Signs of disintegration characterize the World Climate Conference in Belém, Brazil. The United Nations (UN) is quietly abandoning its climate targets there: Most of the 198 member states are no longer complying with the obligations of the once-celebrated Paris Agreement 2015.
For the 30th anniversary of the annual series of conferences with its estimated 50,000 participants, the most important heads of state are not attending, and those who come to the party are no longer bringing gifts. The anniversary celebration in the birthplace of the Rio de Janeiro Framework Convention on Climate Change is rather joyless. At the 30th “Conference of the Parties,” or “COP 30,” the grand dreams of many would-be saviors of the planet are bursting
Climate activists and politicians had actually declared the 2020s the “decisive decade” in the fight against global warming — but halfway through, disillusion is already a certainty. As the UN announced a few days before the conference began, the target temperature threshold of 1.5 degrees will “inevitably be exceeded” in the early 2030s. With this failure, climate protection is now officially seen a political loser issue.
At the meeting of leaders in Belém, only 53 leaders did appear. However, the heads of state of the US, China, India and Russia -- four of the world’s largest CO2 polluters - stayed away from the assembly. China and India are constantly building new coal-fired power plants and using this cheap energy to produce solar panels for the European Union (EU), which are intended to replace the EU’s own coal power plants as an important energy source. What a farce, only one of the highlights of that moral self-deception.
In the tense geopolitical climate that leaves no room for cooperative multilateralism, without which nothing is possible in climate protection, the systemic competition between democracies and autocracies has created geostrategic risks and rivalries that are causing many leaders to retreat into nationalism for self-protection. Instead of free trade, the new buzzword “resilience” sets the direction. It means independence from trading partners, national self-sufficiency and protectionism through tariffs. Globalization is going in reverse. Climate protection is the first victim in such an environment.
The fact that serious negotiations are taking place in Belém regarding the bizarre demand to provide developing countries with US$1.3 trillion in “climate aid” by 2035 – per year – demonstrates the disconnect from reality within the echo chamber of the climate movement. The fact that the major donor, the US, is no longer participating is ignored, as is the fact that industrialized nations like Germany, France, Italy, etc. which are faced with high budget deficits and not knowing how they will renovate schools and transport infrastructure, pay for rearms and ensure social standards.
Last October, the UNFCCC (the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) decided to raise the annual climate fund target from US$300 billion to US$1300 billion by 2035 (per year).
But the figure actually binding only Western nations, often labelled as the “climate sinners”?
Meanwhile, the world’s biggest emitters like China, India, Russia seem to walk away untouched. One might ask: Is this still genuine climate policy -- or rather a global redistribution scheme dressed in green?
You smell what it’s all about: the plan of the largest wealth redistribution in human history. It seems to be the climate, but in truth it is about the establishment of a global socialist levelling, led and carried out by the unelected bureaucrats of UN agencies. So there is talk in Belem about thousands of billion dollars to be drawn from the pockets of Western citizens to fight a fiction. This fiction is covered with the rhetorical blanket called “climate justice.” And when the term “justice” comes up, the separation between perpetrators and victims also emerges: Western countries and Japan are the perpetrators, almost the rest of the world (namely the Global South) are the victims. In this delusional system, the stone-rich oil states in the Middle East are not perpetrators. China, now by far the largest emitter/polluter of CO2 in the world, is ironically a victim of Western CO2 emissions. India will be the same size of China in about 20 years and is also covered as a climate damage victim.
When accountability is missing, what remains is not effective climate policy, but moral theater.
You could laugh about this farce - if it weren’t so sad.