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At the end of the first week of the Glasgow climate summit, 100,000 protesters marched to denounce the attendees as phonies who will never honor their commitments to curb carbon emissions.
Despite pledges by 100 nations to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030, and by 20 nations, including the U.S., to end financing of new international fossil-fuel power plants, teenage climate superstar activist Greta Thunberg says the COP26 summit is a con:
“Two weeks of business as usual, blah, blah, blah!”
Thunberg has a point.
Commitments made in Scotland are not binding upon governments that, be they autocratic or democratic, do not subordinate their national interests to pledges ostentatiously made in global forums.
This Glasgow summit calls to mind the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which won a Nobel Peace Prize for Secretary of State Frank Kellogg,
On Aug. 27, 1928, 15 High Contracting Parties signed on to renounce war as an instrument of national policy. The signatories that day were the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, France, Poland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and India. Within 15 years, all 15 nations, Ireland alone excepted, were ensnared in the greatest war in history.
Like the pledges at the climate summit, the Kellogg-Briand Pact provided for no means of enforcement or sanctions against nations that failed to live up to their commitment.
Consider. China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon emissions, Russia the fourth largest, and Brazil the seventh largest worldwide.
Yet President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil did not show up at the summit. And President Joe Biden of the United States and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain both fell asleep during the proceedings.
Glasgow is destined to fail because national interests invariably triumph over globalism. The demands of the people who keep regimes in power will be heard and heeded before the claims of the transnationals.
Biden, faced with a threat by Sen. Joe Manchin to sink his Build Back Better bill, summarily dropped a measure that would have imposed rising carbon taxes on fossil fuel plants and provided monetary rewards for clean energy facilities. Biden dropped it because his own and his party’s fortunes depend on enacting the legislation.
The protests in Scotland this weekend were far more colorful than the yearlong “yellow vest” protests in France. Yet, the French protests proved more effective and successful.
That movement originated with French motorists from rural areas who had long commutes and were protesting an increase in fuel taxes that was real and immediate. The French protests had a specific goal, and they succeeded in bringing about a reduction in the fuel taxes.
“King coal is dead!” we heard from the summit.
Really? Coal is a foundational resource in Asia, and demand for coal grows as the populations and economies of Asia expand.
Coal accounts for 60-65% of the electricity generation in China and 68-73% in India, two nations that represent more than a third of the world’s population. Nations such as Australia depend upon the sale and shipment of coal as essential components of their exports.
Consider Scotland itself. Should it move to secede from Britain, will it gladly forfeit the North Sea oil and gas deposits that have proven so beneficial to Britain?
As America transitions to clean energy and electric vehicles, our own reliance upon China will grow. For China is today the world’s principal supplier of solar panels and the rare earth minerals vital to the batteries of electric cars.
To get to Glasgow, delegates, journalists and activists had to travel by commercial or private jet, and every restaurant, bar, hotel room and conference hall had to be lighted and heated by electricity generated by the kind of gas-, oil- and coal-fired plants that global elites want on the chopping block by midcentury. The carbon footprint of the Glasgow summit was not inconsiderable.
Now that the presidents and prime ministers have departed the global summit in its second and final week, we’re going to get down to the lick-log.
Writes the Washington Post: “In coming days … negotiators from nearly 200 countries will haggle over every word in every line of an agreement that could shape … how the rich countries of the world deliver on promises to help more vulnerable nations.”
Specifically, who will pony up the $100 billion per year promised to poor and developing nations at previous climate summits and never fully delivered? And who will pay the reparations for the “loss and damage” suffered by the poor and developing countries, previously caused by the industrialized nations of the world?
At root, almost every globalist and transnational institution and summit has a common feature: the endless transfer of wealth from the First World, the historic oppressors, to their alleged Third World victims.
These gatherings are to determine how much in reparations the latter can extort from a conscience-stricken West.
