by Dr. Tilak K. Doshi, Daily Sceptic:
Another year, and another ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene. The 29th COP is meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan. It started yesterday and will last for 11 days.
My view of the previous year’s UN climate jamboree, attended by a record-breaking 86,000 delegates, was realistically downbeat (some would say cynical):
It is likely that apart from grand-sounding communiques, more breast-beating by the climate NGOs and alarmist headlines by the legacy media, nothing much of practical significance will come out of the 28th Conference of the Parties in Dubai.
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But the seismic change brought on by the election of Donald “drill baby drill” Trump on Tuesday as U.S. president-elect – an avowed ‘climate denier’ and whose campaign has already promised to withdraw from the Paris Agreement a second time – must leave the West’s faithful devotees of the Church of Climate aghast. A second Trump presidency together with a Republican senate majority will bring about what finance and energy consultant Doomberg calls a “whirlwind that is about to befall the progressive environmental Left [that] will reverberate for decades”.
Pragmatists vs. Alarmists at COP28
As important as Mr. Trump’s triumphant election win is to the outlook for the globalist climate change agenda, let’s step back a bit for context.
It will come as no surprise that over the past year since COP28, large developing countries such as China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam carried on with their ambitious schedules for growing coal mining capacity and building new fossil-fueled power plants needed by their growing economies.
Just as unsurprisingly, the Biden administration and the left-of-centre European and U.K. governments zealously continued their quest for ‘Net Zero (emissions) by 2050’, the mantra that has entranced Western governments since the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Many governments in the Global South struggle to have access to affordable fossil fuels. Meanwhile, with the relentless climate alarmist propaganda going on for three decades, Western policymakers continue to demonise fossil fuels and nurture (with taxpayers’ money) their favoured green technologies, such as electric vehicles, solar and wind power, “green” hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, many of which have yet to be proven commercially viable.
With their control over leading financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Western governments veto the development and use of fossil fuels in developing countries in the name of the “climate crisis”. Carbon colonialism hypocritically denies developing countries the means to scale the energy ladder that the now-developed West has exploited to obtain their industrial prosperity and high standards of living.
Last year’s COP28 served as a crossroad when the contradictions between the ‘energy pragmatist’ and the ‘climate alarmist’ camps – roughly matching the ‘Global South’ and the ‘collective West’ – broke out into the open. Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the president of the COP28 climate summit and CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, said in an interview: “You’re asking for a phase-out of fossil fuels… Please, help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”
Al Jaber’s remarks were amplified by Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman who told Bloomberg that the world’s biggest oil exporter would not agree with Western demands to phase out fossil fuels. “Absolutely not,” he said in an interview in Riyadh. “And I assure you not a single person – I’m talking about governments – believes in that… If they believe that this is the highest moral ground issue, fantastic. Let them do that themselves. And we will see how much they can deliver.”
Enter President-elect Trump
Ah, what a difference a year – and an American presidential election – makes! Expectedly, the hyperventilating headlines of the mainstream media were out in full force within 48 hours of the election results being announced:
