COP hypocrisy is all a bit rich

Where do the wealthy get off saying we must ‘share the pain’ of climate action?

Prince Charles speaks with Leonardo DiCaprio and designer Stella McCartney during the Cop26 summit in Glasgow. Picture: Getty

Boris Johnson told the Glasgow climate conference that the world was at “one minute to midnight” on the climate “doomsday clock” and I fear he might be right. How else to explain the hysterical, ill­ogical and shameless behaviour we see around us?

The supranational, anti-intellectual and hyper-emotional posturing of the COP 26 crowd would confound even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell. This is a cowardly new world, three score years ­beyond 1984.

Johnson, ever dishevelled, populist and jocular, told world leaders (and thousands of earnest hangers-on) that we are one crowded minute away from “a destination that will end human life as we know it”. On the margins of the conference, he joked with an interviewer about personal sacrifices to lower his carbon footprint, noting that since moving to Number 10 Downing Street he had “totally abolished commuting” because effectively he lives above the shop – although he baulked at giving up eating beef.

How very droll, especially when the reality is that the inevitable consequence of drastic global climate action will be to slow the emergence of developing countries out of poverty and malnutrition. The indulgence of Glasgow, with its private jets, movie stars, Italian suits and bottled water sparkling with little bubbles of CO2, has all the hallmarks of the fall of empire – which, I guess, is why China and Russia like to urge it on from afar.

The divide between the ruling elite and the people they claim to represent is stark. Millionaires and billionaires who never see a power bill, let alone fret over how to pay one, and who have no worries about reliable work, paying a mortgage or being able to educate their children, lecture others about the need to live with less or, at the very least, accept some pain during a “transition”.

For the wealthy and woke, “transition” means the period during which government subsidies and targets convert their speculative renewables investments and projects into foolproof, and profitable, mainstays of the energy system. For the people who missed out on the business-class seats or private flights to Glasgow, “transition” means high prices, more taxes, unemployment, and looking for work in non-existent manufacturing plants or resources industries.

To comprehend the irrational approach you only have to listen to Australian politicians and business leaders declare that their dramatic conversion to the net-zero cause has been prompted by the capital markets which are driving investment decisions and policy direction across the Western world. These would be the same capital markets that – again in ­cahoots with government interventions – gave us the global ­financial crisis.

There is a distinct similarity in these episodes. Both, ostensibly, have been driven by altruistic aims – providing cheap mortgages and producing low-emissions energy – but in each case the policy measures, stimulus and subsidies have bolstered the wealth of asset holders (the rich) and increased the pain and imposed new barriers to prosperity for humble wage earners, farmers and small business people.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Picture: Getty

Yet, in Western countries, the left cheers. The green left is now motivated almost exclusively by symbolic and emotional causes rather than economic and practical progress for the masses.

They preach moral superiority rather than family advancement. Which is why a man like Mike Cannon-Brookes, owner of the most expensive house in Australia and one of the nation’s richest people – a capitalist extraordinaire – can become a hero of the woke green left.

His salvation is that he advocates for and invests in green energy, runs his farm on renewable electricity installations, and barracks for dramatic climate action. Never mind that working families could never afford the money or the risk of going off-grid with the energy indulgences of the rich on their various properties and farms – like BoJo joking about walking downstairs to work, the real pain is always someone else’s burden.

When Johnson claimed in Glasgow that we are “raising the temperature of the earth with a speed and abruptness that is entirely man-made” it proved that gendered language is acceptable if it is pejorative against males, and misrepresentation of science is acceptable so long as it exaggerates the climate threat and underplays the non-human variables.

One of the constantly changing assessments in the IPCC ­reports is the proportion of observable temperature changes that are anthropogenic rather than stemming from other factors (short answer, they do not know).

Outside the Glasgow conference centre, Greta Thunberg – the teenage activist who personifies the protest movement the political leaders seek to mollify – was accurate when she again derided their negotiations and pledges as mere “blah, blah, blah”.

She led a chant to “shove” their climate “crisis” up their fundamentals – and the fact she mocks the global leadership for what she perceives as their lack of action, rather than their reckless promises of action, does not detract from the precision of her jibes.

Glasgow was literally a circus. China, the world’s largest emitter, snubbed the event, eschewed the 2050 target, and put its hand out for a trillion dollars in funding – I guess it would be asking too much if Beijing’s future clean-energy programs had to detract from its aggressive expansion of defence hardware and militarisation of outer space.

Hollywood stars, business tycoons and world leaders flew in on private jets and warned we would all need to live with less. Malcolm Turnbull praised the platitudes from Russia and China despite their junking of the 2050 goal; but criticised a nation that has cut emissions by 20 per cent and signed on for net zero by 2050 – the same nation he used to lead and whose 2030 target he set.

The hype of global media in the lead-up to the conference has crashed into a dull and predictable reality. On the ABC this week they ran a complaint about the gender balance of the COP26 crowd – there was so little to flesh out their endemic alarmism.

Photos sent from the conference centre showed me a space for “Co-creative reflection and dialogue” where the sessions included “Inner and Outer Ecology Meditation” and “Why are we not talking about our clothes?” Let me prove them wrong and declare that I am wearing blue jeans and a check shirt – all cotton, I think.

The conference’s host nation offered the idiot son of its head of state as a keynote speaker, and Prince Charles urged world leaders to put themselves on a “warlike footing” because “time has quite literally run out” and, in some weird climate-induced distortion of democratic atmospherics, his opinion was considered relevant.

“Here we need a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector, with trillions at its disposal,” said our future king, proving once more that his greatest contribution to climate action might be the destruction of a monarchy that has the carbon footprint of a small nation.

Yet in the middle of all this absurdity, our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, felt the need to go and dip his lid to Prince Charles. “Now we’ve committed to net zero by 2050, Australia’s done that here at COP26,” enthused the PM. “And we’re working very closely with our Pacific family, Prime Minister Bainimarama and the whole team, which I know you have a great ­affection for.”

Quite so, dear fellow – it seemed a humiliating attempt to appeal to the prejudices of our likely next head of state. We are left to wonder whether it would have occurred to either of these men that the royal family has more palaces than Australia has coal-fired power stations and therefore a carbon footprint that might outstrip some Pacific ­nations.

This is the sideshow that distracts our political, business, academic and media leaders from the issues confronting mainstream people. It has little relevance to most, beyond posturing – except when it increases their electricity bills, cuts their power, or kills their jobs.

Meanwhile in Virginia, USA, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, Glenn Youngkin, claimed a stunning victory in a state that gave Joe Biden a 10-point victory a year ago. Sure, Donald Trump ­decried the international climate action carry-on and dumped Paris, while Joe Biden had the US rejoin the UN climate process.

But climate policies were a mere backdrop to the real campaign debate, where Youngkin focused on economic liberation, strong law and order, and an education system committed to basic skills, free of woke distractions.

There are lessons in this for Morrison six months out from an election.