THE FOLLOWING COMMENT IS CRAP BUT WE NEED TO KNOW WHAT THE RICH PEOPLE REALLY THINK..

THE MISES INSTITUTE IS MYOPIC... IT ONLY WANTS TO SEE THE FREEDOM TO TRADE WHATEVER FOR THE PRICE OF WHATEVER, WITHOUT ACCOUNTING FOR MUCH DAMAGE TO THE ENVIRONMENT.... THIS IS WHY THE MISES INSTITUTE, still living in the 19th century, POOPOOES THE CONCEPT OF "CLIMATE CHANGE" WHILE, LIKE COPOUT28, IT AVOIDS UNDERSTANDING THE LURKING DAMAGE OF TEMPERATURE INCREASE ON HUMAN CIVILISATION A) BECAUSE IT'S NOT HAPPENING, B) BECAUSE IT'S NEGLIGEABLE, C) BECAUSE IT AFFECTS THE POOR MORE BECAUSE THE POOR HAVE NOT DISCOVERED THE FREEDOM OF COMMERCE TO BECOME RICH, and D) BECAUSE THERE IS STILL LOTSA MONEY TO BE MADE FROM SELLING FOSSIL FUELS.

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BY Michael Rectenwald

A hodgepodge of activism and legalistic negotiations characterized the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (UNFCCC COP28), which concluded Wednesday, December 13, 2023. The resulting agreement, dubbed the “UAE Consensus,” includes the first-ever UN statement in the 27-year history of climate summits to call for the “transition away” from fossil fuels. In fact, it marks the first climate agreement to specifically refer to “fossil fuels” as the culprit behind climate change. Nevertheless, since the language in the final agreement calls for the “phase down” rather than the “phase out” of fossil fuels, the more zealous contingents in attendance typically remained less than satisfied.

In ambiguous bureaucratese based on the speculative and largely unfalsifiable (unscientific) claims of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the agreement assesses the progress made on mitigation efforts to date. It then calls for additional measures deemed necessary (and sufficient) for capping the global temperature increase at 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial levels, or 2 degrees C at most.

The UAE Consensus has been hailed by some delegates, including U.S. “climate czar” John Kerry, as a historic landmark in climate change mitigation efforts, aiming as it does to reach “net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.” Still others, including Anne Rasmussen, the lead negotiator for Samoa, suggested that the agreement was a failure, especially for island nations. Such ocean-bound land masses will supposedly disappear under water in the perpetually not-so-distant future. 

While the 200 member states are not legally bound to execute anything treated in the agreement, delegates and climatologists have suggested that it will force the hands of nations, oil companies, industrial producers, and investors to divest from fossil fuels, accelerating a sea change toward renewable energy and climate change mitigation. Likewise, the terms, when pursued, will have a devastating impact on the world economy.

The climate summit was partially overshadowed by the war in the Middle East, as several world leaders used their speeches to address the crisis in Gaza and met behind the scenes to discuss the unfolding catastrophe. While the war was not an official topic, it did impact the convention directly. Israeli President Isaac Herzog spent one morning meeting with fellow leaders, telling them about “how Hamas blatantly violates the ceasefire agreements,” after which he skipped his scheduled speech.

Meanwhile, the Iranian delegation walked out of the meeting entirely, pointing to the “political, biased and irrelevant presence of the fake Zionist regime.” In a speech during a panel entitled “Acting on military spending and military emissions,” Deborah Burton, founder of the social justice cooperative Tipping Point North South, argued that the “emissions story is wrapped up inside another story, and that is runaway military spending.” Meanwhile, activists outside the convention hall linked the climate crisis to calls for a ceasefire.

As I pointed out in my previous installment on COP28, the climate summit was chaired by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, the UAE Special Envoy for Climate Change, and the chief executive officer of Adnoc, the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Doubts preceded and continued throughout the talks as to whether Al Jaber, an oil man tied to fossil fuel development, would deliver the desired results. In the end, most agreed that the goals were attained, although the results exist only on paper and in the minds of participants. It is up to the parties to the agreement to force the terms down our throats against our wills.

But what else could have been the outcome of such a welter of ridiculous and deleterious ideas and aspirations? Everything evil under the sun is deemed causally connected to climate change, including war and genocide, terrorism, poverty, inequality, inclusion, the condition of women, and population growth.