Will the GOP reject the shakedown?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
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400 jets!!! 400 Morons!!! These people can not seriously believe that we have even a tiny sliver of respect for them.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/08/cop26-african-nations-seek-talks-climate-finance-deal
I for one am asking how we might channel some of this loot back into our pockets. The cash is designed to make sure the blacks do not build things. Can we set up ecological companies in Africa and trouser the money ourselves? A fraction of that money would fund the rightwing for a century.
It’s a ritual humiliation.
The whole purpose of this conference was for world “leaders” to get together to schmooze, drink fancy wine, eat fancy food, virtue signal and stretch their legs a bit before they get back into their private jets and fly back to the business of mismanagement in their home countries.
You cannot power a major industrial nation like the US with windmills and solar panels; and now Biden is considering shutting down a natural gas pipeline in Michigan right before the chill of Winter. Is there no end to Biden’s idiocy? Biden allegedly carried Michigan so it serves all the people who voted for Biden right if they freeze to death this winter because of Biden’s climate zealotry.
The vilest denialist thugs say ‘windmills’ as a sort of declaration of their membership of the denialist death-cult. Wind turbines, solar and other renewable CAN power any country, and they are the cheapest energy now, and due to get cheaper. This omnicidist’s preference for fossil fuels, which are due to run out in decades in any case, is a desire to see Life on Earth devastated in an ‘hot-house Earth’ mass extinction. Denialists are death-worshippers.
Good column.
The Billionaires will save us. Thank goodness that private property is still worshiped in some parts and the Billionaires are allowed to become billionaires for the betterment of humankind and puppy dogs. Conferences like Glasgow are meant to create consensus around the problem, not the solution. Governments are bankrupt. Only public-for-profit-private-partnerships can save us. Musk is going to buy world hunger off the table. Don’t panic – God put billionaires on the planet for a reason.
Notice who was missing at COP 26? The climate scientists, even the IPCC down-players. Any honest assessment of the climate destabilisation situation says that we are dead hominids walking, yet the Evil psychopaths still deny it all, the bloodsucking capitalists look for ways to rip off the remaining gelt to be purloined in the Fire Sale, and Austfailia, a veritable dystopia of greed, imbecility, misanthropy and ‘Christian’ fundamentalist lust for the End Times, comes stone, motherless, last of sixty countries surveyed for their climate destabilisation preventative actions.
The French protests have accomplished nothing.
No protest in history has ever accomplished anything.
The goyim are so stupid.
No worries Pat, 13 chickensh*t traitors from the “republican” side of the uniparty gave Fraudsident Sh*ttenpants his trillion-dollar boondoggle.
Guess we’ll all find out the hidden horrors of this latest tyrannical bs we can’t afford come Jan 1st of next year.
.
It’s good to be passionate about issues, but there’s an 80-year winning streak of not one environmental doomsday prediction coming true.
Google “the oil we eat” by Richard Manning. The fertilizer without which our farmers would not survive is oil based. Global starvation is the consequence of banning the oil industry.
Why is that fact so difficult for our leaders to understand? The food industry depends on oil, not bullshit.
Your so-called “death-cult” is actually comprised of those ignorant fanatics trying to shut down our reliable energy sources, like power plants fired by coal, oil and natural gas, which can run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year without issue to keep people from freezing in the dark.
Yes, the best way to provide a good life for all the planet’s people is to ensure they have easy access to reliable, inexpensive electricity.
Wind and solar can’t do that because those intermittent, unreliable energy sources cannot provide the base-load power needed to run a modern civilization, as Max Maxwell correctly notes. Wind and solar can’t even carry their own weight, and in fact depend on government subsidies to stay afloat.
But if you’re trying to impoverish or even kill people, and make them miserable in the process, wind and solar are a good way to go, speaking of your “death-cult.”
We will have to build more Nuclear power plants; solar and wind power is unreliable; fossil fuels are finite and will eventually run out. Nuclear power if safely done is the best way to go; we have plenty of it; and its clean. it does produce radioactive waste but that can be solved by storing it deep underground; and in the US we have lots of desolate uninhabited areas out west to store it. But liberals and climate radicals thinking we can rely on Wind Mills and solar power are living in a fantasy land.
