Time to COPitulate?
Why the Activists Have Pushed the Climate Campaign Too Far
This week, the 30th meeting of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) begins in Belém, Brazil. With the leaders of the three largest CO2 emitters, China, United States and India, not attending COP30, maybe it is time to consider giving up this UNFCCC mandate and ending this high-pollution, low-achievement globalist circus.
The US and European elections in 2024 were loud statements by the general public (the workers, consumers, taxpayers…) that they were not represented by the climate elite and were not impressed by their foundation-endowed campaigns and media manipulation that did not reflect the feelings on the street. Consumers did not dip into their wallets to buy EVs or green energy, factories were offshoring production to more energy-affordable economies, farmers were not giving up their land or their proven practices.
Still, the foundations continued to invest billions into flogging this dead horse. It was business as usual for activists who have a history of not listening to those they don’t respect. Groups like the European Climate Foundation, a high-level fiscal sponsor pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars annually from tech philanthropists and captured foundations, are now paying off most climate NGOs. This means there is no longer a need for these once struggling activist groups to hustle donations from the public. They don’t have to care what the public thinks anymore of their policies – those coach-flying working class peasants are too ignorant to bother with.
If democracy and elections don’t support their green dogma, these well-endowed activists just come up with other workarounds. Buried in the Amazon rainforest outside of a small Brazilian town (but with a nice new highway and new hotels), COP30 should be sheltered from reality.
COPocrisy
Every year we hear of all of the private jets flying into the COP venues (worse this year as Belém is a small, remote Brazilian city). Poor people don’t fly on private jets. Neither do middle class or working people. But they do travel by road. So the UNFCCC organizers cut down thousands of trees to build a nine-mile long, four-lane highway through the Amazon to the COP30 conference center (and while more than 80% of the residents of Belém don’t have access to a sewage system, the 50,000 COP delegates need nice, new hotel rooms).
The reality is that most of the people attending these global summits are the out-of-touch affluent and politically privileged, or funded to attend by the affluent and politically privileged. Like the transnational functionary class sealed off in the Brussels Bubble, what this closed, global climate diplomatic corp considers as work in unrecognizable to the rest of the world.
Do these climate activists understand what the non-affluent think about their campaigns? Do they understand what it means to work?
Most of those affluent delegates attending COP30 think that work involves clicking on PowerPoints and meeting people for lattés or champagne receptions.
Most of those affluent delegates attending COP30 rarely worry about losing their jobs (and the green consultants running the foundations paying their rent continue to believe in and support their campaigns).
Most of those affluent delegates attending COP30 have never had to face a decision between feeding their families or heating their homes.
Most of the affluent delegates attending COP30 have diplomas in political science, public policy or leadership studies and cannot verify the evidence they are promoting as “the” science.
Yet these hypocrites think they can speak about long-term commitments on behalf of consumers and individuals struggling to survive short-term needs. They live in a transnational bubble, moving from UN conference to high-level negotiation to UN summit with other privileged career delegates, networking in luxurious hotel lobbies and restaurants, discussing what sacrifices the non-affluent will have to make (until their next international conference).
At COP30, no doubt these hypocrites will invite children to cry out about their stolen futures or some Filipino will be given the floor to speak of the damage of the latest typhoon and flooding (heavy on the “emo”). But these affluent globalists will not spend a penny to help the Philippines develop so that there could be fewer vulnerable people living in flimsy shanties along flood-prone rivers. (And any cash these surrogate benefactors sprinkle on Manila for flood prevention programs simply disappears within a network of unaudited kleptocratic corruption.)
Economic development is what these climate activists believed caused the climate change so helping poor populations get the energy and markets they need to lift their economies and futures is pure anathema to these ideologues. Instead, the COP30 nobility will try to hock repressive green energy solutions or ESG financing restrictions that even the affluent in developed countries can barely afford. To these neo-colonial zealots, being right and holding a virtuous high-ground is far more celebrated than finding practical solutions that prevent death and suffering. And of course, most importantly, these global non-dom diplomats need to be invited to the next UN COPs, high-level negotiations and summits.