“Climate change” functions as a catch-all phrase for sequestering the world’s problems under a single, global crisis rubric. As such, it is believed, a global governance system must be put in place to address it. And the means used are always the ends attained.

https://mises.org/wire/cop28-climate-catastrophism-wins-world-loses

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Up to 100,000 people — most of whom derive their professional status and income from climate-related politics, advocacy and business — flew into Dubai for the COP28 annual global climate policy-making event, the Conference of the Parties under the United Nations’ climate convention. And the result?

An unmitigated disaster. Indigenous people, frontline communities and climate justice groups rebuked the deal as unfair, inequitable and “business as usual”. At the final session, a weak and incoherent compromise resolution between petrostates and smaller states and advocates — which did not call for the phase-out of fossil fuels — was accepted without dissent and greeted with a self-congratulatory standing ovation, even as Pacific and small island delegates were barred by security from entering the room.

Too many glib responses were variations on the “moving in the right direction, but more needs to be done” mash, with “flawed but still transformative” one classic example. Within two days the COP28 president, who also heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil company, announced the United Arab Emirates would keep up its record investment in new oil production.

Prof. Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester described the scene as “the infinite loop of the COP GroundHog days”. It seemed a form of Stockholm Syndrome again took hold with cooped-up delegates — for decades held hostage to the denial-and-delay tactics of the fossil-fuel producers and the threat of veto from their captured governments — cheering an outcome which will push societies everywhere closer to civilisational breakdown.

Such cognitive dissonance is the COPs’ cultural norm. It is all about a performative outcome regardless of efficacy. Despite dozens of such “successes” over three decades, global emissions are still rising. The politics is about incrementalism, compromises, deals and “pragmatic realism” which assume that one can negotiate with the laws of nature and mollify an existential risk by such behaviour. Avoiding climate risk, the supposed raison d’etre for COPs, is neither discussed nor understood by the key negotiators.

Many people with a career in climate policy will celebrate any outcome, because to do otherwise would be to admit to the COPs’ systemic failure, and risk their own professional future.

But many “outside the tent” in Dubai — the scientists, the most vulnerable states, the young activists and the civil society organisations with some spine — did not celebrate; they wept for humanity’s future. Kevin Anderson summed it up: “No doubt there will be lots of cheer and back-slapping… but the physics will not care.”

There were two big items on the agenda: reducing emissions, mainly from fossil fuels, to zero; and finance. On the first, national delegates agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels,” but words about the “phaseout” of oil, coal and gas advocated by civil society and 130 out of 198 participating countries did not appear.

Even then, there were get-out-of-jail cards aplenty. The big one was the acceleration of carbon capture and storage, which the fossil fuel industry claims will allow the production of oil, gas and coal indefinitely, except that the technology does not work at scale. Then there is the acceptance of “efficient” fossil fuel subsidies, and language around the need for an “orderly” transition which is now impossible largely as a result of fossil fuel industry denialism over many decades.

Climate finance is essential, especially for the developing and most vulnerable nations, through the Green Climate Fund, and a Loss and Damage fund which recognises the historic responsibility of high-polluting nations for the damage inflicted on those who have contributed least to the problem but have disproportionately borne the impacts. Small island states characterised the national commitments to these funds to date as trivial and disappointing, and Australia’s refusal to support a funding facility for loss and damage as “a deep betrayal and abdication of its responsibilities to its Pacific neighbours”.

From scientists, there was anger and condemnation. They know that after 28 COPs the level of greenhouse gases and coal use both hit a record high in 2023. And they have documented the growing emissions gap and production gapbetween promises and actions by nations and the plans of the largest fossil fuel producers to keep on expanding production, which the COP has done nothing to practically prevent.

Michael Mann, of University of Pennsylvania said  that “the lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels was devastating”. Mike Berners-Lee of Lancaster University called COP28 “the fossil fuel industry’s dream outcome, because it looks like progress, but it isn’t”. Martin Siegert of the University of Exeter said that not making a clear declaration to stop fossil fuel burning “is a tragedy for the planet and our future. The world is heating faster and more powerfully than the COP response to deal with it.” And from Dr Friederike Otto of Imperial College London: “With every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions more people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die.”

The scientists and the policymakers appear to live in parallel worlds, and in a sense they do. The COPs, claiming to be informed by IPCC reports, disproportionately rely on emission-reduction scenarios generated by Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) which incorporate energy, economy and a reticent analysis of climate impacts. IAMs reflect more the social, technological and economic worldviews of the modellers than they do the physical realities. They have now been convincingly debunked in recent reports and analysis.

