy alternatives to their community.”

Vilsack, a University of Colorado graduate, first formed Elephant Energy to address connectivity issues and try to provide alternative energy solutions in Namibia. Eagle Energy is an offshoot working on the Navajo Nation.

Navajo Nation activists have been pushing hard for more renewable energy and greater U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation of aging coal-fired power plants in the region, which have been blamed for haze over Mesa Verde and Grand Canyon National Parks, as well as respiratory problems for area residents.

According to a Nokero release on Tuesday, “beginning today, and for as long as it takes, Nokero will direct its resources toward tackling this challenge — working with Eagle Energy and Navajo partners to build sustainable distribution systems which ensure that all people of the Navajo Nation have access to affordable, durable, high-quality solar-powered lights, mobile chargers, and other green technologies.”

Tom Boyd of Nokero pointed to recent media coverage in Colorado highlighting the situation on the Navajo Nation, linking to a Colorado Independent story earlier this month.

Groups like the Citrus County Tea Party, the West Orlando Tea Party, Tea Party Manatee, Bear Witness Central in Jacksonville and other groups of concerned individuals from around the state have had their eye on the U.N.’s “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development” and its “Statement of Principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests” — also known as Agenda 21.

The initiative is a non-binding program that provides local communities that seek to grow in a manner that is kind to the environment with resources such as grant and conference announcements.

The organization that provides these resources is the International Council for Local and Environmental Initiatives (known as ICLEI). Almost 600 cities all over the United States are “global members” of ICLEI, including more than 30 cities, municipalities and counties in Florida.

Among the ICLEI members in Florida is South Miami. South Miami Mayor Philip K. Stoddard says that ICLEI has provided his city with information that helps the city move toward more environmentally friendly practices.

“They help connect you with people that let you know about grants, and conferences,” Stoddard explains.

But some conservative groups are convinced the initiative is a plot by the U.N. to take away the United State’ sovereignty and citizens’ property rights. These folks are also taking their concerns to local government meetings to “tutor” local officials about what their sustainable growth plans really are.

Stoddard says the paranoia is completely unfounded; he says ICLEI has no authority over its members.

“ICLEI simply provides resources for communities looking to improve their sustainability codes,” he says.

While the genesis of this recent upsurge in Agenda 21 paranoia is unclear, the subject was fodder for a few national right-wing conspiracy theories from the likes of Alex Jones and former Fox News host Glenn Beck. Jones has propagated many controversial theories, including “9/11 truth” ideas.

In June, Beck said on his now-canceled Fox News program that Agenda 21’s plan for sustainable development is really just a means of instituting “centralized control over all of human life on planet Earth.” Beck said the plan “is a massive movement, and its real intentions are being masked with environmental issues.”

“This structure was set up by those who want to set up a global government system,” he said. “They wanted to set this structure up years ago.”

Beck argues that local governments are going to try to control populations under the guise of environment protection with marching orders given by the U.N.

In 2009, American Thinker, a daily online conservative magazine, featured an article that described some of the most frequently heard theories from the right. The piece describes Agenda 21 as an “amalgamation of socialism and extreme environmentalism brushed with anti-American, anti-capitalist overtones.”

According to the article:

Smart growth plans usurp property rights and constitutional rights. Local officials, at the behest of State Government, revise zoning laws to fit into a “smart code” zoning template. A massive reshuffling of property rights ensues. Farmers may lose subdivision rights; conservation land adjacent to population centers may be rezoned into commercial employment centers; and low-density land in small towns is re-designated as growth area and rezoned to accommodate diverse housing including high-density apartments and condominiums.

Finally, a healthy dose of federal- or state-sponsored housing initiatives is embraced to ensure communities are properly balanced. The net effect of these plans is to create highly urbanized population centers throughout otherwise-rural counties, while simultaneously limiting the availability of land for suburban and estate subdivisions, as these are considered an unsustainable waste of land by Agenda 21 disciples.

The article warns that, “regardless of political orientation, two indisputable facts remain.” One: “Agenda 21 is a direct assault on private property rights and American sovereignty.” And two: “It is coming to a neighborhood near you.”

Right-wing activists in Florida have acted on such fears by calling on state legislators to repeal a septic tank inspection bill, for example.

Tea party members in Citrus County fought new restrictions on boating and fishing proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Kings Bay. The restrictions were imposed to protect manatees in the bay (the animals are facing a high number of deaths due to boating activity), but they threw the Citrus County Tea Party into a full-on protest.

From the St. Petersburg Times:

“We cannot elevate nature above people,” explained Edna Mattos, 63, leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots, in an interview. “That’s against the Bible and the Bill of Rights.”

