Maurice Strong: Ignore Glenn Beck - climate change (carbon emissions trading) is big business

Source: Gaurdian; Leo Hickman

Maurice Strong: Ignore Glenn Beck – I don't want to rule the world
What I do want, says the man self-labelled 'the planet's leading environmentalist', is for nations to co-operate fully on issues they cannot deal with alone

Maurice Strong, shakes hands in in 1992 in Rio with Brazilian indigenous tribe chief Kanhok Caiapo. Photograph: Antonio Scorza/AFP

Maurice Strong, the founding executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme and self-proclaimed "world's leading environmentalist", has hit back at his critics in a rare interview with the Guardian.

Responding to internet speculation and repeated attacks by prominent rightwing climate sceptics that he is using the climate change issue to establish a global government, the 81-year-old Canadian, who organised both the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 and the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, said his only motivation was to alert the world that mankind's current actions are environmentally unsustainable.

"I've always made it clear that I do not believe that global government is either necessary or feasible," said Strong, who was a key official at the UN for decades until his retirement in 2005.

"What I do believe is that we need a system of global governance through which nations can co-operate and deal with issues they cannot deal with alone. Maybe that statement is too sophisticated for some, but it shouldn't be."

Last month, Glenn Beck, the conservative Fox News host and popular US talk radio presenter, portrayed Strong as a malevolent figure using his UN contacts to bring about the "collapse" of the world's "industrialised civilisations".

Beck said: "[Strong is] involved in collapsing the global economies into the hands of a global government."

Last year, Lord Monckton, the prominent climate sceptic who recently became the deputy leader of the UK Independence Party, accused Strong during a US TV programme of being a central figure in a "collusion" between UN officials, business leaders and scientists to use climate change as a device to make money.