Such models produce absurd propositions about “net zero 2050”  being compatible with the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5–2°C, which have become the bread-and-butter of COPs. In fact, this year will nudge 1.5°C (with warming of 1.46°C to end November), and next year will very likely be hotter. Former NASA climate chief James Hansen warnsthat “global warming of 2°C will be reached by the late 2030s” due to accelerated warming:

“The first six months of the current El Nino are 0.39°C warmer than the same six months of the 2015-16 El Nino, a global warming rate of 0.49°C/decade, consistent with expectation of a large acceleration of global warming. We expect the 12-month mean temperature by May 2024 to eliminate any doubt about global warming acceleration. Subsequent decline of the 12-month temperature below 1.5°C will likely be limited, confirming that the 1.5°C limit has already been passed.”

This should have been the core concern of the COP28 outcome, but it was never mentioned. Neither did increasingly dire warnings that big tipping points are already in play. Faster than forecast, climate impacts are triggering a cascade of tipping points in the Earth system. And a blind eye was turned to warnings from Stockholm University’s David Armstrong McKay and his colleagues that even global warming of 1°C risks triggering some tipping points.

Privately, eminent scientists worry that we are heading towards a truly existential 4°C when the now-emerging high-end risks are accounted for. “Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic … yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe,” wrote the eminent Australian climate scientist Will Steffen and colleagues in August 2022.

Nothing at this COP has substantially moved us away from that trajectory. In fact, by fostering the delusion that “orderly” solutions remain possible, as opposed to the necessity of a disruptive emergency-scale mobilisation, it has made matters worse.

https://johnmenadue.com/cop28-a-tragedy-for-the-planet-as-stockholm-syndrome-took-hold/

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It was always going to be a balancing act keeping the credibility of the global environmental talk shop COP28 in check while holding it in a country where they are producing fossil fuels like it is going out of fashion. It might not have been a wise choice of the UAE’s president Mohamed Bin Zaid to give the top job of presiding over the event to the oil minister and the boss of the national oil company, but it was equally unwise for Sultan al-Jabar to have used the event as a way of promoting the UAE and its oil production to other countries. Something about that smacks of shooting yourself in the foot and perhaps Mr Al Jabar’s denials and feigned innocence at the opening day press conference just made the whole fiasco even more of a farce than it already was.

The UAE tycoon just lowered himself into the vat of sulphuric acid when – in media terms – he couldn’t pull off the ultimate stunt that all politicians dream of but very few actually achieve: to lie to the press and get away with it.

Lazy journalists might have just left it at that. But then they started to look more closely at Mr Al Jaber who had paid Lynton Cosby, the infamous Australian media and political consultant to handle all the PR for the event – and decided that the Emirate minister’s unchecked, feral speaking needed a closer look. It didn’t take much digging to find even more controversy days earlier when he more or less mocked the science behind climate change in defence of fossil fuels, leading many to ask how did the UAE get this gig in the first place and couldn’t its elite have chosen someone with more media elan?

The failure of the event can really be determined by how media were mismanaged from the beginning when the early signs were there back in January when the Guardian launched its first attack against Mr Al Jaber questioning his credentials. That might have been a good indicator that Jaber and his team needed to listen and learn with a serious of crisis management media training sessions which Mr Cosby should have set up and wheeled in the grey haired retired journalists in London to help with the dummy interviews. But presumably, being someone who has enjoyed silencing the press – the UAE has probably one of the most servile press in the world, often with media outlets running front page stories about the elite opening a shopping mall or just repeating one of their tweets – it was little surprise that Jaber believed that the world’s press wouldn’t turn against him. The old story that when you mess up media, you become the story, became the story. Jaber, within a matter of hours, became the focus of attention by journalists who were the to find a good story and didn’t find one from the organised conferences and hullabaloo.

The UAE needs to think much more about international media if it is going to court the attention of the world. Its elite need to wake up and realise that international press whose journalists fly in and leave a few days later are working from a very different hymn sheet than the local expats who work for The National, which despite huffing and puffing and blowing hot for Jaber right from the beginning made no impact whatsoever on global opinion which has written off the event as an unprecedented PR disaster. Indeed, it was Yanis Varoufakis, a media darling and former Greek Finance minister who put it so succinctly on Twitter:

“UN Chief denounces COP28’s President. What did they expect? Appointing Sultan al-Jaber, the head of UAE’s oil company, as Head of COP28 was like appointing the leader of a pack of wolves to preside over a conference on making the world vegan”. The UAE doesn’t have a satire magazine like Private Eye so we won’t pity those who were robbed of the opportunity to lay on the irony hard and thick. But the lessons are there for the royals of the UAE who must be dumbfounded by the calamity of the event and just how much the whole event has become an international laughing stock. Perhaps think about media more next time?

