Drill, Baby, Drill

By May Thawtar @Adobe Stock

A Jamboree for Billionaires

After decades of desperate cries of crisis and alarm from thousands of activists, wouldn’t you wonder, as Francis Menton does regarding the global warming scare, why catastrophe hasn’t struck well before now? And this before weighing the trillions of dollars in government funds invested.

Interesting how somehow trillions of dollars of government funding can have a magical effect of motivating those feasting on the bounty to keep the scare going.

The Blissfully Uninformed

The Manhattan Contrarian has a surprise for those not in the know. It wasn’t just that Donald Trump decisively won the presidential election on the promise of “drill, Baby, drill” or that Kamala, attempting to influence swing states, abandoned her promises to ban fracking and internal combustion cars. There is something even bigger going on. Are you aware that the big annual UN climate conferences just got underway in Baku, Azerbaijan?

No, I was not aware of the conference taking place in Azerbaijan. And that is among the reasons I follow the Manhattan Contrarian. There is always something to learn.

Francis Menton remembers these big events starting in 1992,  following the UN’s so-called Framework Convention on Climate Change.

They have occurred almost every year since, going by the name of “Conferences of Parties” or “COP.” COP 21, held in Paris in 2015, was the meeting when the Paris Climate Agreement was signed, supposedly committing all the nations of the world to emissions reductions and energy transformations. 

Flooding the Zone with Coverage 

The press was giddy when US President Barack Obama and other dignitaries showed up and reported myriad stories. Six years later, in Glasgow, Scotland, no fewer than 120 heads of state attended, including UN secretary-general António Guterres, United States President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, French president Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Angela Merkel, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, Indonesian president Joko Widodo, Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida, Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, and Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven.

What a Difference a Year Makes

This year’s conference largely has been overshadowed by the US presidential election.

Climate activist David Wallace-Wells bemoans the newly elected administration:

[Donald Trump’s] election is . . . a confirmation of an international turn in the politics of warming as much as it is a sharp or distinctly American break. Yes, a global renewables boom is well underway, with worldwide investment in clean energy reaching $2 trillion this year and total solar capacity doubling since 2022. But the climate logic of that transition increasingly goes unspoken in all but the most committed corners, replaced by chin-scratching about energy politics. Governments have retreated from even their legally binding promises to decarbonize, trusting markets to deliver comparatively meager emissions reductions instead, and activists have been unable to generate meaningful public outrage at the walkback. 

Who Cares Anymore? 

Wallace-Wells included in his list those who failed to show, but Mr. Menton fills in the blanks … “Just about everyone important,” he notes.

When the COP29 climate conference comes to an end next week, it will have concluded without an appearance by President Biden. . . . The president-elect isn’t attending, either. Neither is Vice President Kamala Harris. . . . Hardly any of the world’s most powerful leaders will be making an appearance in Baku, Azerbaijan . . . . President Xi Jinping of China won’t be there, and neither will Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. President Emmanuel Macron of France, . . . is skipping the conference, too. Also missing will be Lula da Silva, who is the leader not just of Brazil but also of the Group of 20. As recently as the Glasgow summit in 2021, the annual climate confab was a who’s who of global power politics. These days, it’s more about who’s missing.

Still 50,000 attendees is nothing to sneeze at, but it is  light compared to the 70,000 or so participants last year. And the goal of the attendees? An attempt to reach a new “climate finance agreement.“ Otherwise, clarifies Mr. Menton, “known as the effort by the governing cliques in developing countries to shake down the rich countries for sums in excess of $100 billion per year, using the cover of ‘climate’ to fill their Swiss bank accounts.”

From Reuters, yesterday:

The main task for nearly 200 countries at the U.N.’s COP29 climate summit is to broker a deal that ensures up to trillions of dollars in financing for climate projects worldwide. . . . Wealthy countries pledged in 2009 to contribute $100 billion a year to help developing nations cope with the costs of a transition to clean energy and adapting to the conditions of a warming world. . . . Those payments began in 2020 but were only fully met in 2022. The $100 billion pledge expires this year. Countries are negotiating a higher target for payments starting next year. . . .

President Joe Biden Sends $$ Billions

Yes, outgoing President Biden fell for this scam and sent off billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funds. Put this at the top of President Trump’s agenda: zero this one out.

Once it becomes clear that the U.S. isn’t going along anymore, maybe we can even save the annual expense of sending thousands of people off to these remote corners of the world.