We are now halfway through the annual global festival of green hypocrisy, science abuse and rent-seeking, known as COP30 in Belem, Brazil. Each year bar one (delayed because of the pandemic), 99.999% of the world has been excluded from the ritual of this United Nations climate conference, while governments, billionaire-funded NGOs and transnational corporations seek deals between themselves to remake the world at our expense. From the early days of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meetings, hopes for a global one-size-fits-all emissions reduction policy have faded. And the process has produced notable failures. We make take some satisfaction in that, but it would be premature to celebrate the failure either of this COP meeting or the broader process. And it is the broader conversations around the UN that shed more light on why we should resist global climate politics than the detail of any one conference.
It was historian of the green movement, Rupert Darwall, who explained this to me. Much of the UN’s green agenda is credited to the late Canadian oil man and latterly green technocrat Maurice Strong, who convened the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in the 1970s. Strong, explains Darwall, "understood the nature of power in modern world and the fear people have of being left out". Once the agenda of endless meetings had been established, "people have this terrible nervousness of being left out of these very important meetings, not being at the top table". The world’s
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Darwall mandatory reading for climate sceptics; he concentrates not on the science but the governmental and super-governmental plotting to wreck our economies for their benefit
Only 25% of the countries in the UN are democracies. The other 75% have Kings, Colonels, Dictators and Tyrants in charge. How would anyone expect anything like “democracy” to come out of that? —And ofcourse it doesn’t.
There are two theocracies: the KSA, and the UK.
Another excellent article, Ben. Thank you.
The UN may well have been substantively formed in the aftermath of World War II, and intended to mitigate the risk of such horrors being repeated
The UN is a reheated version of Wilson’s league of nations and it was founded by the very people who escalated a local conflict between Germany and Poland to a world war whose outcome was mainly to ensure that the blessing of Bolshevism could continue to transform the world one million of dead people at a time.
The UN are a bunch of unelected climate loons. About time they were disbanded as a threat to the world.
Don’t forget the jab, and human rights, and so much else.
Well this “conventional sceptic” has never really believed anything other than the whole thing is just a pretext to grab power, prestige and money and get on a gravy train – pretty much like most other non commercial initiatives and organisations (and commercial ones for that matter, except with those you usually have a choice). See also “global health”, “covid”, “anti-racism”, “DEI”, etc.
Governments such as the UK “pay lip service to climate goals…”
…My electricity unit rate and standing charge tell a different story.
So does the hole in my pocket made by the state stealing my money to give to people who buy heat pumps and electric cars.
My electricity unit rate and standing charge tell a different story.
The story they tell is that you’re still allowed to use electricity despite the historic guilt of the UK of not having burnt the inventor of the steam engine at the stake who was clearly an evil wizard seeking to condemn the whole world to a horrible heat death because of emissions(!!1).
Ergo: Lip service. The end goal is that you pay 50 times this rate for electricity not being generated at all.
If the Government wanted to meet the Climate Goals, they wouldn’t be getting Arts and Humanities graduates implementing NET Zero policies, and ‘measuring’ Climate Change.
They would be finding out what was changing the climate, (it is the Sun), and realising it was futile. But Scientists are not in control, are they?
The ‘… science has always been secondary – i.e., downstream – of the political process’.
And Scientists are used to arguing their Scientific points, not Political points.
‘Yet that caused little reflection by scientists about how their institutions had been colonised by politics.’
Yes, and those Scientists that attempted to fight in the political arena, like Tim Ball, Judith Curry, and many others, have the scars to prove it. They didn’t have the political expertise of the politicians: funny that! And they didn’t have the advantage of of being ignorant of the Scientific Method. Science requires patience and politeness to succeed.
And lastly, the final decisions have been taken by the public, at elections, and you know how knowledgeable they are about scientific matters.
So the public need to take it on the chin, just like the consequences of the jab, id cards and the state taking over… Read more »
Love the acronym UNFCCC. Just pronounce it
It’s a bit crap.
So, something has been done. They have managed to sustain themselves for a few decades, after all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism