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https://peakoil.com/publicpolicy/climate-crackup-why-the-cop27-summit-failed

Climate Crackup: Why the COP27 Summit Failed

Just before he left for the United Nations COP27 climate conference in Egypt, President Joe Biden tweeted: “The global leaders of the COP27 must reach out and take the future in our hands to make the world we wish to see and that we know we need.” This reminded me of one of my favorite spy movies, Our Man Flint. In the movie, the enemy is not a rival power like the Soviets or Red China or an evil criminal organization like Specter or THRUSH. It is an idealistic group of scientists who can control the weather. Derek Flint is sent to eliminate this threat. When confronted, the scientists explain they intend to coerce the nations of the world to disarm and pursue peaceful endeavors under their benevolent direction. They invite Flint to join them, with their leader declaring that “ours would be a perfect world!” Flint refuses, “because it’s your idea of perfection, gentlemen—not mine!”

It is because there is no universally shared vision of the world that Biden’s words fell on deaf ears. COP27 failed, as have the previous twenty-six conferences to place imagined climate control above tangible national interests.

Emerging nations pushed back against continually citing the goal of preventing global warming from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels. “1.5 is a substantive issue,” Wael Aboulmagd, a senior Egyptian negotiator, said, adding that China was not the only country that had raised questions about the target. This pushback challenged the very foundation of the UN climate effort, which claims “that only a fraction of proven fossil fuel reserves can be burned if we are to keep temperature rise to 1.5°C.” Most of the world finds this goal unacceptable. A compromise adopted in 2015 raised the formal target to 2 degrees Celsius while keeping 1.5 degrees Celsius as the ideal. Many governments want this reference to an ideal of 1.5 degrees Celsius ended.

The target for net zero—the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions to as close to zero as possible, with any continued emissions being reabsorbed by carbon “offsets”—is now 2050. However, each country is to pursue this goal in its own way. For instance, India says it will not reach net zero until 2070. Policy goals set generations into the future lack credibility.

If the UN’s statement that “fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, are by far the largest contributor to global climate change” is true, then replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy should be the top priority. But it wasn’t made COP27’s top priority, for the obvious reason that it is impossible to accomplish this at a bearable cost. And the green activist demand that fossil fuels simply be eliminated regardless of what replacements are available would impose a dramatic drop in the standard of living of billions of people. Indeed, Europeans will discover the discomfort of an energy shortage this winter. National leaders know this is not an approach their people will tolerate.

Last year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projected that while renewable energy sources will grow rapidly, they will be used primarily to increase total global energy output, not to replace existing sources. “By 2050, global energy use in the Reference case increases nearly 50% compared with 2020—mostly a result of non-OECD economic growth and population, particularly in Asia. In the Reference case, global emissions rise throughout the projection period, although slowed by regional policies, renewable growth, and increasing energy efficiency.” This means the hope that emissions would peak in 2025 (or 2030) has been dashed.

The driving ambition of the developing world is to develop, which means generating more energy by all available means, including oil, the use of which is expected to continue to grow through 2050. In October of this year, the EIA issued a new projection for nuclear power, a relatively clean energy source the greens are loath to talk about. The agency predicted a doubling of nuclear power generation worldwide by 2050, with the rethinking of security concerns in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian War being one of the drivers.

Coal, which generates one-third of the world’s electricity, has been the main target for cuts. At COP26, 200 countries signed a pledge to “phase down” (but not eliminate) coal use. Yet a global record for the use of coal was set last year. New coal-fired power plants are under construction around the world because they meet the practical requirements of being reliable, affordable, and secure. Half of the world’s new coal plants are being built in China, even though Beijing’s fourteenth five-year plan claims coal will be “demoted” as a power source in coming decades. China claims that by 2025, 20 percent of its energy will come from renewables. Beijing is rapidly expanding its use of solar power and electric vehicles, but the driving force seems to be security rather than fear of climate change, which it has never taken seriously. As tensions rise in the Indo-Pacific, China is well aware of its vulnerability to sanctions or a blockade of oil and gas imports during a conflict. Coal also provides a security blanket, as China has the world’s fourth-largest proven coal reserves. But other Asian countries, notably India, Indonesia, and South Korea, are still building substantial coal plants as well.