Federal officials “want to restrict the entire bay,” she contended. “They don’t want people here.”

Last week, Mattos, who says she has 800 members signed up on her group’s website, and other tea party members picketed outside a public hearing on the new rules. Because they weren’t allowed to bring their signs inside, she said, “my anger took over” and she sent a sharply worded e-mail to thousands of tea party members across Florida, urging them to write to Congress to block the Fish and Wildlife Service.

…

To Mattos, what the agency has proposed will erode private property rights. She predicted they will prevent people who own waterfront land from tying up boats at their docks “because you can’t have anything that interferes with the manatee because they’ll get trampled on.”

Mayor Stoddard says that ICLEI is an “information service, not command and control from Geneva.” He also says that the people up in arms about ICLEI are “raging loons.”

“These are the guys that wear aluminum foil hats,” he says. “They have completely lost touch with reality.”

The rhetoric is hardly exclusive to a handful of right-wing activists.

This past month, Senate candidates George LeMieux, Mike McCalister, Craig Miller and Adam Hasner took part in a debate hosted by the Central Florida Tea Party and the Florida Family Policy. Each candidate stood behind the tea party’s anti-sustainable growth stance, because they say they want to protect the country’s “sovereignty.”

The candidates were posed this question by Clyde Fabretti of the West Orlando Tea Party during the debate:

The sovereignty of America and the sanctity of our individual property rights are being threatened by America’s involvement in the United Nations’ globalist subsidiary the International Council for Local and Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI). ICLEI and the U.N. have circumvented our congress and our constitutions for direct relationships with 600 U.S. cities and over 41 local Florida governments to persuade them to adopt U.N. foreign policy initiatives such as Agenda 21, which separates private property from its rightful owners under the label of “sustainable development.” If elected to the U.S. Senate, would you take specific legislative action to remove this threat to America’s sovereignty and our individual property rights under ICLEI — and if so, how would you do that?

“The United Nations is a corrupt organization,” Hasner said. “I believe that we should not be jeopardizing America’s sovereignty … through the admission into these types of globalist organizations and international organizations.”

McCalister received a big round of applause when he answered, “We must stay sovereign in this country and we do not need the U.N., or any other country, telling us how to run this place and certainly not trying to tell us where we are going to live with their ‘one world government’ concept and trying to take away our guns.”

“We need people to wake up and realize there is an effort afoot to take away our God-given rights,” LeMieux warned.

“When I started learning about this silent invasion of our country’s sovereignty,” Miller said, “I literally was flabbergasted.”

“First our firearms, then our farms,” one of the Tea Partiers called out, amid the hullabaloo, according to the Arizona Republic.

Baffled, McCain said no Congress would allow that to happen but few cared to hear it.

Indeed, the Gilbert, Arizona, crowd was riled up well before McCain arrived, upset that he had appeared to mock the naivete of Tea Party members of Congress by quoting a Wall Street Journal editorial that characterized them as deluded, as acting like they were hobbits in the Lord of the Rings trilogy battling the forces of evil.

Asked by the town hall folks to apologize, McCain said he didn’t understand, that he only meant that the drive to pass a balanced budget amendment was fantasy.

“Is there anything wrong that I said?” McCain asked. “I don’t know what to apologize for.”

In Colorado, 2010 Tea Party gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes became the GOP nominee despite and something of a national embarrassment to the state party, in part for warning voters against the Denver bike sharing program, which he said was part of a UN one-world government initiative that would deprive Americans of liberty and end in miserable domination.

Reuters reports on a new study that shows that under 10 percent of the articles written about last year’s United Nations climate change talks in Copenhagen focused primarily on climate science:

Much coverage from Copenhagen instead focused on hacked e-mails from a British university that some skeptics took as evidence of efforts by scientists to ignore dissenting views. The scientists involved have since been cleared of wrongdoing.

There’s no doubt that reporters (myself included) are under-serving their readers when it comes to a substantive discussion of climate science. Because many of us in Washington cover energy and the environment through the lens of politics, climate science often gets short shrift. But climate science and climate politics don’t have to be separate beats. In fact, they must not be.

More often than not, science plays a minimal role in politicians’ public discussions about various energy and environmental policies because polling says it doesn’t test well with the average constituent. Instead, policies are explained in terms of jobs, the economy and national security — the key issues of the day. But what’s lost in those explanations (e.g. “a renewable energy standard will create jobs” or “building a new fleet of electric vehicles will lessen our dependence on foreign oil”) is the scientific rationale for these policy choices. The wealth of scientific research shows that inaction will have dire consequences: drought, deforestation, sea level rise.

