After two weeks, billions of dollars, anger, hypocrisy, and lots of unnecessary pollution, the environmental elites finished off their climate summit in Scotland. And did they make a deal?
You can read the AP’s summary, which is hardly celebratory, or you can realize that, as usual, this is mostly nonsense.
Countries were forced to weaken the language on coal after a last-minute protest from — you guessed it — India and China. The two leading emitters will continue to increase their consumption of the “evil” fossil fuel as their economies grow, prompting cries from richer, more liberal nations that the deal is not sufficient.
“The #COP26 outcome is a compromise, reflecting the interests, contradictions and state of political will in the world today,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Saturday “It’s an important step, but it’s not enough. It’s time to go into emergency mode. The climate battle is the fight of our lives & that fight must be won. The agreement also aims to strengthen ‘near term’ climate targets and urges wealthier countries to help poorer countries battle the rising costs of climate change.”
China: not yet green
China's renewable fraction (biomass, hydro, solar, wind etc) 40% in 1971 when poor (wood, dung)
As average Chinese got 35x richer over the period, fossil fuels maxed at 92% in 2011, now at 88% in 2019https://t.co/xzhaOjmABT pic.twitter.com/64boOdMlJt
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) November 12, 2021
The stars of the show — other than 81-year-old Nancy Pelosi jetting thousands of miles to equate weather with racism and sexism — were platitudes, fearmongering, and soaring rhetoric.
Related: Biden’s New Climate Plan Helps Rich, Hurts Everyone Else.
There was also empty diplomacy and loads of hubris by affluent countries and western celebrities.
In the end, these buffoons wasted half of November on meaningless theatre, because nothing is binding. Actual reductions in emissions are completely dependent on China and India changing course, along with technological innovations. So I’ll go out on a limb and predict that it’s highly unlikely a non-binding agreement will stop the earth’s climate from “changing.”
For a more extensive recap, take a look here.
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