One can only hope that the big news out of COP-27 in Sharm el-Sheikh is yet another cop-out on “climate change.” The big news seems to rank up there with news of Trump’s return to Twitter. Is it equally vacuous? Politico boils the news down to three paragraphs:
Governments from around the world agreed to have wealthy countries help pay vulnerable nations for the damage they’re suffering from climate change, a deal that overcomes decades of U.S. and European resistance.
The agreement, reached at the end of a 14-day U.N. climate summit on the Red Sea and announced to loud applause in the room, pushed the hardest decisions off until at least late 2023.
Those include the exact mix of government and private financing that would go into the climate-damage fund, as well as U.S. and European demands that China and other middle-income countries contribute as well.
Among the accessible news stories, CNN’s gives a hint of the farcical madness that Jonathan Swift mocks in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels: “The complete COP27 agreement, of which the fund is a part, also reaffirmed the goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels – a key demand from a number of countries.” As many have observed, the “climate change” orthodoxy has the earmarks of a religion. The mad scientists of Laputa have nothing on the men of COP27.
CNN adds this important caveat: “The final text also made no mention of phasing out fossil-fuels, including oil and gas.” Can we get a commitment from the prospective Speaker of the House of Representatives, whoever he may be, that not one penny of our taxpayer dollars will fund this fantasy? The Daily Mail has more here.
The UN has posted the so-called Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan along with many other documents related to the conference. It is one of the documents accessible via the UN press release posted here or via this page. I trust that Steve Hayward will tell us what it all means when he returns to duty this week.
