COP28 Wish-Wash: What is a Climate Alarmist to Do? (Part I)

“The whole thing is a misdirect. Were any of you serious it would have been a zoom meeting. All of the stopping climate change proposals are bullshit because they require rounds of GLOBAL CONSUMPTION. Forcing everyone to buy a new stove, water heater, HVAC system and car all at once is not decarbonization its a disaster for the planet. This is all industry driven to force consumption.”

– Steven Lamb, Institute for Sound Public Policy (below)

They had it coming. James Hansen, no less, called the 2015 Paris Agreement “a fraud really, a fake.” And fossil fuels almost a decade later are that much more embedded.

But will the disillusioned true believers want to check their premises and change course?

“The only person who can truly persuade you is yourself,” Milton and Rose Friedman once wrote [Free to Choose (1979), p. xii.] “You must turn the issues over in your mind at leisure, consider the many arguments, let them simmer, and after a long time turn your preferences into convictions.”

Here is one salient report from climate activist Clover Hogan on the looming failure:

We’re in the final hours of COP28 and it’s on the precipice of failure. This, after 2,456 fossil fuel representatives infiltrated (a 286% increase on COP27), and the President of the process was exposed for brokering new oil and gas deals – before publicly denying climate science.

Yet the problem isn’t COP28. It’s a political system that represents the interests of a few billionaires, rather than the planet’s billions of people.

She then issued a new call to action:

Our mistake would be accepting that this is the best we can do. That our only choice is to show up to processes like COP28 – or for the average person, the polling station – and choose between “bad” and “worse”.

I reject this idea. Not because I’m naïve, or an idealist, but because I’ve read my history books. History shows us that true leadership will not come from those who benefit from the system remaining unchanged. True leadership will come from those who have everything to lose; but also, everything to gain.

As I told attendees of the NextGen2023 conference, the state of the world feels incredibly dire; yet that is exactly why this moment demands courage. How will you show up in the weeks and months following COP28?

Courage to change? How about this instead:

• Consider the optimistic side of CO2/climate from base science
• Understand energy in terms of density and consumer service
• Study the political economy of government intervention (rent-seeking, etc.)
• Human flourishing via adaptation to change, positive and negative

Reaction

The comments to Clover Hogan’s post were revealing.

Steve Rowe commented:

Although we don’t know the final outcome, we can reasonably assume that COP no longer represents the average person. The time has come for people and communities to act and shame the naysayers, politicians and selfish fossil fuel junkies. That way we will all know we can make a difference.

I answered in a comment:

Yes, the “selfish fossil fuel junkies” are now part of the climate industrial complex. But removing CO2 politics takes away their drug. And “selfish … junkies” includes wind developers, solar developers, battery companies ….

Steven Lamb (Institute for Sound Public Policy) commented:

The whole thing is a misdirect. Were any of you serious it would have been a zoom meeting. All of the stopping climate change proposals are bullshit because they require rounds of GLOBAL CONSUMPTION. Forcing everyone to buy a new stove, water heater, HVAC system and car all at once is not decarbonization its a disaster for the planet. This is all industry driven to force consumption

Stephan Seifert added:

I keep hearing that we can do anything individually. But it’s wrong. You are individually changing the narratives. All of us individually have make the climate change movement what it is. What we can’t do, is do it alone. We need to get organized, and do some effective Impact actions, small steps but unstoppable ones. We can’t wait for the old economy to change, but should make actions to create our new economy. Nothing will make the old money move faster than the fear of being locked out of the new way of doing things.

I responded:

“Old economy”? Poverty was the old economy. Old energy was renewable, which had a 100 percent market share until coal came along …. Modern is energy density ….. Prosperity for the masses means affordable, reliable, plentiful energies, not wind and solar (that require batteries too).

It is a futile crusade with the interests of billions of consumers coming before the political class. But as one person put it, it is a war of attrition against fossil fuels. That thinking needs to change with a new human betterment standard.

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