The Patriot Post® · Get Ready for More Hype From Climate Fearmongers!

In case you hadn’t heard, radical environmentalists and their globalist, “Great Reset” allies, people I like to call “climate cops,” are holding their annual doom-fest. The 27th “Conference of the Parties,” or COP, of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change started November 6 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and has drawn some 40,000 participants from pretty much every country in the world. It’s set to last two weeks.

True to form, organizers are using it as another opportunity to demand global action to fight catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). Cornwall Alliance will comment from time to time about this COP, as we’ve done about previous ones.

The Associated Press reported on its first day that COP27 was taking place “amid a multitude of competing crises, including the war in Ukraine, high inflation, food shortages and an energy crunch.” Every one of these competing crises, including even the war in Ukraine, is in part a consequence of the very climate and energy policies promoted for the last three decades, and every one of them is exacerbated even now by exactly those policies.

Prodded by past COPs, developed countries have rushed to substitute wind and solar energy for abundant, reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy. The result, predicted by critics, has been higher energy prices and, simultaneously, increasingly fragile energy infrastructures, especially in Europe. Those fragile, poorly supplied energy infrastructures led to European nations’ growing reliance on Russia for natural gas. That dependence, in turn, led to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculating that the risk that Europe would respond militarily to an invasion of Ukraine was slim — and he was right. European nations’ support for Ukraine has been tepid compared with the nearly $20 billion in aid the United States has given.

Meanwhile, pressured by developed nations, many developing nations have been forced to rely increasingly on wind and solar rather than fossil fuels, slowing their economic growth and prolonging poverty for their billions of people. That makes those nations vulnerable to the oil and gas price shocks that came with the war in Ukraine.

And more recently, again at the insistence of the COPs, some nations are adopting agricultural policies that depress crop yields in the name of fighting global warming.

Put them all together, and these mean higher prices for increasingly unavailable energy and food. I.e., the architects of all this suffering are the very people lecturing the world from Sharm el Sheikh for the next two weeks.

Negotiators at COP27 have put “loss and damage” — a.k.a. “reparations” — on the agenda, too. The idea is that wealthy nations, which developed their wealth using hydrocarbon energy and therefore are to blame for global warming and the increased numbers and intensity of extreme weather events, owe developing nations financial assistance as they deal with climate disasters.

Never mind, of course, that according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the hard data show no increase in the frequency or intensity of such events. The fact is, developing country cops are shaking down the developed countries for damage that would have occurred anyway.

Hoesung Lee, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, opened COP27 by saying, “This is a once in a generation opportunity to save our planet and our livelihoods,” essentially the same thing said by chairmen of lots of past COPs. Apparently, once in a generation means once a year. Kind of short generations, I guess.

The outgoing chair of the talks, British official Alok Sharma, said: “As challenging as our current moment is, inaction is myopic and can only defer climate catastrophe. We must find the ability to focus on more than one thing at once.” He added, “How many more wake up calls do world leaders actually need?” He cited recent devastating floods in Pakistan and Nigeria, and historic droughts in Europe, the United States, and China — but he did not point out that even the IPCC says you can’t attribute such events, which have happened over and over throughout history, to current climate change.

Over 120 world leaders were expected to join the 40,000 attendees, including President Joe Biden. But China’s President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India don’t plan to come. Their absence — China is the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases, and India is number three — means major deals for further cuts in emissions will be hard to achieve. Those countries have made it clear that they don’t intend to curb their emissions. Why? Because hydrocarbon energy is essential to their continued efforts to lift their people out of poverty — and they’re big enough and powerful enough to resist pressure from the climate alarmists in the West.

Good for them. Poverty is a far greater risk than anything related to climate — as the 98% decline in mortality from weather-related disasters over the last hundred years demonstrates.

That doesn’t mean no harm can come from COP27. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the likely Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, where all spending bills must originate, is likely to put a significant crimp in the climate alarmists’ plans here. Let’s hope so.

E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and author of “Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future.”