COP21: The Only Six Things You Need to Know About the Paris Climate Debacle

By JAMES DELINGPOLE, BREITBART

Sometime round about now the negotiators at the Paris COP21 climate conference will be thrashing out the final details agreement which will make no measurable difference to “climate change” but will definitely cost all of us a great deal of money.

Here is what you need to know.

1. All that stuff you’ve read and heard about “time running out”, “deadlock” , “last minute deals” — it’s all a charade; everything was pre-ordained.

Every COP conference there has ever been has run on exactly the same lines. Whatever comes out of this one, it will be a fudge and a compromise whose only certain achievement will be to ensure that there are more such conferences next year (in sunny Marrakech, Morocco) and the one after and the one after that…

In truth, COP is not really about saving the planet. Rather, it’s a massive jobs fair for activists, shyster politicians, bureaucrats, corporate scamsters, and people with otherwise worthless degrees in “sustainability”, “conservation biology”, “ecology”, etc.

2. No serious person in the world believes in man-made climate change any more. They just don’t.

When did the edifice finally collapse? Well there are lots of competing candidates. But if you haven’t seen the testimony presented by John Christy, Judith Curry, or William Happer at the hearings in Congress earlier this week, that’s a good place to start. Then, in a league of his own, is Mark Steyn — who doesn’t mince his words…

3. If you live by fairies you will die by fairies.

So if no serious person in the world believes in man-made climate change any more, who does? Only people like US Secretary of State John Kerry — who, as we know, has staked the reputation of the Obama presidency on how well it deals with this non-existent problem.

In order to do this, of course, he must somehow engineer a global agreement on carbon dioxide emissions reductions. But for that to happen everyone — not just the Western delegations — must pretend to believe in climate fairies. And unfortunately, the non-Western delegations, led by China and India, just aren’t playing ball. Hence Kerry’s reported frustration and threatened walk-out.

The night saw an ugly brawl as US Secretary Of State John Kerry threatened that developed countries would walk out of the agreement if they were asked to commit to differentiation or financial obligations. “You can take the US out of this. Take the developed world out of this. Remember, the Earth has a problem. What will you do with the problem on your own?” he told ministers from other countries during a closed-door negotiation on the second revised draft of the Paris agreement.

“We can’t afford in the hours we are left with to nit-pick every single word and to believe there is an effort here that separates developed countries from developing countries. That’s not where we are in 2015. Don’t think this agreement reflects that kind of differentiation,” he added. Making a veiled threat that the agreement could fail if the US was pushed for financial obligations, Kerry said, “At this late hour, hope we don’t load this with differentiation… I would love to have a legally binding agreement. But the situation in the US is such that legally binding with respect to finance is a killer for the agreement.”

The problem here is very simple. Kerry has become a victim of his own fantasy game. If you accept the theory that man-made carbon dioxide produced by industry has been driving the earth’s temperatures towards catastrophe, then it follows that the developed nations are largely to blame for the damage done thus far. The countries of the developing world are entirely within their rights to demand reparations for this, and Kerry has no right to complain.

4. China and India are running this show.

We know what China thinks: tell the gwailo what they want to hear — and go ahead with industrialization anyway. The same is true of India: and who can blame it? If the Western nations choose to bomb their economies back to the Dark Ages by cutting carbon dioxide emissions and driving up energy prices, that’s their problem. But it shouldn’t become the problem of those developing countries whose first priority, quite rightly, is giving their people a better stand of living. And to do that, you need cheap energy (from fossil fuels), not expensive, unreliable renewable energy which is only viable with government subsidy.

This, as the Times reports, is the cause of the deadlock.

Britain and other rich countries face demands for $3.5 trillion (£2.3 trillion) in payments to developing nations to secure a deal in Paris to curb global warming. Developing countries have added a clause to the latest draft of the text under which they would be paid the “full costs” of meeting plans to cut emissions. The amount paid by rich countries is a key unresolved issue at the climate conference in Paris.

Essentially, China and India have got the Western nations over a barrel because, unlike the Western nations, they don’t believe in climate fairies and therefore feel they have no moral obligation to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions to save the world because they know it won’t save the world. Therefore, all they need to do is sit back, watch people like John Kerry stew, and ramp up their demand for compensation in the full knowledge that the West needs this climate agreement far more than the developing world does.

5. If this doesn’t end in stalemate then you know the West has lost.

See 3. and 4. above. China and India (and the rest of the developing world) have nothing to gain from making concessions. Therefore they won’t make concessions. At least not meaningful ones.

6. Never forget: this whole show is the biggest waste of time and money in history.

In Paris, the stated aim was to prevent the earth’s temperatures rising more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. To experience a similar temperature change, simply walk from the top of the Eiffel Tower to the bottom; or move from downtown San Francisco to Berkeley. That’s the temperature change on which the global economy is being staked in Paris.

Remember also that we know already what difference this conference is going to make to global temperatures because the participating nations have already announced what their carbon dioxide emissions are going to be.

If all the world’s leading nations stick to the carbon-reduction commitments they will make in Paris this week, then they will stave off “global warming” by the end of this century by 0.170 degrees C.

Oh – and that’s the optimistic scenario, calculated by Bjorn Lomborg, assuming that countries like, say, China don’t lie or cheat about how much CO2 they’re burning secretly.

At an annual cost to the global economy of $1.5 trillion.

Lucky we’ve all got a great sense of humor, eh?