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/12/17/laughing-stock-cop28-how-uae-event-became-farce/

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a “turning point” in the history of COP negotiations. What is he smoking? 

Way back at the first COP in 1995 that might just have held true. But 28 years later this agreement – riddled with qualifications – does little more than provide permission for an unbridled further expansion of fossil fuel production. . As the International Energy Agency (IEA) points out, expenditure on new oil and gas developments will be $528 billion in 2023 and reach an estimated $4.6 trillion by 2031.  That’s what the “just, orderly and equitable” transition away from fossil fuels is looking like.

Do any other of the list of ‘achievements’ of COP28 rate a turning point accolade? The fossil fuel industry continues to pretend that carbon credits and carbon capture and storage (CCS) will clean up their dirty work. Both devices, however, in their current state are utterly unfit for purpose. That is reflected in the COP 28’s agreement to seek to install a more robust verification scheme for carbon credits of which, it is generally accepted, 80% are not worth the paper they are written on.  That is an inevitable consequence of allowing carbon credits to be the chief domain of the private sector and a gathering point for cowboy capitalists.  A turning point would have been to ban their use – and usefully place far greater onus on emitters to directly reduce emissions – until (if ever) they can be properly validated.

The final text calls on nations to accelerate CCS “particularly in hard-to-abate sectors”. Such an encouragement is dangerous at a time when CCS remains an unproven device and when the carbon industry are pretending it will clean up gas. We need to remind ourselves that the only two at scale CCS developments – in Australia and Canada – have been uneconomic and ineffective, which is to say they have been way over cost and have way underperformed. A turning point would have been to likewise sideline CCS from the IPCC’s pathways to carbon neutrality until proven.

Yet another possible turning point has been the agreement to create a Loss and Damage Fund. In its creation there was furious resistance to calling it a reparations fund. Which is to say that none of the Western wealthy club wanted to admit they have been largely responsible for the current rise in global temperatures at a time when the developing world have yet to claim their fair share of wealth creating emissions. Of course the Loss and Damage fund is indeed compensation for the massive damage climate change is already inflicting on developing world countries which just happen to also be the most vulnerable.  Australia – as one of the world’s largest per capita emitters of carbon emissions and one of the world’s largest exporters of carbon fuels (new projects are estimated to deliver 1.7 billion tonnes of C02 annually) – has stumped up just $5million to the fund.  For those countries about to be submerged by the Pacific Ocean we have allocated $150 million, which is a roundabout parsimonious way to pay for our oversize role in heating up the planet.

A final turning point from COP28 might just be the announced increase in funding to the Green Fund – set up to provide concessional finance to developing countries for low-emission and climate-resilient projects and programs. An additional US$3.5 billion means total pledges have reached US$12.8 billion. But the UN’s 2022 Adaptation Gap Report indicates international adaptation finance flows to developing countries are five to ten times below estimated needs and will need to reach over US$300 billion per year by 2030. For Australian no turning point here either, notwithstanding our decision to rejoin the Green Fund inexplicably vacated under PM Morrison. Our paltry $50 million contribution is witness to that.  So rather than a turning point here we have a stark reminder just how far the Western and oil rich Middle Eastern worlds are from paying up for the damage we are inflicting on the developing world. A rude comparison lays bare our abject miserly financial irresponsibility. As a percentage of global GDP, military expenditure accounts for 2.4%. Total climate financial flows from developed to developing countries account for just 0.01%.

In sum COP28 has been yet another repetition of governments failing to take the sort of new substantial measures to directly reduce emissions which are necessary to keep global warming to 1.5 – 2.0 degrees. Rather, governments are free riding on the glow of market-driven technological change. There is no change to the long standing fact that the agenda and outcomes for COPs has always and still is being largely shaped by the fossil fuel industry. Which is to say that at their insistence (and with governments’ acquiescence) the IPCC’s pathways remain fatally flawed by their reliance on CCS and carbon credits. If there is a turning point then, it is that this repetition of governments’ abject failure to act is sealing the globe into climate change Armageddon.

https://johnmenadue.com/abject-failure-cop28-is-sealing-the-globe-into-climate-armageddon/

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SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/4446

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