Another year, and another ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene. The 29th COP is meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan. It started yesterday and will last for 11 days.
My view of the previous year’s UN climate jamboree, attended by a record-breaking 86,000 delegates, was realistically downbeat (some would say cynical):
It is likely that apart from grand-sounding communiques, more breast-beating by the climate NGOs and alarmist headlines by the legacy media, nothing much of practical significance will come out of the 28th Conference of the Parties in Dubai.
But the seismic change brought on by the election of Donald “drill baby drill” Trump on Tuesday as U.S. president-elect – an avowed ‘climate denier’ and whose campaign has already promised to withdraw from the Paris Agreement a second time – must leave the West’s faithful devotees of the Church of Climate aghast. A second Trump presidency together with a Republican senate majority will bring about what finance and energy consultant Doomberg calls a “whirlwind that is about to befall the progressive environmental Left [that] will reverberate for decades”.
Pragmatists vs. Alarmists at COP28
As important as Mr. Trump’s triumphant election win is to the outlook for the globalist climate change agenda, let’s step back a bit for context.
It will come as no surprise that over the past year since COP28, large developing countries such as China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam carried on with their ambitious schedules for growing coal mining capacity and building new fossil-fueled power plants needed by their growing economies.
Just as unsurprisingly, the Biden administration and the left-of-centre European and U.K. governments zealously continued their quest for ‘Net Zero (emissions) by 2050’, the mantra that has entranced Western governments since the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Many governments in the Global South struggle to have access to affordable fossil fuels. Meanwhile, with the relentless climate alarmist propaganda going on for three decades, Western policymakers continue to demonise fossil fuels and nurture (with taxpayers’ money) their favoured green technologies, such as electric vehicles, solar and wind power, “green” hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, many of which have yet to be proven commercially viable.
With their control over leading financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Western governments veto the development and use of fossil fuels in developing countries in the name of the “climate crisis”. Carbon colonialism hypocritically denies developing countries the means to scale the energy ladder that the now-developed West has exploited to obtain their industrial prosperity and high standards of living.
Last year’s COP28 served as a crossroad when the contradictions between the ‘energy pragmatist’ and the ‘climate alarmist’ camps – roughly matching the ‘Global South’ and the ‘collective West’ – broke out into the open. Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the president of the COP28 climate summit and CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, said in an interview: “You’re asking for a phase-out of fossil fuels… Please, help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”
Al Jaber’s remarks were amplified by Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman who told Bloomberg that the world’s biggest oil exporter would not agree with Western demands to phase out fossil fuels. “Absolutely not,” he said in an interview in Riyadh. “And I assure you not a single person – I’m talking about governments – believes in that… If they believe that this is the highest moral ground issue, fantastic. Let them do that themselves. And we will see how much they can deliver.”
Enter President-elect Trump
Ah, what a difference a year – and an American presidential election – makes! Expectedly, the hyperventilating headlines of the mainstream media were out in full force within 48 hours of the election results being announced:
Bloomberg: “Trump Stranglehold Adds to Growing Doubts at Climate Talks”
Euronews: “Trump victory casts shadow over upcoming COP global climate talks”
Politico: “No leaders remain to check Trump’s climate wreckage”
MSN News: “Trump’s climate denial and green rollbacks poised to fuel warming”
BBC News: “Trump victory is a major setback for climate action, experts say”
Activist-journalists fulminating in the legacy media over what the Trump win means for the globalist climate agenda are among the less interesting aspects of this year’s UN climate fest in Baku.
The COP29 summit, in the shadow of Mr. Trump’s return as the 47th U.S. President, will be noteworthy for other, more durable reasons. When the U.S. first pulled out of the Paris Agreement with a formal notice in 2017 during President Trump’s first term, it was only three years later – as it happened, the day after the 2020 election – that the decision took effect under UN rules. Upon taking office, President Joe Biden promptly re-instituted U.S. participation in the UN agreement. This time around, it will take a year for a withdrawal to take effect under the terms of the pact once the Trump administration files its exit notice to the U.N. upon assuming office on January 20th 2025.
But more importantly than the formal details of UN bureaucratic rules, the expected second pullout by the incoming Trump administration next year from the (non-binding) Paris Agreement will happen at a time when other Western countries leading the global environmental agenda are themselves exhausted economically and politically.
Hours after the announcement of the results of the U.S. elections, the German three-party ruling coalition government collapsed after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the sacking of Finance Minister Christian Lindner over deadlocks on spending and economic reforms. The fiscal constraints brought on by years of irrational energy policies that de-industrialised and immiserated EU economies have come home to roost.
The imposition of sanctions on supplies of cheap Russian energy imports in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which boomeranged on Europe, effectively put paid to Europe’s climate leadership. Its farmers have revolted. Its working and middle classes, owing no allegiance to the luxury beliefs of Brussel bureaucrats and political elites in Berlin, Paris and London, have begun to support the populist right as a force in the European political order.
It’s all about the money
The U.N. climate summit in Baku has been dubbed the “climate finance COP” for its central goal: to agree on how much money should go each year to helping developing countries cope with “climate-related costs”. From the current climate finance commitment of $100 billion annually by wealthy nations (not achieved in most years), some negotiators hope to transfer $1 trillion a year for “climate mitigation and adaptation goals” to the developing countries.
But in the U.S., the UN’s biggest climate finance contributor, ‘Bidenomics’ and the duplicitously termed Inflation Reduction Act which promise massive subsidies for ‘green’ energy were comprehensively rejected at the ballot box last week.
Mr. Trump’s climate scepticism will once again encourage U.S. oil and gas dominance in global markets, continuing a strong theme of his first term in office. One would think that even the climate-obsessed European elites will be under no illusion about what a Trump administration would make of the U.N.’s push for transfers of vast financial resources to poor countries for what is essentially bad weather. As they might say in Main Street U.S.A., “that ain’t going to happen” on Mr. Trump’s watch.
Indeed, among Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters will likely be the host of COP29, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, who described his country’s oil and gas resources as “a gift from God”. Trump’s election victory could not have been more nicely timed to put a nail in the coffin of the globalist environmental agenda.
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes, and a member of the CO2 Coalition. Follow him at Substack and X.
Stop Press: Heather Mac Donald has written a wonderfully vituperative piece about COP29 for City Journal: “Any doubt regarding the wisdom of the next Trump administration’s likely pullout from such meetings should be dispelled by the conference photos alone.”
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