Some 15,000 delegates, 45,000 green activists and 5,000 journalists will be in Copenhagen for the UN's climate change conference over the next 11 days.It is estimated that the Climate Change Act, passed in the UK a year ago, will already cost Britain £18 billion, or £720 for every household in the country, every year between now and 2050. But that, it seems, is not enough.
A few weeks ago British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said negotiators had until the Copenhagen conference to save the world from global warming. The alternative to united action was a catastrophe of floods, droughts and killer heatwaves. The cost of failing to address global warming, he said, would be greater than the impact of two world wars and the Great Depression.
You might have thought the purpose of the conference was simply to consider whatever was responsible. Not so. A treaty had been prepared for signing at the conference, we are told, which would create a new global organisation with power, under the guise of saving the planet, to transfer money from one nation to another, and to enforce the conditions of the treaty.
The goal of the environmental movement, we are told, was to use climate change to bring the nations under the umbrella of an organisation with global governance.
Lord Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, has argued that global warming hysteria was being advanced by the political left to impose global taxes on the United States in pursuit of international control of the US economy under a one-world government to be administered by the UN.
He told the Americans: "I read that treaty and what it says is that a world government is going to be created. The word 'government' actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity.
"The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to Third World countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, 'climate debt' because we have been burning CO2 and they haven't. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement. . .
"Unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your humanity away forever."
It was reported that President Obama was "leaning toward not going" to the Copenhagen conference. Then that he would be there for the first days, but not at the end. Last week it was said he would not be there at the beginning, but at the end, when the decisions would be made.
So what will be decided at the Copenhagen conference? We shall soon know.
