If your fear of the future is:

a bleak, cold world where the ruling elite force healthy people to walk on treadmills to produce electricity while the elderly and disabled are strapped to conveyor belts and incinerated,

or

an overheated, arid planet where healthy people wear masks to avoid breathing polluted air as factories in India and China belch smoke to provide their people with millions of gas-guzzling cars.

If the first scenario sounds more plausible than the second, you have probably read Glenn Beck’s book, “Agenda 21,” a dystopian vision of the future.

A group of true believers lobbied a legislative committee Tuesday for a bill banning any implementation of the actual “Agenda 21,” a 20-year-old United Nations document about environmental conservation and sustainability.

The real Agenda 21 is a stupefyingly long and naively idealistic statement urging nations to put aside their self-interest and work together to save the planet.

The U.S. is a signatory, but Agenda 21 is not a treaty and has no force of law. More than 500 U.S. communities have voluntarily participated in Agenda 21 programs to receive sustainable development advice and information.

And that’s what worries Agenda 21 opponents in Maine.

“It’s an awful, awful, awful thing,” Blaine Richardson, a former Republican candidate for Congress, told the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee Tuesday.

The U.N. document is a blueprint for destroying our Constitution, national sovereignty and America itself, said Henry Joy, a former Republican Congressional candidate.

Joy pointed out that the U.S. gives the U.N. a large part (22 percent) of its operating budget, more than any other nation. Yet he passed right over the obvious: Why would the U.N. destroy what Joy himself called its biggest “cash cow?”

The ultimate goal, Agenda 21 opponents said Tuesday, is to strip anyone, anywhere of private property rights and reduce the earth’s population to 500 million.

Since we now have seven billion souls on spaceship earth, the elitists behind Agenda 21 would have to incinerate a massive number of people, none of whom we suspect would go quietly.

Neither goal appears in the text of Agenda 21. You must read between the lines, and a lot creativity has been used, not only by Glenn Beck, but others, to weave this complex conspiracy theory.

The contra-conspiracy would be that conservatives like the Koch brothers, who have earned billions by extracting natural resources, and oil company executives have heavily funded the groups spinning these yarns.

You could say Agenda 21 was designed to inspire the rest of the world to meet our relatively higher standard of environmental protection.

Or you might believe tougher environmental regulations demonstrate we are simply a long way down the road to one-world government and enslavement.

The biggest danger isn’t Agenda 21, it’s that the conspiracy theorists will convince enough people that using any of the words or ideas presented in Agenda 21 are evidence of the creeping Agenda 21 conspiracy.

Henry Joy, a former state representative from Crystal, was well on his way to that point Tuesday.

“You have an organization, well two of them as a matter of fact — one called the DEP and one called LURC,” Joy said. “And both of those organizations are implementing many things which go along with this Agenda 21.”

Could those be Regionalism? Sustainability? Reducing carbon footprints? Conservation? Environmental policy? Land management? Pollution control. Enforcement?

LURC and DEP documents and programs contain a lot of those words, but you see what’s happening here:

If the U.N. is evil, and the U.N. uses those words, then anyone using those words is evil. That’s right, folks, all part of the conspiracy.

That is so Glenn Beck.

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The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and the editorial board.