There is nothing known to humanity that can replace four fifths of our energy, but this is not a flaw in their plan. It has become the plan and they no longer feel the need to hide. Gone is the fantasy that a robust economy, modern conveniences, and future breakthroughs can be achieved without a dramatic impact on your lifestyle.
For the past two weeks, world leaders have been meeting in Dubai at the COP28 summit to address the supposed climate crisis. Much digital ink has been spilled by conservatives about the spectacle of hundreds if not thousands of so-called leaders arriving in private jets, some large enough to carry fancy limousines, living it up in hotels with huge carbon footprints, and consuming enough food for a starving country, but that has become typical for these conferences and therefore far too easy a target. Much more insidious is the unique combination of a self-fulfilling prophecy and ever changing targets of their ire followed by vague, unworkable goals with no real plans or possibility of achieving them, save as a political cudgel to bludgeon the populace, that has developed over the past few decades. The leaders meet under the auspices of a global crisis, operating under the assumption that something drastic needs to be achieved or the planet itself might not survive. The media repeats the apocalyptic warnings with no regard for whether or not the last thirty years of similar warnings has come to fruition and no actual analysis on whether or not the ever changing goals are in line with the science that has supposedly been long established, increasing the pressure to do something, anything or all the carbon expended for the summit would be a waste. This year has been both the same and different because, amid the warnings and the claims we need to do something, the climate crisis community has attempted to pull the ultimate bait and switch, completely changing the rules of the game in the middle, revealing their true, ridiculously authoritarian goals, and sadly, they have at least partially succeeded. For decades, the “settled” science has claimed that the world needs to reduce global emissions to pre-industrial levels to stave off global warming. This is because the warming is said to be caused by the amount of carbon, methane, and other so called “greenhouse gasses” in the atmosphere, most of which have been rising as we consume more energy and the population has increased over the past century.
We can debate whether or not reducing these gasses would be successful or even desirable, but the logical appeal was simple: Humans are pumping chemicals into the atmosphere that wouldn’t normally be there, and the presence of those chemicals is influencing atmospheric phenomenon, namely the climate, whether by trapping more sunlight or some other means. This placed the onus for saving us from catastrophe on emissions or reducing temperatures by some other means, not the underlying fuels, meaning if we were able to capture the carbon from a coal plant or create gasoline cars that produced no emissions, or whether we used different energy sources was irrelevant. So long as the carbon (and other gasses) didn’t get into the atmosphere, the result would be the same. Thus, the much vaunted Paris Accords agreed to reduce emissions without commenting on the fuels themselves. As the United Nations summarizes it, “To keep global warming to no more than 1.5°C – as called for in the Paris Agreement – emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. Getting to net zero requires all governments – first and foremost the biggest emitters – to significantly strengthen their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and take bold, immediate steps towards reducing emissions now.” As to the efforts to achieve net zero, “a growing coalition of countries, cities, businesses and other institutions are pledging to get to net-zero emissions. More than 140 countries, including the biggest polluters – China, the United States, India and the European Union – have set a net-zero target, covering about 88% of global emissions. More than 9,000 companies, over 1000 cities, more than 1000 educational institutions, and over 600 financial institutions have joined the Race to Zero, pledging to take rigorous, immediate action to halve global emissions by 2030.” This is why billions have been invested over the past thirty years to develop “carbon capture technology.” For example, $7 billion was included in the vaunted infrastructure bill signed by President Biden, on top of $2.7 billion per year in regular appropriations. As late as August, the Energy Department was congratulating itself for the largest ever investment in this technology in history. MIT’s Climate Portal explains it as follows, “Carbon capture and storage (CCS) refers to a collection of technologies that can combat climate change by reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The idea behind CCS is to capture the CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels before it is released to the atmosphere. The question is then: What to do with the captured CO2? Most current CCS strategies call for the injection of CO2 deep underground. This forms a ‘closed loop’,, where the carbon is extracted from the Earth as fossil fuels and then is returned to the Earth as CO2.”
