I can’t be the only one who’s fed up with all this climate-summit hooey. It goes nowhere every few months when advocates want a junket to another intriguing global city on taxpayer-funded expense accounts.
We’re set up today for two full weeks of it as Joe Biden and some actual world leaders meet again – this time in Glasgow – to doom-say our lives and everything anyone has ever worked for since the beginning of time. It’s all in urgent jeopardy, you know, if we don’t do something fast.
Unless we spend billions upon billions of dollars ASAP to change things that have been changing on their own for a very long time. Joe Biden is a big believer, on his good days.
Hey, remember John Kerry? He was an anti-war activist and then a lieutenant governor and then a senator and then a losing presidential wannabe and then a secretary of state.
He left unemployment to become Joe Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. So, this latest climate summit that won’t accomplish anything is a big deal for him. He calls it COP26 and is going to spend the entire two weeks in Scotland, which isn’t exactly tough duty.
My father grew up in Glasgow decades ago when it was a sooty industrial city. It’s still a major economic hub, but over years, the locals got together and cleaned up their workplace and 570-year-old city to the beautiful one it is today. And all without a summit meeting.
Kerry recently hailed the Glasgow gathering, which has attracted jet planeload after jet planeload of leaders and squadrons of important aides using tons of jet fuel to fly at high speeds and high altitudes. Kerry asserts this is the last chance to save the planet before bad things happen.
More accurately, given all the results-free efforts in recent years, it’s just the next chance.
Remember Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson before a long-ago NFL championship game. He said if this Super Bowl is the most important game ever, why are they having another one next year?
I had the misfortune many years ago to be assigned to cover the very first Earth Day back in 1970 at the beginning of The End unless we spent large sums of money to change what we’re doing. That was such a history-changing event, they have one every April now. But somehow, we’re still in big trouble. And need yet another climate summit to change nothing once more.
That first Earth Day was deemed so very important for the future of humankind that my New York City editors gave it to the greenest, most vulnerable kid who was walking by their desk that morning when they had to find some schlump who could not refuse crap assignments.
Fortunately, we are all still here, along with the Earth that’s been spinning through space at eight miles per second for going on five billion years now, give or take 400 million. But, as usual, John Kerry is certain he knows things the rest of us don’t.
Like how to crash a bicycle in France and break your leg in 2015. That would never have happened if he’d been in an automobile.
Kerry recently announced that this month’s United Nations Climate Summit in Glasgow is the “last best chance” to avoid potential catastrophic damage to the 4.5 billion-year-old planet that has suffered previous catastrophic damage and come through pretty well. Thank you, Bruce Willis.
These folks and their bureaucratic predecessors have failed to build a costly consensus at any of the many other climate summits. So, maybe another one will work. Good food anyway.
Leaders of the G20 just finished the latest of what seems like their monthly meetings in a nice place. Like Canasta clubs, each such gathering of elites has a different host. This one was in Rome, not exactly hardship duty.
Climate was a big topic there, too. Urgent one. Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping did their part to save the Earth by staying home, not burning tons of kerosene to travel there at 550 miles an hour for a group photo like their high school yearbook.
According to numbers tossed around by climate-control advocates, the G20 economies turn out three-quarters of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. They state this with the confidence that no one else is counting.
The meeting folks agreed they need to speed up their Earth-saving activities by spending tons of other people’s money as quickly as possible because Doom looms. The undeveloped countries were especially eager to have the developed countries speed up the distribution of billions of dollars to help save the Earth, at least in their countries.
The participants, however, just could not agree on specifically what to do, which means another failure.
That’s my problem with these regular Earth-saving assemblies. The talk is good and well-meaning, even inspiring. It’s the actions that inevitably fall short, way short. At this session, everyone said they would stop exporting coal-fired power plants to other countries. Never mind enforcement.
And that’s it.
They couldn’t agree on specific steps to live up to the climate-saving commitments they made six years ago at the climate summit in Paris. That’s the empty agreement that Donald Trump abandoned because the worst polluters like China and India weren’t doing as much to meet the international goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2150.
The weekend’s G20 summit was just a two-day deal in Rome. So, the elites got back in their jets and flew another 1,223 miles to Glasgow to spend two weeks trying again to find something that won’t hurt anyone.
Joe Biden believes so strongly in making a show of his commitment to saving the Earth that he took half his Cabinet to Glasgow, which means three government jets were needed for the transatlantic flight to ferry them and platoons of aides eager to see Scotland.
Plus, of course, several military transport planes to get Secret Service and military vehicles abroad and back. Saturday’s motorcade in Rome for the climate-conscious Biden had 85 gas-powered vehicles, which proves something.
As you may have noticed from this year’s trillions in newly-printed cash, Joe Biden has never minded spending other people’s money. He and his entourage once ran up a $600,000 hotel tab for a single night’s stay in Paris plus another half-million for a night in a London hotel. And he was only vice president then.
To justify his presence and all this expensive folderol, Joe Biden will no doubt announce progress in controlling Nature. That won’t be fact-checked because Joe Biden wouldn’t lie. And the fake details won’t be remembered either.
Which will enable media to get all excited again sometime in 2022 for the next last chance to prevent catastrophic damage to the Earth.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member