What does a 45,000 ton "carbon footprint" get you?

...that's the total estimated footprint of the 15,000 participants in the UN's just-completed climate conference in Cancun, BTW. Enough to run 8-9,000 households for a year. Cant' find a cash estimate for the cost, but I 'm sure it's many, many millions of dollars. Why not? For the most part, it's not their money...

So what did all this hot gas and burned cash get us? From the UN's site, this announcement:

The United Nations Climate Change Conference took place in Cancun, Mexico, from 29 November to 10 December 2010. It encompassed the sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) and the sixth Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP), as well as the thirty-third sessions of both the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), and the fifteenth session of the AWG-KP and thirteenth session of the AWG-LCA.

Gives you an idea of just how much was accomplished. But wait, I see some press releases as well:

UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun delivers balanced package of decisions, restores faith in multilateral process

Really! And all it took was for UN officials and allied NGO groups to spend a week in a resort to make us all believers again in their own omnipotence...

And there's still more self-serving press releases:

The United Nations System delivering as one on climate change: supporting implementation

Well, I suppose if I spent a week at a Mexican beach resort with someone else's money, guilt would obligate me to make all types of grandiose statements about what type of life-affirming progress I made there. But I'd probably still feel some remorse about the lying, and stealing, and scamming....

Not these guys. I suppose the billions of dollars they've appropriated from the worldwide taxpaying citizenry has warped them to reality just a little bit.

And if the best they can come up with is what we've seen above, maybe it's time to stop paying into this diplomatic climactic Ponzi scheme. At least Madoff's suckers got some payoffs, all we get is someone else's vacation photos, while we can't even afford to to heat our homes anymore....