But one line in every story about the “scientific consensus on climate change” is not enough. Increasingly, readers don’t trust reporters, so it’s important to show them the research and then explain it. I haven’t been doing that enough and will work to do it more.

I can tell you all from experience that my own posts about climate science don’t traffic well. So the question is this: How can reporters balance the often-juicy political reporting that readers crave with the take-your-medicine science reporting that readers need?

I’ve got a few ideas, but I’d be interested in hearing your suggestions.

The atmosphere is very different from a year ago, when U.S. negotiators headed to Copenhagen touting the recent success of a House-passed climate bill. Now that legislation has died in the Senate, and with candidates poised to win this week who are more likely to focus on immediate economic concerns than on long-term environmental and energy ones, these constraints are shaping U.S. climate diplomacy.

Given the minimal chances that a climate bill can pass the Senate anytime soon, the Obama administration must convince negotiators at the conference that it will address greenhouse gas emissions through regulation, rather than legislation. Expect U.S. negotiators to enumerate the climate-related regulations it has passed in recent months, including new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.

At the same time, the administration is set to release new ozone standards before the talks and is preparing new greenhouse gas emission limits on stationary sources. The message U.S. negotiators will bring to Cancun is this: The lack of progress in the Senate on climate change is not going to keep us from reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. We are committed to exercising our regulatory authority now and passing a strong climate when possible.

Whether that will be enough is another question. Other countries are wary about the U.S. commitment to addressing climate change. And this certainly isn’t going to help.

From the Post story:

Administration officials might not be able to deliver on all the climate assistance they have promised to give poor countries by 2012 and have questioned some financing proposals linked to longer-term foreign aid. They are considering whether to challenge China’s renewable energy subsidies as violating international trade rules, and have objected to Europe’s plan to force airlines operating there to pay for their carbon emissions.

Pachauri’s comments come as observers expect little progress in the upcoming United Nations climate change talks in Cancun; some have suggested that bilateral agreements between countries will help lay the foundation for a future binding climate treaty.

Pachauri, speaking to reporters on a conference call set up by the Natural Resources Defense Council, said he hopes to see a “very clear plan of action” from the two leaders after the meeting that focuses on extending an already-established clean energy partnership between the countries. Pachauri called for collaborative research and development as well as increased investments in green energy technology.

NRDC Director of Global Strategy and Advocacy Jacob Sherr, also on the call, said the leaders should commit to helping the countries adapt to the affects of climate change by establishing a “green hotline” that would allow India and the United States to share resources.

There is no chance of completing a binding global treaty to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases, few if any heads of state are planning to attend, and there are no major new initiatives on the agenda. Copenhagen was crippled by an excess of expectation. Cancún is suffering from the opposite.

Not only that, but talks in Tianjin, China this week may actually be moving backward. The Times reports that a number of issues that negotiators thought they’d settled in Copenhagen last year are being looked at again.

Delegates in Tianjin, China, at the last formal meeting before the Cancún conference opens Nov. 29, are hung up over the same issues that caused the collapse of the Copenhagen meeting. Even some of the baby steps in the weak agreement that emerged from last year’s meeting, a slender document known as the Copenhagen Accord, have been reopened, to the dismay of officials who thought they had been settled.

Agreement on critical issues like short-term financial aid for vulnerable countries and monitoring and reporting of emissions by major economies appears even farther away than it was at the end of the Copenhagen meeting.

While the news doesn’t come as a surprise to people closely following the debate, it’s still frustrating. Many scientists say it is essential to reach a binding agreement to reduce world greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Environmentalists had hoped that negotiations in Tianjin and Cancun would lay the groundwork for more significant action later. But it appears that may not even be possible.

The letter comes midway through United Nations climate talks in Tianjin, China. The talks will continue in Cancun, Mexico, in December, but negotiators are not expected to agree to a binding climate treaty. Oxfam, which put together the letter, has long called for establishing a climate fund.

The letter was signed by the chairmen of five House Foreign Affairs subcommittees.

According to the letter:

Around the world the impacts of climate change are occurring.  The US can demonstrate global leadership and ensure critical forward movement in the climate negotiations by supporting the establishment of an equitable, effective, and accountable global climate fund that is embraced by the international community.  We commend the administration for its efforts on the Copenhagen accord and strongly urge the establishment of the global climate fund as an essential step in its own right, one that should be taken now even as other parts of the negotiations mature separately.

The following lawmakers signed the letter: Rep. Eni Faleomavaega, chairman of the Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment; Rep. Brad Sherman, chairman of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade; Rep. Gary Ackerman, chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia; Rep. Donald Payne, chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health; and Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.