It seems that just about everyone can find a reason for disappointment in this year’s climate summit.
It seems that just about everyone can find a reason for disappointment in this year’s climate summit.
R epresentatives from nearly 200 countries agreed to a radically progressive plan to reduce oil, natural-gas, and coal use to allegedly slow global warming as the COP28 (“Conference of Parties”) U.N. climate summit in Dubai concluded this week. But that still isn’t enough for some environmentalists.
“We could mobilize the trillions of dollars we need, in the order of four-and-a-half to five trillion a year, to drive the transformation we need,” King Charles told a crowd of environmentalists during his opening address.
To put $5 trillion a year into context, that’s almost three and a half times more than the $1.51 trillion the U.S. is set to spend in fiscal year 2023 on Social Security, and 28 times the $177.5 billion the U.S. Army is set to spend.
To conceptualize the amount of money Charles wants to spend on fighting global warming, imagine America’s fleet of ten Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, which cost taxpayers $10.8 billion each. For what King Charles wants to spend, America could’ve built 463 new aircraft carriers — each year.
The immense costs of a green transition have been known for a long time. Solar and wind power, for example, would require an estimated $90 trillion of energy investment to substantially affect global warming, according to the International Energy Agency.
King Charles has attended COP for decades now and has continually predicted calamity. (Amusingly, as Europe’s environmentalist elite convened in Dubai, this year the continent was actually covered in record-breaking snowfall.) “Back in 2009, just before COP15, in Copenhagen, I remember trying to point out that the best scientific projections gave us less than a hundred months to alter our behavior before we risk the tipping point of catastrophic climate change, beyond which there is no recovery,” he stated in his 2015 COP speech in Paris . . . which took place 96 months ago.
It has been 167 months since King Charles predicted we had 100 months before the effects would be so catastrophic as to be unrecoverable. Yet he is still attending COP well after his own self-imposed deadline, making exactly the same ridiculous claims. Disturbingly, he’s far from the only environmentalist there to make continually unfulfilled predictions of future apocalypse — and to keep pushing back the date of catastrophe.
In 2018, then-teenage activist Greta Thunberg promoted on social media Harvard University professor James Anderson’s warning that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” Five years later, when that did not occur, Thunberg quietly deleted her tweet. Anderson had also predicted in 2018 that “there will be no floating ice remaining [in the Arctic Ocean] by 2022” unless the U.S. and the rest of the world enacted his vision of environmental protection. We did not enact his vision, yet ice remains.
But the king’s desire to spend $5 trillion annually isn’t enough for Thunberg. Starting in 2022, Thunberg began skipping COP after criticizing it for being insufficiently environmentally radical, calling it “greenwashing.” This year, Thunberg was busy appearing in court after being arrested by British police (for causing disruption for guests at a hotel hosting an oil-and-gas-industry conference). She did, however, find time to criticize the host government.
COP was wildly unsuccessful from the skewed perspective of many environmentalists like Thunberg. Protesters outside the conference claimed, “This text is bullsh**,” as the conference’s takeaway proposal merely called for reducing the use of conventional energy such as oil, coal, and natural gas, instead of ending it. This change fell far short of the demands of the most extreme environmentalists. Thus, activists claimed it was a huge letdown.
“COP28 is now on the verge of complete failure,” former U.S. vice president Al Gore stated on the website formerly known as Twitter. He continued:
The world desperately needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but this obsequious draft reads as if OPEC dictated it word for word. It is even worse than many had feared. It is ‘Of the Petrostates, By the Petrostates and For the Petrostates.’ It is deeply offensive to all who have taken this process seriously.
That the draft was milquetoast by environmentalist standards was allegedly due to the influence of the Chinese delegation. That is, Asian dictators and Arab oil sheiks may have saved America from an awful deal.
“[The draft] really doesn’t meet the expectations of this COP in terms of the urgently needed transition to clean sources of energy and the phaseout of fossil fuels,” U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said during a closed-door meeting, according to Politico. (Perhaps the delegations of other nations were alienated by Kerry’s own personal unscheduled methane emission, which occurred in the middle of the former Democratic presidential nominee’s anti-coal power diatribe, and was audible over the microphone.)
Another notable disappointment to eco-extremists was their seemingly failed attempt to use the agreement to sabotage the future of nuclear power. Environmentalists pressured Germany to make a serious attempt to purge nuclear power from the COP agreement. But it looks like they failed: The draft agreement now actually calls for “accelerating” nuclear power. Anti-nuclear environmentalists aren’t happy about it.
“Of course #nuclear does not belong in texts #cop28,” Jan Haverkamp, Greenpeace’s “senior nuclear expert,” seethed. “A fossil fuel phase out should be there, not a technology that guarantees decades of fossil lock in because it delivers too little, too late against too high a price … oh yes, and is too risky.”
Germany is currently operating over a hundred coal-power plants. They provided a third of the country’s electricity production last year, according to the country’s Federal Statistical Office. But Germany’s last three nuclear-power plants were taken off the grid in mid-April, under heavy pressure from factually challenged environmentalists like Haverkamp.
From disputes on proposed spending to nuclear power, it seems that just about everyone can find a reason for disappointment in this year’s climate summit. It has laid bare fractures in the environmentalist coalition like never before.
Fundamentally, environmentalists’ problem is that any attempt to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions because of global-warming concerns will be futile without global participation, but nations in the developing world are the least interested in reducing emissions, as that would obviously destroy their quality of life.
China has been the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide since 2006 and emits close to three times what the U.S. does. Other developing countries’ emissions are rapidly rising. For almost a decade, China has been building one new coal plant every two days, meaning any commitments it makes will only be on paper.
This reality directly contrasts with the quasi-religious ideological preconceptions of the environmentalist movement. But rather than address environmental concerns via new technologies, environmentalists prefer to burn trillions of dollars on ineffective wind and solar energy. So far, the rest of the world is mostly refusing to join them.