Negotiators at COP27 have put “loss and damage” — a.k.a. “reparations” — on the agenda, too. The idea is that wealthy nations, which developed their wealth using hydrocarbon energy and therefore are to blame for global warming and the increased numbers and intensity of extreme weather events, owe developing nations financial assistance as they deal with climate disasters.
In case you hadn’t heard, radical environmentalists and their globalist, “Great Reset” allies, people I like to call “climate cops,” are holding their annual doom-fest. The 27th “Conference of the Parties,” or COP, of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change started November 6 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and has drawn some 40,000 participants from pretty much every country in the world. It’s set to last two weeks.
True to form, organizers are using it as another opportunity to demand global action to fight catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). Cornwall Alliance will comment from time to time about this COP, as we’ve done about previous ones.
The Associated Press reported on its first day that COP27 was taking place “amid a multitude of competing crises, including the war in Ukraine, high inflation, food shortages and an energy crunch.” Every one of these competing crises, including even the war in Ukraine, is in part a consequence of the very climate and energy policies promoted for the last three decades, and every one of them is exacerbated even now by exactly those policies.
Prodded by past COPs, developed countries have rushed to substitute wind and solar energy for abundant, reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy. The result, predicted by critics, has been higher energy prices and, simultaneously, increasingly fragile energy infrastructures, especially in Europe. Those fragile, poorly supplied energy infrastructures led to European nations’ growing reliance on Russia for natural gas. That dependence, in turn, led to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculating that the risk that Europe would respond militarily to an invasion of Ukraine was slim — and he was right. European nations’ support for Ukraine has been tepid compared with the nearly $20 billion in aid the United States has given.
Meanwhile, pressured by developed nations, many developing nations have been forced to rely increasingly on wind and solar rather than fossil fuels, slowing their economic growth and prolonging poverty for their billions of people. That makes those nations vulnerable to the oil and gas price shocks that came with the war in Ukraine.