As I recently posted elsewhere, the psychology literature tells us that repetition creates the illusion of truth. That is the importance of the summit, to the climate-emergency people. “Blah blah blah” actually has a purpose in that it imbues what is being said with the illusion of truth.
(I suspect Mulga – not his usual level-headed self – is led astray by woke pussy;
which can be rewarding 😉 provided one does not lose contenance )
One point I´d like to add is that heating (or cooling) with electricity is energetic harakiri.
How do you debate those who “do not need no stinkin coal plants, we have wall sockets”?
Speaking up is tantamount to declaring you are a baby-eating oger and proud of it,
but it cannot go on like this
(if nothing emerges that reliably kills 30 million Africans per year, every year,
whatever we do is moot anyway – that´s how deep in the muck we are).
But kanga, (they’re loose in your top paddock by the look of things)why only Africans? Why not kangaroos?
Especially those mail-in help him, 100% unbelievably for Biden.
Yes, I agree. The repetition of the science, the observations, indeed of reality does have an effect. It drives the denialist psychopaths to their own, destructive, repetition, of lies, disinformation, misrepresentation and every other abomination that spews from their life-hating gobs.
Climate change lie is a very lucrative business, ask Al Gore.
In the poor world solar and wind are the best bet for electrification. Big, central, fossil fuel power stations require huge infrastructure of power-lines, transformers etc, where village or town solar and wind, or pumped hydro, with battery storage, is much easier and cheaper to deploy, wind and solar being the cheapest forms of production now.
Fossil fuels are running out, their burning is an act of omnicide (strange how that doesn’t bother denialist ghouls)and they produce more pollution eg mercury, than just their greenhouse gases. As for subsidies, you dolt, the IMF calculated subsidies to the fossil fuel behemoths at $5.9 TRILLION in 2020, or eleven million per minute. As I said, solar and wind are the cheapest, so no longer require subsidies, let alone the subsidy of treating the destruction of humanity as an ‘externality’. Stick to chewing gum and trying to fart at the same time-it’s more your territory.
No matter how much the EPA and other regulatory bodies try to stack the deck against coal-fired power plants by requiring costly but idiotic CO₂ sequestration in the USA, the fact remains neither wind nor solar can provide base-load power, and both of these intermittent, unreliable, weak-sister energy sources must have fossil fuel fired back-ups for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
Fart and chewing gum jokes are the territory of teen-age boys, Mumblebrain, so you’re just showing your immaturity along with your ignorance and fanaticism.
Why don’t you try your luck promoting wind and solar over at Watts Up With That?
(you still don´t get what “no” kangaroos means, right?)
iirc a “mulga” is a poisonous secondary growth on real estate laid to ashes by the
blackfeller, so I´d thought you´d appreciate things like “carrying capacity” and
irreversible deterioration.
Africans are only the most pressing problem, not an obsession, and just to give a scale
(and to explain why “climate” is rather low on my list of worries).
– What you do with your kangas is your business, but they are not an invasive species
and were no problem before all the Artesian wells; your previous successes with emus,
cats, rabbits and toads do not engender spectacular hopes 😛
But back to the topic: The Watermelon Guards (green on the outside … ) are right
on one thing – we have passed Peak Gretta and the willingness to listen to their
hormones is going to go ever further south.
The problem with nuclear power plants is how long they take to be planned, designed, permitted, environmental impact studies, and then constructed. So you’re looking at a decade plus before a plant can be up & running.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/park-k2/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Nuclear%20Energy,is%20ready%20to%20be%20used.
Plenty of methane from the emissions from the delegates’ mouths, not to mention those released in getting their fat a**es to Glasgow.
Death-worshipping morons. I forgot to mention your mentality. Environmental predictions, say from the IPCC, in recent decades have massively UNDERSTATED the reality of our predicament. One wonders where you Dunning-Krugerites are force-fed your crap, like lab rats at the mercy of loony scientists in the pay of fossil fuel interests.
