Does COP28 enable corruption?

Isn't it time that we cut their funding?

Does the COP28 enable corruption?

With the increasing number of participants every year, what is the IPCC achieving other than enabling corruption?

Isn’t it time that the world cuts the cost of the IPCC and stop the silliness, as it might do far more to advance the cause of reducing C02.

Isn’t it time that we cut their funding?

It’s difficult keeping track with everything that is taking place at the International Conference of the Parties’ annual event that is hosted in the name of “saving the planet”.

Perhaps the most absurd was hosting the COP27 conference in Sharm el-Sheikh Egypt, a country that is oil dependent, and with serious human rights abuses, that include having a quarter of the population being food deprived, and more journalists in jail than Russia and Iran combined.

But I am sure that I am not alone in questioning how much money is truly needed to constantly repeat the message that the world needs to “reduce our C02 footprint” and how many more policies are required before the environmentalists realise that the problem isn’t as simple as only “cutting emissions”.

Whenever I read that the world can “decarbonise” I am reminded of a speech that the writer Michael Crichton , who was the first, as far as I am aware, to define environmentalism as a religion, gave to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.

I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.

The graph below plots all the number of COP Conferences next to the world’s global average C02 emissions (also known as the Keeling Graph). It clearly shows that many of the COP Conferences were an active waste of time and that after nearly 30 years, the world worked incredibly hard at achieving absolutely nothing.

As the number of participants (who fly in with Greenhouse Gas Spewing Airplanes) grow in number year by year, perhaps it’s time that the world stops and think a bit about what is being sold to us in these conferences under the name of “decarbonisation”?

Carbon dioxide is inevitably linked to the energy sector and if the cost of reducing C02, in the absence of alternative technologies, is too high, then it’s not difficult to predict a political backlash. This was for example the case in France in 2018 when Emmanuel Macron tried to increase the price of “dirty” diesel. As soon as he announced the policy, the Gillet Jaune riots took place with the slogan that ‘the elite speak of the end of the world, when we speak of the end of the month’.

As the graph below shows, despite all the attempts at finding “alternatives”, fossil fuels still remain the backbone of the industrial economy.

If the policies just stopped here, then I personally wouldn’t have been so concerned, as there are many conferences that never achieve anything. But unfortunately what the environmentalists haven’t come to terms with yet, is that the decisions taken at the International Conference of the Parties have real world implications. They enable corruption in the developing world and notably in South Africa - the situation that I am obviously familiar with.

South Africa’s president Ramaphosa for example recently signed another $500 million loan with Germany “to help South Africa” (the world’s most coal dependent country) “move away from coal” and achieve its “just energy transition”.

The conflict of interest cannot be more blasé, because our President’s brother-in-law Patrice Motsepe is South Africa’s biggest rent-seeking renewable “independent power provider”. The series of cop conferences are only enabling more “state capture” by providing the African National Congress (ANC) with another mechanism to milk South Africa’s energy policy.

In the past the ANC looted the state through their “Black Economic Empowerment”  subcontracting partners such as when they signed a deal with Hitachi to build Medupi and Kusile, the two “dodgy coal plants”.

But now it would appear that they are doing it through other means by offering contracts to their family in law that are branded as “independent power providers” (that in turn provide the ANC with campaign contributions).

Isn’t it time that we stop sending people to COP?

Isn’t it time to cut their funding?