Attempts at COP27 and previous UN meetings to add other fossil fuels to the coal “phase down” failed. Indeed, for the first time, oil and gas companies were invited to participate in the conference. In his speech at COP27, Biden never uttered the words “fossil fuels,” “coal,” or “oil,” though he calls for ending their use when addressing American audiences. Biden knew his international audience, so he repeatedly used the term “diversified energy” in recognition that countries will continue to make policy choices based on practical matters of reliability, affordability, and security, not fear of climate change, and will thus continue to use coal and oil along with natural gas, nuclear, solar, and wind.

The discussion has evolved from stopping climate change to adapting to it. Adaptation—targeting specific incidents of climate-related distress, if and when they appear—is a much more practical approach than trying to radically transform entire societies in ways contrary to popular desires. Since 2016, there has been a push to incorporate climate “resilience” into the estimated $90 trillion in infrastructure investments needed worldwide, particularly in developing countries, over the next fifteen years. As the UN puts it, “if all of this sounds expensive, it is—but the important thing to remember is that we already know a lot about how to adapt. More is being learned every day.” The argument for including climate as a design element in infrastructure projects is based on the same logic as any investment and will be evaluated on its merits. A call for climate features to be required in major projects was rejected at COP.

The 2015 Paris Agreement, signed at COP21, called for $100 billion a year to be raised to aid developing countries, half of which would be used for adaptation. These funds have not materialized, so the attempt to double this commitment lacks credibility, as does the call for another $300 billion to be raised annually for adaptation. Yet the real battle at COP27 was over how to get more money flowing from developed economies to developing economies to cover “loss and damage” from fires, floods, and other natural disasters allegedly spawned by climate change. The logic is that if human action is aggravating climate change, those countries that have been most active in building the modern world are liable for any damage suffered by the rest. This is just the old principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” which means all burdens, restrictions, and costs are to fall on the developed countries, while the rest remain free in their “right to develop.”

The original offer from the European Union to provide some aid to “the most vulnerable” countries set off a clamor for everybody to be able to make claims. The United States had opposed such a fund precisely for this reason, but it shifted in favor of it as the issue took the conference into overtime on November 19. However, it was not determined who would provide the money, who would administer it, and which countries and kinds of damage would be eligible. Instead, these questions would be topics for COP28. Still, this empty gesture was hailed as the greatest accomplishment of COP27, perhaps the greatest since the Paris Agreement! No wonder the meeting was quickly called a failure for advancing “climate ambitions,” with national ambitions holding sway instead.

Comment to article:

" Yes, yes, Russia’s losing the war, dying, etc. Ukraine is winning, winning, winning.  Just ask Zelensky or the Anglophone puppet media.  The oil “price cap” will somehow work and bring Russland to its knees.

Meanwhile, in Realityland, Germany is on the verge of full collapse due to the fact that the U.S. has prohibited Deutschland from importing Russian gas (and orchestrated the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines through the UK), and even Britannia-Rule-the-Waves, too, is slowly sinking beneath the economic waves.  And all of western Europe can expect another millions-strong wave of destitute Ukrainian refugees.  Thank you, USA.

At the same time, European leaders, in the grip of mass formation psychosis, refuse to reject their American lord and master.  After all, what would they do without all of the bribes and threats from superduperland with its Uniparty of Republicrats?  Better to let their own countries die, as the World Economic Forum wants them to.  Those leaders themselves, enormously enriched, will escape to the indispensable nation at the last moment, and will avoid the fate to which they are subjecting their underlings. "

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/03/what-is-to-be-done-6/

What is to be Done?

Not an original title for a piece that will assert we are in a unique moment in world history?  No, Lenin used it to expose the cruelty and villainy of the empire that ruled Russians like a slave master.  Claiming we are in a “unique moment” is not original, either.  We Americans, with our caudal appendage, Europe, have been told time and again we are in “unique moments”, unmatched in peril, so that it’s now routine to say it of every asinine Presidential election.

I have spent a lifetime reading and listening to the best minds in journalism and reportage bemoan, attack, mourn, and decry the encyclopedia of lunacies and disasters our system has inflicted on our country, the world, and ourselves, its naive, ignorant people.

Since the Gulf War, and the rolling chain of shameful absurdities that followed—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, et.al.—in the idiotic dirty joke of the bumbling “War on Terror”, I have seen the mainstream press devoured by the Capitalist Monster to the point where all voices of integrity have been marginalized and expelled, then denounced and vilified by the diseased whores who slunk into their places.

