. . . but we must not take our eye off of further developments now that the COP27 summit in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt has concluded. It did so without issuing a grand statement of what was accomplished and what the plan is going forward, and this reparations plan for less-developed countries is nothing but vague wording at this point, but attendees will continue to work on it.
China and Saudi Arabia were the parties that gummed up the works for a big statement:
The world has failed to reach an agreement to phase out fossil fuels after marathon UN climate talks were “stonewalled” by a number of oil-producing nations.
Negotiators from nearly 200 countries at the COP27 UN climate summit in Egypt took the historic step of agreeing to set up a “loss and damage” fund meant to help vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters and agreed the globe needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by 2030.
The agreement also reaffirmed the goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
However, an attempt to address the biggest source of the planet warming emissions that are causing the climate crisis ended in a fiasco after a number of nations, including China and Saudi Arabia, blocked a key proposal to phase out all fossil fuels, not just coal.
Neither of those two nations is my cup of tea generally speaking, but they do deserve our gratitude for slamming on the brakes with regard to abandoning normal-people energy forms.
And with regard to this loss-and-damages scheme, by which advanced countries would pay lesser-developed ones for - for what? bringing more safety, comfort and convenience to their societies? - there are no details in place yet to guide the overlords in how to do it:
Details on how the fund would operate remain murky. The text leaves a lot of questions on when it will be finalized and become operational, and how exactly it would be funded. The text also mentions a transitional committee that will help nail down those details, but doesn’t set specific future deadlines.
Gerard Baker at the Wall Street Journal extirpates the faux nobility of this whole undertaking. I'm going to excerpt generously, because it's so well articulated and so important:
Before they left their air-conditioned hotels and hopped into limousines to take them to their jets for the long journey home, these courageous fighters for carbon neutrality agreed to create a fund on the principle that rich countries like the U.S. should compensate poor countries for the damage caused by climate change. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican, long opposed this idea, justifiably fearing that it represents an open-ended scheme to funnel American taxpayers’ money to beacons of planet-saving good governance like South Africa, Pakistanand Indonesia.
The idea is that developing countries are being literally inundated with the costs of climate change in the form of rising sea levels, extreme weather and the other horsemen of the meteorological apocalypse. Developed countries are responsible for most of the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere and therefore should be made to pay for the costs of climate damage to small developing countries that have contributed little to the planet’s warming.
There are several problems with this.
We are all moved by scenes from the disasters the climate lobby cites to justify its plans, such as those from Pakistan’s devastating floods this summer. Simple human compassion compels those of us more fortunate to want to assist.
But aside from the big question of how many of these weather events are actually caused by man-made climate change, we know that the human cost of these disasters is much smaller today than it was before we were alarmed by the climate alarmists.
In his brilliant dissection of the climate extremists’ case in his book, “Unsettled,” Steven Koonin, who served as undersecretary for science in President Obama’s Energy Department, notes that climate-related deaths have plummeted in the era of global warming. Citing data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, he notes that “weather-related death rates fell dramatically during the past one hundred years” and are “about 80 times less frequent today than they were a century ago.”
Why? Almost entirely thanks to improvements in infrastructure and mitigation enabled by rapid industrialization.
A second problem is that under the agreed plan, China and India, as “developing countries,” haven’t agreed to contribute to the fund but have made only vague commitments to assist. So countries whose emissions have grown rapidly in the past decade will be exempt while the U.S., whose emissions have been declining, are on the hook.
Above all, the idea that the least developed countries in the world have received only the cost of industrialization and not the many benefits is ahistorical. The sophists at the United Nations insist that the new fund is a model of “climate justice,” but it sounds an awful lot like a vehicle for the “reparations” climate extremists have long demanded from the countries that were first to industrialize for supposedly having inflicted their environmental costs on the world.
If we in the West are to pay damages for the Industrial Revolution, shouldn’t we also consider the extraordinary wealth that process has helped spread around the world?
Maybe Pakistan could have become a thriving economy with little industrial activity, producing carbon-free economic growth and prosperity for its people. But the nation’s gross domestic product per capita has roughly tripled in the past 50 years, and I’d wager that a significant amount of that growth has been the result of innovations such as the combustion engine, air conditioning, the microchip, the personal computer and all the other wonders of the developed world.
And while the CNN story linked and excerpted above gives the impression that African nations are on board with this scheme, let us recall some recent evidence to the contrary we discussed here at LITD:
African countries will use the COP27 climate talks in Egypt next month to advocate for a common energy position that sees fossil fuels as necessary to expanding economies and electricity access, the continent's top energy official said on Tuesday.
The African position, criticised by environmental groups, could overshadow global climate talks in Sharm El-Sheikh seeking to build on the previous Glasgow summit and make good on financing targets by rich nations to poorer countries that have fallen far short of the promised $100 billion a year by 2020.
"We recognize that some countries may have to use fossil fuels for now, but it’s not one solution fits all," said Amani Abou-Zeid, the African Union (AU) Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy."It is not time to exclude, but it is the time to tailor solutions for a context," she told Reuters on the sidelines of an oil and gas conference.
An AU technical study attended by 45 African countries on 16 June seen by Reuters outlined that oil and coal will play a "crucial role" in expanding modern energy access over the short to medium term.
In tandem with renewable sources, Africa also sees key roles for natural gas and nuclear energy.
"Our ambition is to have fast-growing economies, competitive and industrialised," Abou-Zeid said.
As do these folks:
"Africa has woken up and we are going to exploit our natural resources," said Uganda Energy Minister Ruth Nankabirwa Ssentamu.
"There is no way you can develop any economy, any society without energy," said Omar Farouk Ibrahim, secretary general of the African Petroleum Producers' Organisation.
"We are talking about coal, we are talking oil and we are talking about gas. At this time we are not discriminating," he told Reuters.
N. J. Ayuk, Executive Chairman at the African Energy Chamber, is forthright in his view: “Africans don’t hate Oil and Gas companies. We love Oil and today we love gas even more because we know gas will give us a chance to industrialize. No country has ever been developed by fancy wind and green hydrogen. Africans see Oil and Gas as a path to success and a solution to their problems. The demonization of oil and gas companies will not work.”
That's visionary leadership right there.
So while there's some comfort in knowing that COP27's outcomes remain vague and grandiose at present, let us not forget that the overlords, having gone back home, will stay in touch and strive to turn it all into a tangible blueprint for tyranny and decline.
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