To be fair, one of the sole policies that might succeed at COP30 is the rumored proposal to levy a tax on private jets and first / business class airline tickets. 5% should be fair (and very magnanimous of these big egos).
All the Money in the World
It is really quite remarkable how hundreds of billions of dollars could be wasted on two decades of climate campaigning, dictating global economic and policy decisions, redefining scientific research strategies and leading the media to reshape the public narrative. Essentially a small group of consultants managing large foundation endowments carried out a mass global manipulation. With billions of other people’s money, these consultants managed the “spontaneous” global tours of a Swedish savant, the net-zero takeover of the investment world, an academic makeover and a political coup within the Davos-driven business community (where all the turkeys were voting for Christmas). It is remarkable how everyone fell in line with the script.
The last twenty years was a well-orchestrated post-capitalist coup led by well-seasoned environmental campaigners and professionalized foundations (built on capitalist earnings). Degrowth because of impending climate collapse became the most recent green-socialist anti-industry strategy – Marxism without the proletariat. To the contrary, this champagne socialism is seriously harming the working class (ie, people who actually work).
Ill-gained capitalist philanthropist profits were ill-spent by ill-intentioned post-capitalist activists and in the end, outside of a lost generation suffering the ills of climate anxiety, nothing has come of it. What a waste of real opportunity to use these resources to help the most vulnerable develop. Instead, this money is pilfered on out-of-touch activists travelling to remote cities to demand a seat at some globalist table.
The world has rightly moved on. As soon as Donald Trump broke the secret handshake code, banks and asset managers abandoned their ESG strategies and net-zero commitments, returning to the hunt for profits by investing in fossil-fuel powered data centers. That conscious capitalism was all a charade and no one in the financial industry has looked back or even considered an apology for their brief activist folly.
Even Smarmy Carney, the accidental Canadian Prime Minister and former Davos-darling (and the architect of the banking industry’s shift to degrowth), is talking about building a new gas pipeline through the pristine Rocky Mountains. While he changed his suit for a hockey jersey and learned to stomach a Tim Hortons iced caramel latté, this opportunisim rests in his DNA. Cows give milk, bankers make money.
COPitulate? Not a Chance!
Meanwhile, the show must go on for another year ... so the jets land and the new hotels fill up in another city as another country takes center-stage. And like Rotary clubs, these activists are simply another year older, with fewer showing up, and more questions about what it’s all worth. The diehard climate diplomacy elites will grace the venue to build up morale. Like Old Faithful, Michael Bloomberg will certainly make his triumphant entry (on his way to a competing WHO FCTC COP11 in Geneva) but fewer journalists will be following him on his handshake tour.
This reveals a major character flaw in the environmentalist strategy. They have habitually built the anticipation of failure into their campaigns. Activists have learnt to turn the expected policy setbacks into opportunities for their next campaign and funding pitch.
If regulators don’t ban plastics (because that would be stupid), the activists turn this anticipated defeat into more public fear of some nanoplastics crossing into their brains and use their inconclusive studies to raise anti-industry outrage.
If all synthetic pesticides aren’t banned (because that would be stupid), they will try to restrict conventional farmers from being able to export or earn a decent living.
If additives aren’t removed from food processing (because that would be stupid), activists open paths for the litigation industry to enrich themselves and bankrupt the food industry.
Foundations are donating tens of millions of dollars to astroturf tort law firms like Sher Edling to sue fossil fuel companies for damages from climate change, not because they have a chance of winning a single lawsuit, but because it will continue to pummel industry’s reputation.
Activists have, by nature, anticipated how their ideologies will never succeed, but have defined success in their a cleverly managed failure. So COP30’s paltry achievements have already been baked in. The strategy then is to take the higher moral ground, prejudicially Trumpify any opposing rational, and move forward to the next big event with well-articulated outrage and even more resolve from their foundation funders.
That was until Bill Gates wrote a note abandoning their blind idealism in favor of pragmatic development. One more setback for the true believers to turn into an opportunity?