Now, with America’s ridiculous, transparent, and contemptible falsity so obvious in every aspect of governance at home and abroad, I have seen the entire press converted into an organ of crude and ridiculous propaganda for the Capitalist War Machine that is coldly, inhumanly  dictating our demise.  The viciously dishonest and relentlessly stupid storm of juvenile horseshit disseminated by all mainstream outlets— print, tv, and internet—is an ethical crime of diabolical dimensions.  Our government, with its cadre of vacuous, degraded simpletons, men and women of no intellectual size, depth, or scope, profoundly ignorant yet arrogant in their smarmy inadequacy, is restricting and distorting knowingly all truth that conflicts with the malign intentions of the War Lobby to pursue nuclear war with Russia until they get it.  And, of course, they need a second enemy and so must tell China what it can and can’t do. Where do these moronic fuckers get the brass to try that shameless madness with Xi and his power?

And this is done while the few strong voices of courage and integrity that, against all the power of money and corruption of The Empire, continue to try to provide an educating effect through reason and evidence, are exiled and suppressed from platforms of influence.

I have long wondered at their dedication and staying power in the face of the cynical, unwarranted abuse they get, including, of course, from their supposed colleagues who, collectively, aren’t worth the powder to blow them to hell, as my Dakota Grandpa used to say.  I can only assume they are held together, in place, by the unbreakable fiber of integrity in them that they have no choice but to honor.

And yet, though those few and proud speak out against false America and denounce it where denunciation is richly warranted, I feel, even in their most blistering analyses that there is a conviction, a certainty, an honest, incontestable statement of truth, that is missing.  I had hoped to hear it expressed by those who have great credibility, and great reputations, profiles and followings, but I have been disappointed.

My list of heroes is not long.  I acknowledge them as the heirs to the great ones before: Ed Murrow, Eric Sevareid, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, Sy Hersh, David Halberstam.  I include among the present greats Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Aaron Mate, Michael Brenner, Max Blumenthal, Jeffrey St. Clair, Patrick Lawrence, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange.

All of them have done honest, deeply informed work to counter the rampant imbecility and cruelty of the American government and its stenographers, the press.  The one conclusion none has plainly stated, that all have suggested, is neither obscure nor complicated.

It is this: America can not be reformed or improved under Capitalism. Its corrupt, rotten burlesque democracy must and will be destroyed.  Not by any action of the torpid, gelded, stupid people.  It will come, and soon, by financial chaos and meltdown, or by nuclear war.

We are told that unless bold action is taken, unless we find the moral courage to act, unless we come together, get money out of politics, vote for better candidates, unless we do this, that, or the other thing, disaster will follow.  Sadly, that is all nonsense.   In fact, it makes no difference what we do: America, as a viable state, is finished.

This is intolerably painful to admit.  Every instinct of self-preservation, every human yearning for safety and justice rejects it.  All our training, our education, our immersion in bullshit propaganda screams against it but, admitted or not, it is fact, it is truth, and collapse of America’s baselessly arrogant, obscene, punishing oppression of the compliant world, already tenuous and strained, is coming.   And soon…

It is said to be easier for people to imagine the end of the world, than the end of Capitalism.  This will end soon when it will no longer be necessary to imagine either, because both will have happened.  In the same way that socio-political truth has been screened out by official deceit, environmental truth has been obscured and denied by our own and the world’s rulers.   What Capitalism has done to humans is trivial beside what it’s done to the earth and all living things.  In this, too, we are told that if we can just do this or that the world will recover and all will be well.  It won’t.   No matter what we do.  And that will almost certainly be what we have done up to now: nothing.

Humans, mostly, are large, dull children.  They have a great need to feel loved, protected, pardoned, saved.  That’s why they were given religions by elites that have always owned them.  All dogmatic religions are bullshit by definition, their fatuous fraud shown up by every advance of knowledge from Galileo to the Webb Telescope.

I, like all my kind, wish for mercy and grace, but I don’t look for it in a ludicrous infantile fantasy, or in deluded hope where there is clearly none.  Both religion and science, in the hands of priests and hustlers, have set us up for unavoidable misery and suffering, and arranged for the suicide of our species and the murder of the living world.  There is nothing you can do about this.  We have the ability to love those we hold dear, and the world we have known.  Let that be enough, for it is all you will ever have.