Baku Climate Shysters
Do as we say, not as we do: Sickening hypocrisy of the climate technocrats
Dr Shane Fudge The Conservative Woman November 19, 2024
As the political circus that is COP29 rolls into Baku, Azerbaijan, we witness again the blatant hypocrisy and insanity around this ludicrous attempt to purge the planet of life giving CO2. The headline in the Mail which highlights the 470 delegates from the UK who are off on this 5,000-mile round trip jolly does emphasise the more populist news angle around Net Zero i.e. incompetent and self-serving politicians.
However, an otherwise complicit media themselves often unwittingly stir up deeper, more uncomfortable truths, such as those voiced by Donald Trump’s nominee as energy secretary Chris Wright, who this week called Net Zero ‘a sinister agenda’. COP29 (Conference of the Parties) is the annual meeting of the nations signed up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (currently 129 member states). Emerging from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the aim of the UNFCCC has been to mainstream member state energy regimes in accord with the UN’s sustainability objectives.
The UNFCC became functional from 1994, with the main contributors to global carbon emissions – the US, China and Russia – notable by their absence. For around the first two decades, the history of the UNFCCC was characterised by relative inertia. Most governments were reluctant to concede sovereignty to the UN, particularly to something which was publicly unpopular.
There was also an awareness that dismantling proven systems which balanced energy production and consumption for intermittent, unreliable and expensive renewable technologies was economically, politically and culturally very risky. Why dismantle the very systems that had been instrumental in creating wealth, prosperity and raised standards of living for your voters?
This all began to change about ten years ago. Firstly, the Paris Accord, agreed in 2015, strengthened UN regulation over member states and made signatories more accountable to internationally agreed decarbonisation targets. Secondly, the environmental movement upped their game and influence and began to apply more pressure on governing bodies, spearheaded by their new mouthpiece Greta Thunberg.
Lastly, events from March 2020 concerning covid provided more political justification for us to change our wicked ways (while simultaneously handing over more power to ‘benevolent’ globalist organisations, who are more than willing to carry out the decisions that we are clearly incapable of making).
And so we find ourselves at the 29th COP meeting. As well as 470 delegates from the UK, the Mail points out that there are 405 equivalent bureaucrats arriving from the US, 111 from India, 437 from Italy, 325 from Germany, and 115 from France. The Mail estimates that the British delegation will accumulate 2.3million air miles, resulting in an overall carbon footprint of 338 tons of CO2. It is also reported that some of these delegates will be staying in hotel rooms priced at £800 a night where there is wine available at £1,538 a bottle. I’m sure they will stick to mineral water.
Reform MP Richard Tice has called this trip ‘the Everest of hypocrisy’. These people are flying all around the world while telling everyday folk that the UK will reduce its carbon emissions by 78 per cent by 2035. Considering the above figures, will they make any kind of contribution? Red flags on where responsibility was eventually going to be headed on the climate issue were signposted for us ahead of the Climate Change Act in 2008.
The impetus on industry and commerce via policies such as the UK and EU carbon trading schemes, the Clean Development Mechanism, and Joint Implementation (where producers would be responsible for reducing CO2 emissions at the start of the lifecycle of a product or service), became a consumption-based approach, where the government’s role would now be to co-ordinate and oversee the ongoing reduction of carbon emissions from three main sectors: energy, transport, and households. In short, it is we who will bear the responsibility of addressing climate change.
Not only this, it will no longer be a choice. The techno-political class have already decided what will happen and how it will happen. Morally and ethically, the political narrative around climate change has interesting parallels with the activities of politicians and other decision-makers which took place during the pandemic. Events such as the annual COP meetings arguably constitute another ‘collective policy solution’ similar to the events subsequent to March 2020, where only some seemed to feel morally obliged to abide by their own rules.
It was clear that others did not feel it necessary to set an example for how others of lower status than they, or perhaps lower intelligence, were expected to live. Dominic Cummings and Neil Ferguson were both out gallivanting under their own lockdown restrictions and recommendations, and the Partygate shenanigans at No 10 tell their own story.
The last four years have surely offered real evidence that mainstream politics is now devoid of any sense of intelligent self-reflection or of moral obligation, and very little motivation ‘to do the right thing’. These people clearly exist above us mere mortals and hold a sense of entitlement which reflects this.
Thomas Sowell summed such observations up beautifully in his excellent book The Vision of the Anointed (1995).Sowell made the argument that contemporary politics is carried out by a self-serving, self-referential class of groups, organisations and individuals based on primarily upon ideological assumptions and pre-conceived agendas that are ‘impervious to real world considerations and empirical facts’.
He calls the political class ‘Teflon prophets’ – people who eagerly predict certain economic, environmental and social problems which will occur in the absence of government intervention. Sowell argues that this political class seal themselves off from opposition and counter narratives which challenge political orthodoxy. There are plenty of scientists, for instance, who reject or contest climate change science as an overall rationale for government environmental policy, yet dissenters are cancelled or dismissed as ‘deniers’ or even ‘right-wing terrorists’. Follow the (closed down) science.
The looming realities of Net Zero suggest that any effective cost-benefit analysis – particularly social cost – has been skewed in the favour of ideological dogma. Therefore, this madness will proceed through ongoing impoverishment, diminished living standards, and severely curtailed mobilisation – enforced through government legislation. But only for us, you understand. The political class, alongside their corporate and technocratic allies, will not be expected to take any responsibility in this in relation to their own lives.
Al Goracle fears for his $$$$$$