We recently asked what was the point of the much-hyped 26th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, with its lavish website and lifestyle. And we asked partly because to hear the usual suspects tell it, especially with the latest draft IPCC Working Group 1 report, they know exactly what’s going on and what to do as, indeed, they previously claimed they already did. So why not stay home and do it? Especially since apparently they’re going to be staying home anyway as the whole thing descends into woke farce.
As Edmund Burke once cuttingly observed of left-wing factionalism, birds of prey are not gregarious. And now the Climate Action Network International, of all groups, just said “COP26 Must Be Postponed”. Gosh. Why, given that we have just 10 years to act and blah blah blah and elephant ears? Well, see, “Vaccine inequity, unaffordable accommodation, travel challenges and new surges in the Covid19 pandemic will lock out huge numbers of developing country delegates from the UN climate talks set to take place in November.”
Not if you do it virtually, green dudes. And besides, to be blunt, the kinds of people in even the poorest countries who get to fly to international conferences are not exactly marginalized. Or paying their own airfare. Which didn’t stop Climate Home News from joining the whining chorus about how Britain wasn’t doing enough to vaccinate Third World elites so they could junket to Scotland. As if governments that can’t even organize a conference to say what everyone already said, to the same people they already said it to, or send some vaccine by air freight, might possibly create and execute a workable plan to change the weather everywhere in ways that make people better off and save the whales, elephants, and everything except perhaps the worms if they’re part of the problem.
In August the Guardian pumped out the usual overheated rhetoric about COP26 in hyping the latest IPCC report: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will on Monday publish a landmark report, the most comprehensive assessment yet, less than three months before vital UN talks that will determine the future course of life on Earth.” Whoa nelly. The future course of life on Earth. Heavy, man. Even if as Eric Worrall points out, they had Michael Mann call it the last chance, something he’s… um… done before. At least three times. Which again gives one the feeling of a ritual that even the participants are finding hard to take seriously.
A great many apostles of climate doom don’t act as though they believed a word of it, from the private hypocrites like Al Gore with his mansion or Gail Bradbrook with her diesel car and flights on vacation to Gavin Newsom with his coal power and Joe Biden with his oil drilling. And now Boris Johnson apparently dropped his demand to include climate change in a free-trade deal with Australia. Which might seem trivial, but coming right before Johnson hosts COP26 it’s revealing. As is the disintegrating conference itself.
The COP26 website might blare “UNITING THE WORLD TO TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE” before even, you know, having the meeting. But it’s not uniting the world, let alone tackling climate change so as to determine the future course of etc. Instead everyone is bickering like spoiled children.
One reason is that they do not know what to do and are struggling to remain relevant with ill success. For instance, a major problem is China’s refusal to cut its emissions. And you don’t want to go to Glasgow and say “OK, all the democracies cripple their economies, Xi Jinping gets to rampage, aye or nay?” Or to go “Hey Xi, cut it out with the coal plants” and have him go “Wanna make me?”
Let’s not mince words. After Britain’s “climate envoy” Alok Sharma (nice work if you can get it, including the expense account) and US “climate envoy” John Kerry (ditto) came to China to kowtow, the government/Communist Party Global Times warned the UK that it must not “allow Washington to hijack the summit for its ill geopolitical intentions” and added that China would “stick to its own pace” on emissions.
So the kid gloves are off. And the underlying problem is that nobody knows how to make a rogue nuclear superpower make nice with the cause du jour of western progressives, on climate or anything else. And nothing that might conceivably happen at COP26 would bring us any closer to knowing what to do or being in a position to do it. And it’s not exactly a new problem, either.
Cancelling COP26 would at least avoid the thorny question of whether to invite the Taliban. Who awkwardly now control one of the world’s largest lithium deposits, very important to the green energy on which the West is determined to blow all its money to the great financial as well as geopolitical benefit of China.
These people do not know what they are doing and they would not be able to do it if they did. They can’t even organize a conference, or explain what it would be for if they could. They cannot save the Earth which, luckily, doesn’t need it.
Should be published in The National Post. Passing from farce to tragedy.
Why don't they just cancel?
It appears that this years' "conference" will not have the input or suggestions from about 50% of the worlds' countries.
A suggested date to re-organise for is 2121, nice easy numbers to remember and plenty of time to, perhaps, get your facts straight.
We were warned in 1972 that we had only 10 years to save the planet. We still have only 10 years to save the planet, and always will have. You don't need a conference to figure that out...