Next month, the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (COP30), will start up. This year's event will be held in the town of Belém, Brazil, from the 10th to the 21st of November. An eight-mile, four-lane highway has already been bulldozed through the Brazilian rainforest, upsetting a lot of locals, so that the attendees to this climate conference can ride in their limousines in air-conditioned comfort from the airport to the venue, without having to pass through the town.
Yes, that is an act of gross hypocrisy. But it may be the last such act of gross hypocrisy. And if it isn't, it should be. It is an atrocious waste of time and money that should embarrass even the United Nations, which is itself a huge waste of time and money.
Why might this be the last one? Well, here's why, and I'm going to tell you. A new editorial at Issues & Insights, as it happens, also has some thoughts.
The United Nation’s 30th Conference of the Parties, known as COP30, will be held next month in Belem, Brazil. It will be a nearly two-week festival of intellectual depravity, in which fiery sermons are preached, nags are given an undeserved forum, backs are slapped, glasses clinked and participants tell each other and the world how important they are. Our hope is that it’s an endangered species falling hard toward extinction.
While the crisis-mongers are supping luxuriously and congratulating themselves for saving a world that’s in no danger from human fossil-fuel exhaust, their crusade is losing momentum.
That's a big part of the problem. The climate scolds attending this mess are very nearly at the Marie Antoinette level of cluelessness. It's not just the road: It's the private jets, the yachts, the fancy eats, all of that - and this, all coming from people who wag their fingers at us over our carbon footprints.
Maybe that's why they are losing the public.
Polls are showing that fewer Americans believe it’s a “very serious” or serious problem. When issues are ranked by the public, climate is far behind others, such as health care and the economy. It also follows, though a bit more closely, immigration, energy policy and crime as a top concern. Some Americans are even more troubled by our growing political extremism, which, given the growing violence on the left, is understandable.
The polls are showing this, indeed. It's not a dramatic shift, and it's not universal, but it's there.
Nearly a year after the 2024 election, Democrats are still trying to figure out what went wrong. In the midst of this soul-searching, a new piece of advice has appeared: “Don’t say climate change.”
That’s the takeaway from a recent poll by the Searchlight Institute, a new Democratic think tank. Americans said they see climate change as a problem, but it’s rarely one of their top issues — voters in battleground states are more concerned with affordability and health care. But when asked which issue they think the Democratic Party prioritizes, climate change was number one.
The climate scolds can only channel their inner Chicken Littles for so long before the general public figures out that the sky isn't falling. Oh, people still place a high priority on clean air, clean water, and clean countryside. I do - that's why I live out in the environment, or as we call it, "the woods." But there's a big difference between caring about clean air and water, and giving up our modern technological lifestyle over a climate that has always changed and always will change. The Earth has no "correct" temperature, no thermostat we can set to keep it within a certain range, and the scolds couldn't tell you what that range should be in any case.
Even some of the climate-change worst panic-mongers are starting to back away from the issue, as my friend and colleague Brandon Morse recently informed us:
Read More: Stick a Fork in the Church of Climate Change - Even Bill Gates Seems Done
But here's the real show-stopper: The United States, in the imposing form of Donald Trump, has let the world know that we aren't interested in picking up the tab any longer.
“The mainstream press run-up to COP 30 is the most subdued I have ever seen, and I have seen them all. No grand global plans or calls for astronomical sums of cash,” says (The Heartland Institute's) David Wojick.
He credits Trump for the “lack of financial grandeur.” The president “is pulling America out of the Paris Accord” – for the second time – and he has also “denounced climate alarmism as a colossal scam to the U.N. General Assembly, in their face as it were.”
Wojick further noted that Trump has eliminated USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, “which was throwing billions of dollars a year around the world in climate money,” and cut off climate spending at “many other” federal agencies.
Good. There's no reason to keep pouring American taxpayer dollars into something that is becoming known to be not based in fact.
Read More: Carbon and Climate: A Serious Scientist Brings the Numbers
So, yes, this may well be the last United Nations Climate Change Conference. Good. We've heard more than enough hooraw out of these people, we've seen enough of their motorcades of limos to and from, we've seen enough of their private jet travel, and most of all, we've had it up to here with their finger-wagging.
Now, perhaps, we can start talking about getting the United States out of the United Nations altogether.
