We’ve noticed that alarmists are getting very good at apportioning blame for greenhouse gases down to precise percentages, a trick that ensures that no matter how much emissions might fall, the blame never diminishes. For instance according to a Canadian doctor at COP29 the health care sector is responsible for 5% of our emissions, which if true would remain true even if everyone including his own sector cut theirs in half. Likewise Scientific Climate American recycles a piece from Carbon Brief on the suddenly vital talks on plastic in Busan saying “The production, use and disposal of plastics is responsible for around 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions”. What else? Well, supposedly “Aviation accounts for 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions.” Also “One-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions result from food and agriculture.” Meanwhile “The manufacturing and production sector accounts for one-fifth of global carbon emissions and 54% of the world’s energy usage.” And “Transport accounts for more than a third of CO2 emissions from end‐use sectors” while at least in Canada, home heating alone accounts for 16%, and home energy use in total 24%. At which point you realize the other trick is that we’re collectively responsible for 110% of collective annual emissions before we even get to things like the oil and gas sector. No wonder there’s a crisis… of credibility.

The Scientific American email teaser said “The role of plastics in climate change is easy to overlook”. If only. These days everything bad is loudly proclaimed to be a cause of climate change, a result of it, or both, and vice versa. And in this case apparently “Plastics currently cause triple the emissions of aviation”. They would, because everything causes more than its share of emissions just as everywhere is heating faster than average. Thus when pillorying aviation, it’s at 2.5%, fully half of the dreaded plastic. Not that anybody’s double-counting or using other dubious statistical techniques like the old make up something that sounds good. (As for instance with South Korean’s own plastic recycling statistics.) But what to do, what to do? Alas, especially given the face-plant of COP29, it is a bit awkward that the “Busan” meeting also seems to be headed for the garbage dump rather than the recycling plant.

Short days ago, Climate Home News emailed “Next stop: plastics”. It then insisted that COP29 only looked like a failure while secretly being one:

“If you tuned into the final session of the COP29 summit in Baku in the early hours of Sunday, you’d have been forgiven for thinking it had ended in failure. It didn’t - but the deal on the new climate finance goal can best be described as a Pyrrhic victory for developing countries.”

A Pyrrhic victory being, of course, proverbially a defeat. (As Plutarch records the monarch of Epirus after two battles with the Romans in 280 and 279 BC, “Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one other such victory would utterly undo him.”)

Lacking the wisdom of the ancients, the climate great and good rush on to the next failure. Echoing John Kennedy who famously said “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan” (although what he really said was “There's an old saying that victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan” and it wasn’t old, it seems to originate with Mussolini’s foreign minister who along with Il Duce had some skill at spawning failures) maybe it consists of a thousand children with the parent being the global elite:

“Hard on the heels of COP29, the Climate Home team is this week reporting live from Busan, South Korea's second largest city, for one last global environmental summit of the year that could place limits on fossil fuel production - this time with a new UN treaty on plastic pollution... But, as our reporter Matteo Civillini writes, some fossil fuel-producing nations like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran have fiercely opposed putting any limits on plastic production, almost all of which is derived from oil and gas.”

And… thud. As the same publication conceded on Monday Dec. 2, “Busan talks fail to resolve fossil fuel fight”. And after years of blabbing on about it you didn’t see it coming?