The 30th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 30) is now underway in Belem, Brazil.
There are good reasons to believe the present and any future COPs will reflect the past. COP 30 will be a tale told before of noble words spoken, high ambitions set (though not nearly as high as some demand), negotiated agreements with new targets and commitments for funding, only to have all the goals go unmet when the deadlines fall.
As far as I have been able to determine, every COP climate agreement since the first one at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio has been a story of vaulting ambitions and failed targets. At the first Rio conference, participating countries agreed to “stabilize or peak” their greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels, by 2000. More than 30 years later, COP participants have still not hit that initial target, much less any of the ever-stricter targets and commitments for funding mechanisms for climate aid, set at the 29 meeting, since then. Not a single pledge of emissions reductions or financing for climate adaptation has ever been met over the past three decades. Now that’s a record of failure and futility.
In recent months, Australia, China, and other countries have expanded their fossil fuel use, building mines and power plants with useful lives extending to 2050 and beyond.
SEE ALSO: Could This Be the Last UN Climate Conference?
From an image and logistics perspective, Belem was a poor choice for COP 30. Brazil mowed down thousands of acres of pristine rainforests to build concrete highways (talk about emissions), to get the participants there. And while climate delegates preach that meat eating is not just murder, it is murdering the planet, the attendees’ plates overflow with Brazilian beef and other meats. The contrast between the wealth displayed by the participants, arriving in limos and private jets, eating sumptuous four-star meals, and the poverty of the surrounding town, where garbage fills many streets and overflows gutters, couldn’t be more stark.
The hypocrisy of the event is sickening. Of particular focus at COP 30 is delivering more money to forest protection. That goal would be funny if it weren’t so sad. A good start to that would have been to not cut down vast swaths of rainforest to hold the conference. And the discussions are being led by countries that incentivize both the destruction of forests to power lumber and wood pellet-fired power plants and the destruction of biodiverse rainforests for palm plantations, to satisfy their desire for palm oil for “green” biofuel.
This conference, perhaps like never before, makes it plain for anyone to see that the climate emperor is truly naked, and increasingly bereft of supporters.
Countries were required under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to provide detailed plans for how they meet the emission reduction commitments they have already missed, as well as submit even more stringent goals to be met by dates certain in the future. The parties to Paris agreed to provide these plans by February 10, 2025, yet only 15 countries met the initial deadline. This fact forced the UN grand poohbahs of the climate con to extend the deadline to September.
September came and went, and still only 69 of 197 countries involved in the agreement submitted their new plans. And the evidence suggests the updated commitments submitted are not that impressive.
Japan has been a driving force in the fight for binding emission reductions since the outset, yet from 2013 to 2024, Japan provided around $93 billion for overseas oil and gas projects. The Center for International Law describes its new commitments as “the weakest national plan, without a single timeline or target to reduce fossil fuel production or increase renewable energy.”
The good old European Union (EU) finalized its updated commitments just days before COP 30 commenced. The EU’s plan has been almost universally described by the mainstream media as “watered down” or “weakened.” In a Union that is supposed to thrive on consensus, nearly a fifth of the members either rejected the agreement or abstained during the vote for its adoption, despite compromises intended to garner universal support.
Speaking of compromises, the new EU plan falls far short of hitting the previously promised targets. It allows up to 10 percent of the required carbon reductions to be met by the purchase of carbon credits bought on the international market. The plan also establishes the possibility of renegotiating targets depending on economic performance.
In the end, as has been true in the past, I strongly suspect future deadlines will pass, emission reductions will go unmet if any occur at all, and minimal funding will materialize. Even less of the funding actually delivered will find its way to the people it is supposed to help, as billions of dollars go unaccounted for, somehow lost in the climate cabal bureaucracy, corrupt governments, or finding its way into the pockets of profiteering, politically connected global elites.
In the global warming scam, past failures provide government and NGO bureaucrats with no qualms about spending billions more dollars on junkets and agreements that literally aren’t worth the paper they are printed on. That’s because it never was about stabilizing the climate, an impossible goal if ever there was one, but always and only about money and power for elites.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., ([email protected]) is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization based in Illinois.
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