The United Nations climate conference in Egypt in November was a dreary affair. Dubbed “COP27”—the 27th of these increasingly tiresome extravaganzas—the 2022 gathering was the same old same old, with a few new wrinkles.
Stiell ignored the U.N.’s own published position that “prediction of future climate states is not possible” because “the climate system is a coupled nonlinear chaotic system.” How does he know that the climate will become more destructive? He doesn’t—and can’t—know.
The lip service to “fairness” is best encapsulated in a statement that deserves some sort of prize for being the most vacuous and most fatuous: “Climate change is deeply unfair.”
This statement was made in connection with Pakistan having suffered extreme flooding last year. Yes, those floods are tragic. So was the tornado that destroyed much of Mayfield, Kentucky, in December 2022, the flooding that inundated Hazard, Kentucky, in July 2022, and Hurricane Ian that flattened much of Ft. Myers, Florida, and inflicted fearsome damage on a number of nearby cities on the Gulf Coast. Isn’t it interesting that the U.N. has been conspicuously reticent about lamenting devastating weather events in the United States?
“Fairness,” of course, has nothing to do with destructive weather events. Such events are mindless and random. They don’t choose where to happen or who to hurt; they just happen, as they’ve been happening for countless millennia. But that didn’t stop our sensationalistic media from hyping the climate change angle.
Related to the disingenuous “fairness” canard promoted at COP27, the message went out, “It’s the underdeveloped countries that suffer the most.” Although this isn’t always going to be categorically true (again, remember the floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes that have battered parts of the United States), it does have an element of truth to it. Less-developed countries often lack the engineering and technological capacity that wealthier countries have at their disposal to mitigate the impact of weather-related events. Where the U.N. gets it wrong is in implying that it’s unfair that the developed countries used carbon-based fuels to attain their higher levels of affluence, while the poorer countries consumed less of those fuels and so lagged behind.
Today, in the name of “fairness,” the U.N. climate change cabal wants the wealthier countries to pay “reparations” to less developed countries—compensation for the alleged sin of being wealthier, which was the result of having used more fossil fuels, thereby supposedly changing Earth’s climate for the worse.
Most of you reading this will readily recognize the gross unfairness of making the rich countries pay for the poor countries’ largely self-inflicted failure to develop. However, the unfairness at COP27 is far more vicious than that. The perpetrator of the greatest unfairness is current, not historical. It’s the U.N. climate change cabal itself that’s guilty.
The hypocrisy of the U.N. is vicious. Africans need access to reliable energy far more than they need financial handouts. Former President Donald Trump was right to withdraw the United States from the 2015 U.N.-crafted Paris agreement. Unfortunately, current President Joe Biden is fully on board with the U.N.’s socialistic redistribution of wealth and unjust suppression of African economic development. This is another low point in the Biden presidency. What a shame.