Suddenly, however, reducing emissions is no longer the plan. Instead, we must end the use of fossil fuels entirely whether or not they produce any emissions. We must do so or the COP28 conference would be a failure and the human race would face extinction in some cases. Without warning, the problem world leaders were there to address wasn’t controlling global temperatures any longer by reducing emissions, it was ending the use of fossil fuels and the impact of emissions was irrelevant. “We will not sign our death certificate,” Cedric Schuster, a Samoan politician and chair of the Alliance of Small Island States wrote when language demanding the end of fossil fuels was rejected by the conference. “We cannot sign on to text that does not have strong commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.” “I cannot hide the fact from you that the text, as it now stands, is disappointing,” EU Climate Action Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told reporters. “There are a couple of good things in there, but overall, it is clearly insufficient and not adequate to addressing the problem we are here to address.” Even former Vice President Al Gore – he whose mansion consumes as much energy as a small town – posted on X that the summit was on the “verge of complete failure” as he declared without evidence, “The world desperately needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but this obsequious draft reads as if OPEC dictated it word for word. It is even worse than many had feared.” The without evidence standard extended to his insistence that the situation was “worse than many had feared.” The language at the time called for the holy grail of net zero emissions, and said specifically that the countries should focus on “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels, in a just, orderly and equitable manner so as to achieve net zero by, before, or around 2050 in keeping with the science.” It also included a commitment to “tripling renewable energy capacity globally.” This, however, was simply not enough. The world must declare an end to the energy source that currently accounts for a full four fifths of our overall needs, about 80% of all the power we use. To put this in perspective, only about 1% of all the cars on the road in the United States are electric, meaning they do not use fossil fuels at all. There is no realistic means to magically replace these vehicles, electric car sales are slowing down and companies are losing billions, so far off their targets in some cases as to be measured as zero, but the world now requires it – even if we can reduce emissions without it.
What’s a conference that needs to show some success to do? What politicians always do: They opted to talk a great game while producing absolutely nothing of value, except signing onto language that would continue to confine billions to poverty and threaten to destroy the average person’s mobility and lifestyle throughout the developed world – because that is precisely what ending fossil fuels in barely 25 years would do. CNN’s headline described the close of the conference this way, “World agrees to climate deal that makes unprecedented call to move away from fossil fuels, but ‘cavernous’ loopholes remain.” Hence, a purported climate deal is somehow transformed into an energy deal, and a weak one, meaning nothing until it is used against the average person by progressive politicians, more on that in a moment. “The world agreed to a new climate deal in Dubai on Wednesday at the COP28 summit after two weeks of painstaking talks, making an unprecedented call to transition away from fossil fuels, but using vague language that could allow some countries to take minimal action.” If there was any mistaking precisely why the sudden switch to target fuels instead of emissions, COP28 President Sultan Al Jabar made it plain what the new goal was. “We have language on fossil fuels in our final agreement for the first time ever,” he said, adding that the outcome represented “a paradigm shift that has the potential to redefine our economies.” Yes, their plan is to “redefine” our economies with talk, at least for now. The agreement doesn’t actually announce an end to fossil fuels, much less explain how that is possible in the first place. Instead, it “calls on” countries to “contribute” to reducing carbon and offers several options, including “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems… accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050.” This has led others to be less enthused at the agreement. “At long last the loud calls to end fossil fuels have landed on paper in black and white at this COP,” explained Jean Su, the energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity, “but cavernous loopholes threaten to undermine this breakthrough moment.” The United States own climate envoy, former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry – he who is among the few important enough to destroy the climate via his use of a private jet – explained it this way, “I think there were times in the last 48 hours where some of us thought this could fail,” he told reporters, but ultimately they “stepped up and said, ‘we want this to succeed.’” Previously, he said in a speech, “All of us can find a paragraph or sentences, or sections, where we would have said it differently,” but “to have as strong a document as has been put together, I find is cause for optimism, cause for gratitude and cause for some significant congratulations to everybody here.” “The message coming out of this COP is we are moving away from fossil fuels,” he added. “We’re not turning back,” presumably except when they fly their private jets home.
The problem for the average person is: The entire plan is to turn back. Saving the climate is no longer a concern. Instead, we are going to “redefine our economies” in ways that are far from favorable to you and me. Many, myself included, have said that the coronavirus lockdowns were a dry run for what these progressive, authoritarian, socialists would like to see happen permanently. Now, they are openly talking about taking away your car, replacing the energy that likely heats and cools your home, cooks your food, and allows you to do almost anything in the modern world, not to mention dictating what you eat. The fact that there is nothing known to humanity that can replace four fifths of our energy is not a flaw in their plan. It has become the plan and they no longer feel the need to hide. Gone is the insistence that controlling the weather will not result in negative repercussions for the average person, the fantasy that a robust economy, modern conveniences, and future breakthroughs can be achieved without a cost or a dramatic impact on your lifestyle. Those are all promises they will pretend never happened – the same as their promised disasters like New York City being underwater already never happened – and they are replaced with an open desire to rob you of what undoubtedly makes most of your life worth living. They, in their infinite wisdom and unimpeachable morals, claim this is a success and if you are in the ruling class, it might well be. For everyone else, it is a failure that we can only hope never comes to fruition.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 