Mindful of setting a good example, the organisers of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, otherwise known as COP27, are determined to minimise their carbon footprint. Presumably that explains why only 45,000 delegates, roughly 230 from each of the world’s nations, have travelled to Egypt for this vital meeting.
The location is the town of Sharm el-Sheikh, a beautiful luxury resort situated between the Sinai Peninsula desert and the Red Sea. It was an ideal choice, for it refutes the slanderous and impertinent notion that UN bureaucrats avoid travelling to developing countries. As the delegates would no doubt tell you, the picturesque backdrop of a coastal venue is also a poignant reminder of the existential threat posed by rising seas.
It is a threat aggravated by the danger of wrongthink. Speaking at the summit this week, World Bank president David Malpass denied accusations he was a “climate denier”, a label bestowed on him by environmental crusader and former US vice-president Al Gore. Having lent $US14.8bn to fund fossil fuel projects in the last seven years, the organisation has angered climate activists.
“I don’t have any personal beef with him as an individual,” said Gore last week, before adding that “his approach has really fallen way short of what the world needs”.
Regrettably, Malpass passed up the opportunity to highlight a few inconvenient truths about his chief critic. “Scientists now predict our current course will raise world temperatures five degrees Celsius in our lifetimes,” Gore wrote in the New York Times in 1989. That means we can look forward to a very long life given NASA records show that in 2021 global temperatures were between 1.1 and 1.2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average.
“An enormous hole is opening in the ozone layer, reducing the Earth’s ability to protect life from deadly ultraviolet radiation,” Gore told the UN Commission on Sustainable Development in 1993. The hole turned out to be as deadly as the Y2K bug. True to form, Gore addressed the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009, warning the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free as early as 2014. Aside from the 6.61 million square kilometres of ice currently there, he was right.
You might say Gore’s approach has really fallen way short of what the world needs. Mind you it has met Al’s needs nicely, with his personal wealth estimated to be $US300m. Like all crises real and manufactured, there is money to be made in climate activism, a fact not lost on those attending COP-fest. Take for example Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley and her quest for “climate justice” otherwise known as a guilt shakedown.
“We were the ones whose blood, sweat and tears financed the industrial revolution,” she told delegates earlier this month. “Are we now to face double jeopardy by having to pay the cost as a result of those greenhouse gases from the industrial revolution? That is fundamentally unfair.”
You can understand her pain. For example, developing countries received only a paltry $US532.5bn in climate funding aid for the period 2013-20. Mottley, incidentally, has also demanded that European nations pay her country “reparations” for the Atlantic slave trade.
Australia’s neighbour Vanuatu also has its hand out, or rather both hands out. The country’s climate minister, Ralph Regenvanu, has proposed an additional endowment in the form of a “climate damage tax” funded by the producers of coal, oil, and gas. Its leaders say international donors must cough up $US178m for Vanuatu to implement climate abatement measures by 2030. That is on top of the $US100m it has received in climate funding in the last decade. And this is a country that does not even require its citizens to pay income tax.
Mind you Vanuatu’s demands are pittance compared to those of the Maldives. Environment minister Aminath Shauna told COP27 that it required $US8 billion for coastal adaptation, an estimate she said was “conservative”. You can be sure that will not be the final figure from a country notorious for corruption and human rights abuses.
Mindful of how arduous it can be to contrive innovative grievances, COP27 organisers scheduled a “day of rest” for delegates last Sunday. As Reuters reported “thousands of attendees hit the local beaches and tourist shops”.
You can imagine them sunning themselves in deck chairs. I’m thinking a revamped Dire Straits song to mark the occasion – “Grifting by the Pool”, perhaps?
And this week the conference was enriched by the attendance of former Irish president and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, who now chairs the pompously named activist group “The Elders”. According to her, “climate change is a man-made problem and must have a feminist solution”. I can only surmise this solution involves Robinson continuing to take CO2-intensive trips around the world with her derriere planted firmly on a first-class cushion.
Despite having castigated his predecessor Scott Morrison for initially deciding not to attend COP26 in Glasgow last year, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has chosen to stay home. He is represented by climate minister Chris Bowen, who will regale fellow delegates with details of how Labor is helping Pacific countries combat climate change. You know, measures such as supplying a Solomon Islands despot with 60 semi-automatic rifles for his police force to respond to, um, climate deniers?
As CNBC reported, COP27 has had its challenges. Last Wednesday a sewage pipe at the venue burst, sending waste down one of the conference’s main thoroughfares and forcing delegates to exit.
The waste has been cleaned up. But the stench of mendacity will remain long after the delegates have departed.
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