Special posting for the week of COP28 - Immoral, Ineffective, Expensive, Misguided

December 06, 2023

The 28th Conference of the Parties is taking place right now, with an incredible 70,000 attendees feeling it necessary to jet across the globe to Dubai to stay in fine hotels, eat expensive food and spend government or employer money. The conference thus perfectly symbolizes the entire modern climate movement: wealthy out-of-touch busybodies wandering about in a miraculous world made possible by affordable fossil energy feasting on fine food and wine while they discuss how everyone else should be forced to do without. And then wondering why no one is listening. In-person, not via webinar. There is a great deal to be cynical about regarding net-zero, climate alarmism, and the massive associated consumption of capital. Here is a collection of COP-related commentary for your perusal.

COP28 should be the last COP COPs are immoral because they deprive billions of the energy they need to prosper. They should be replaced by energy freedom conferences. Every report you hear about fossil fuels having made climate more dangerous commits at least one of 2 fallacies: ignoring the enormous climate mastery benefits of fossil fuels or wildly exaggerating negative climate side-effects of fossil fuels.
‘Net Zero’ Fails the Cost-Benefit Test Bjorn Lomborg: As COP28 opens, two new studies show that extravagant climate promises are far more wasteful than useful. "In other words, each dollar spent will avoid less than 17 cents of climate damage. The total, undiscounted loss over the century is beyond $1,800 trillion. For comparison, global GDP last year was a little over $100 trillion. Although well-intentioned, current climate policy would end up destroying a sizable fraction of future prosperity."
By now anyone who pays attention knows that atmospheric CO2 fluctuates, following a number of powerful natural cycles such as planetary orbital mechanics and cosmic ray interaction with the Sun's fluctuating magnetic field, and human-created CO2 emissions interact with these cycles. Ever since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, there have been Conference of the Parties events, now reaching #28 in Dubai. A good question to ask is what difference all the conferences, all the policies, and all the money spent to control atmospheric CO2 has made. The chart below shows the measured concentration of CO2 in Hawaii, and we can see absolutely net-zero impact from all the furore. Do you think the parties involved actually care at all about CO2, or is there perhaps something else they are after?
For there to be an energy transition, it seems safe to assume that some new energy source (wind and solar are the current contenders) would have to be replacing an old source such as fossil fuels. The next three charts show that there is a steady growth of CO2 emissions, with the most developed economies showing decreases in emissions (due in part to a shift from coal to natural gas) while China and India are greatly increasing emissions as they industrialize. In fact, wind and solar have managed to only meet a part of the growth in energy production and thus it seems fair to declare that an energy transition has not yet begun.
There is an existing energy technology that produces no CO2 emissions as it generates energy (although fossil fuels are used in the construction of a facility and the extraction of fuel), produces no air pollution, has a small environmental footprint, is safer than any other energy source, operates at a very high percentage of its nameplate capacity, and has an unlimited amount of fuel available. Do you think environmentalists are in love with this energy technology? No, they have opposed it forcefully and consistently since its initial adoption, making it many times more expensive and far slower to deploy than it needs to be, as evidenced by its use by other countries. Of all the zero-carbon energy sources, nuclear has by far the greatest promise.
The following graph shows that more CO2 reduction has been accomplished by shifting towards natural gas than by all "zero-carbon" generating sources since 2005. The true goal of all COP meetings and the entire carbon reduction movement has never been about lowering CO2 emissions. Otherwise, the COP meetings would have focused on transitioning to abundant, safe, zero-CO2 nuclear power. The real purpose of the U.N.’s efforts is to redistribute wealth from Western countries, especially the United States. This is just one more piece of evident showing the U.N. is an inti-reason, anti-human organization that the mostly-free countries should quit immediately.
COP28 Chairman Sultan Al Jaber is a True Revolutionary COP28 President: "I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation. I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C." "Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves."