The UN’s Latest Non-Productive Global Climate Conference

The United Nations' latest global conference on climate change known as COP 26 concluded this past weekend with little to show for it. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres expressed his disappointment with the outcome of COP 26, although he indicated that something was better than nothing. “The approved texts are a compromise,” Guterres said. “They reflect the interests, the conditions, the contradictions and the state of political will in the world today. They take important steps, but unfortunately the collective political will was not enough to overcome some deep contradictions.”

China is shamelessly ramping up its mining of coal and building of coal-fired power plants

There were some vague promises by participants at the COP 26 conference, including to come back in the near future with more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction commitments. There were lofty pronouncements on the importance of bringing greenhouse gas emissions down to “net zero” by mid-century. There were more pledges by wealthy developed countries to provide many billions of dollars every year to help poorer countries cope with climate change. There were limited agreements on curbing methane emissions and ending deforestation. And private financial-related institutions, which together control about $130 trillion in assets, agreed to invest their capital towards helping meet the goal of achieving net zero emissions of greenhouses gases by 2050. That’s about it, except for the usual complaints from developing countries that they should receive damages for the permanent losses they claim to have suffered from climate change allegedly caused solely by a few rich industrialized countries. China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases today by far as it goes all out to industrialize its own economy, has joined this chorus as a so-called “developing” country. China supports such reparation payments – not as a payor of course, even though it is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Indeed, China is shamelessly ramping up its mining of coal and building of coal-fired power plants as we speak. As long as Western countries pay the piper and take steps to immediately cut their own fossil fuel use while China continues to increase its own use, including of coal, China is getting a free ride. China’s president Xi Jinping did not even bother attending COP 26 in person. Yet President Biden’s climate czar John Kerry thinks it is a mark of great progress that he negotiated a climate agreement of cooperation with his Chinese counterpart that lacks any concrete commitments from China. Kerry was so anxious to take a symbolic climate agreement with China back to the United States from the Glasgow conference that he deliberately looked the other way when it came to China’s atrocious human rights record against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Kerry’s excuse for his indifference to real human suffering today at the hands of the Chinese Communist government officials was “that’s not my lane.”

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UN officials have been crying wolf for decades

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. That is precisely what the United Nations is doing in repeating the same formula for more global climate conferences. “COP 27 starts now,” Guterres said, while emphasizing that there was no time to waste. “Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread,” the UN Secretary General warned. “We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe.” The problem is that UN officials have been crying wolf for decades, claiming that climate catastrophe was right around the corner. “We have ten years to stop the catastrophe,” said the UN’s environmental protection chief back in 1972. Well, we’re still here. In 1982, the next head of the UN Environment Programme declared that the world had just 18 years before “an environmental catastrophe as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.” Thirty-nine years later and we haven’t seen anything approaching this end-of-time prophesy. And so on. Repeated predictions of imminent apocalypse that do not come to pass will not convince countries to sacrifice their own national self-interest in economic growth for the so-called “common good.”

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Globalist wealth redistribution schemes

Instead of going around in circles with more conferences, empty commitments, and enormous, no-strings attached payouts to developing countries, it is time to focus on real technological solutions to deal with global warming. These solutions would go beyond the development of clean energy technologies to cost effectively replace fossil fuels, as important as that is. Rather than concentrating on the promotion of globalist wealth redistribution schemes, the UN could help galvanize multilateral public and private investments to accelerate the development of carbon capture and sequestration technologies. These technologies can help to greatly reduce CO2 emissions from coal-and gas-fired power plants and large industrial sources while countries gradually transition from reliance on fossil fuels without damaging their economies in the process. The UN could do the same for even more ambitious technological development projects to remove carbon dioxide already emitted into the atmosphere out of the air. Scare tactics and endless UN-sponsored talk fests won’t solve anything. But UN bureaucrats, blowhards like John Kerry, and anti-capitalist non-governmental organizations have too much to lose if real problem solvers turn to multilateral cooperative investments in the right technologies to pragmatically address the actual dangers posed by climate change.