by Heather Mac Donald
November 12, 2024
from CityJournal Website

 

Photo by Aziz Karimov

Getty Images

The latest global climate conference opened Monday in Azerbaijan.

The timing is excellent.

 

Any doubt regarding the wisdom of the next Trump administration's likely pullout from such meetings should be dispelled by the conference photos alone.

Here are tens of thousands of well fed, well-dressed members of the global elite:

activists, employees of lavishly funded NGOs, armies of government bureaucrats, hundreds of heads of state,

...who have all travelled via jet and private plane to this remote corner of the Earth and who expect that every minute of their day will be supported by abundant, magically available energy.

None has sacrificed a single personal comfort to save the planet.

They assume that their smartphones will draw on an invisible web of transmitters and that they will be able to search the Internet and run AI queries at will, notwithstanding that doing so requires voracious energy use from a growing archipelago of server farms.

 

They expect their PowerPoints to be well lit and their conference and hotel rooms to be heated or air conditioned as needed.

 

They are never without their bottled water, which is carried thousands of miles by carbon-emitting trucks and planes and kept sterile by plastic containers whose manufacture requires petrochemicals and plenty of energy.

 

They do not wait on the sun to shine or the wind to blow to light their rooms, run their elevators, or power up their devices; they want energy now and without interruption...

You don't have to be a "climate denier" to see that climate-change politics have become the largest global grift in history, one that grows in proportion with each new conference.

It was just a matter of time before Third World basket-case countries exploited the First World's virtue signaling.

This year's UNFCC COP 29 conference in Azerbaijan (COP stands for Conference of the Parties) features the demand that developed countries fork over billions, if not trillions, more dollars to the Global South, ostensibly to help it adjust to climate change.

Those billions will follow all previous foreign aid into the same sinkhole of corruption and incompetence.

The grift also includes the green energy enterprises that survive only thanks to government subsidies and mandates that no one meets.

 

When it comes to electric vehicle use, those mandates would take down the power grid if they were met.

 

President Joe Biden's hilariously named Inflation Reduction Act transfers close to $400 billion of appropriated taxpayer wages into subsidies for wind and solar development.

 

The alleged purity of those alternative energy sources is based on keeping their environmental costs off stage.

Climate change conferenciers lead self-important, globe-trotting lives.

Not a month goes by without an international convocation somewhere.

In April 2024, the 15^th Petersburg Climate Dialogue took place in Berlin.

 

In June 2024, the Bonn Climate Change Conference included the 60^th session of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation and a meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice.

 

The 79^th Session of the UN General Assembly in September 2024 hosted a high-level plenary meeting on what the General Assembly called the,

"existential threats posed by sea level rise"... (sic)

The current COP 29 meeting gathers together climate change veterans as well as an ever-expanding crew of new exploiters.

 

It will include the 19^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 19), and the sixth meeting of the COP serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA 6).

Hot air is acceptable for a good cause...

The New York Times lamented Trump's contempt for climate change accords long before he won the election. Saving the planet was another reason to vote for Kamala Harris, the paper urged in its news pages.

On Monday, the Times added to its long list of untruths regarding anything Trump-related.

"World leaders gathering in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on Monday for a global climate summit face a bleak reality:

The United States, the country responsible for pumping the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, is expected to soon drop out of the fight against climate change," the paper wrote on its front page.

The U.S. is not the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases:

China is, and India is coming up fast behind...

It is the self-punishing futility of restricting American manufacturing and development while America's competitors do whatever it takes to seize the economic advantage that drove Trump to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords the first time around.

The Times worries that China could assume,

"leadership of international efforts to address climate change",

...if the U.S. withdraws again.

If China does assume such leadership, it will not be at the cost of its own manufacturing base and standard of living...

If these climate gatherings focused on reviving nuclear energy - the solution to a "warming" planet - one could take them seriously.

But nuclear remains an afterthought at best in the romantic pursuit of "renewable" sources of power, whose harnessing requires mineral extraction, energy-consumptive manufacturing, and unsightly and sometimes lethal disruptions of natural ecosystems.

Trump's realism regarding the self-promoting theater of climate activism is of a piece with his refusal to bail Western countries out of their delinquent defense obligations.

The climate grift (scam) will continue and the putative nonprofits that have sprung up around it will keep multiplying, but at least the American contribution to elite hypocrisy will be cut back...