Gosh-an ignorant moron who adds puerile vulgarity to its shtick, then thinks that it is being ‘witty’.
Keep lying, you genocidal imbecile. Fossil fuel emissions equal Near Term Human Extinction. If you don’t comprehend that, you are an ignorant moron. If you do, but still deny it, you are a mass murdering monster. No middle road exists. Just why humanity, mostly in the Anglosphere of course, has produced so many Evil thugs of your type just at the moment is a question that only psychologists and moral ponerologists could answer.
You are ranting hysterically. You must not have had your uterus removed yet. Shut up, old woman, and let the men talk in peace.
The process for designing nuclear power plants must be streamlined and nuclear power plants must be standardized. This will need to be done in the future as fossil fuels become more scarce. Wind and solar power are inherently unreliable.
Al Gore is a crook, so you throw out 200 years of science and all the observations from reality of rapidly accelerating climate and weather chaos. Suicidal and genocidal imbecility.
A genocidal denialist thug who is also a vile and vicious misogynist. No surprise there-the Rightwing Authoritarian Personality is definitely a total shit.
Wind and solar can power the planet EASILY. Unreliability can be removed by research on storage, and money spent on nuclear fission is basically money stolen from renewables, and thus a cats-paw for fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are the greatest store of wealth on Earth, subsidised by five TRILLION EVERY year and those who own that gelt, and the scuttling trolls, value that far more than the lives of our children and grandchildren-yet more evidence of Satanism in action in the Western world.
Wind & solar production are susceptible to outside sources like ice & cloud cover like we saw in Texas last winter. Solar is good for low power consumption items like lighting, but not so great when it comes to powering a dryer, unless you have a bunch of batteries, which not only drain quickly, but require lots of mined minerals and special disposal when their storage capacities wear out. Same goes for wind turbines, if it’s not windy, they’re not producing. The idea is good, but the technology to handle actual large scale power production required to power a major city like LA, just isn’t there yet.
Hydroelectric or wave generation power is much cleaner and more reliable than solar or wind, but wave generation also isn’t there yet, so our best current options are nuclear, hydro, and coal run plants. The other issue is that most of the existing electrical plants weren’t built to sustain the current rate of population growth to many states, which is the cause of rolling black outs/brown outs due to to many people drawing power off of a grid designed for 1/2 that. It’s the equivalent of overloading an electrical outlet in your house, at some point it causes the circuit breaker to trip. The power grid is no different, just a larger scale.
Are you ignorant, or just a disinformer? I’m shocked that you didn’t assert that solar and wind are ‘too expensive’. You fanatics got away with that for years. Solar, wind, hydro are all perfectable, and rapidly improving in efficiency and affordability. Just what pathopsychological rewards you get for arguing, in fact, for Near Term Human Extinction is one for the psychologists to investigate. Do you own coal shares? That’s the usual motivator for Rightists-insatiable greed.
No they aren’t. Nothing you, Pres. Biden or anyone else can do will make the sun shine or the wind blow 24/7 in any one location.
Making batteries is dirty business. The batteries themselves are dangerous, and critically, they cannot provide power indefinitely, as fossil fuel fired power plants do as a matter of routine, 24/7/365.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2016/10/lithium-ion-batteries-found-to-produce-toxic-gases/
I do love a diehard imbecile. What I meant, and any normal person would comprehend, is that the efficiency of solar and wind can be improved by advances in technology. Solar PV panels are far more efficient than in the past. Wind turbines larger and more efficient. New batteries are being produced all the time, many without the need for ‘rare earth minerals’.
Fossil fuel extraction routinely pollutes vast tracts of the world, and produces huge mountains of poisonous fly-ash, and heavy metal pollution, most notably of mercury, in emissions. All vastly more than the pollution caused by renewable minerals extraction. And the 24/7/365 availability of fossil fuels come with Near Term Human Extinction through a hot-house event, which you psychopaths seem to be remarkably keen on. The combination of Evil and stupidity is running rampant in the West.