Next month in Brazil, expect the climate cops to party, plot

OPINION:

Repeating the annual United Nations ritual yet again, COP30 will run from Nov. 10 to Nov. 21 in Belem, on the edge of Brazil’s northwestern Amazon rainforest.

The city will host some 70,000 scientists, activists, journalists, politicians and observers (including CFACT), who will party, participate in endless meetings, and plot ways to convert waning worries about a planetary climate crisis into continued sinecures for those who profit.

This 30th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change intends to “accelerate global action” on climate change through “multilateral cooperation” and “nature-based” solutions.

Its key priorities include limiting industrial-era (post-Little Ice Age) global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, advancing “just transitions” from fossil fuels to “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy, and addressing social and economic impacts resulting from climate changes imposed on poor countries by rich developed countries, primarily by transferring trillions of dollars from rich to poor nations.

Other “core themes” include protecting rainforests and other sensitive areas and creating a global “bioeconomy” that “prioritizes the sustainable use of biological resources” (plants, animals, microorganisms and their derivatives) to produce food, energy, raw materials and other essential products “while minimizing environmental harm and promoting social equity.”

Diversity, equity, inclusion, social and climate justice, “net zero” and special concern for women and children who will be most “grievously impacted” by so-called climate change remain the guiding principles.

COP30 arrives hot on the heels of an International Court of Justice decision declaring that all countries are obligated to prevent climate change and ensure a clean, healthy, sustainable environment for all.

This supposedly includes the United States, even though it withdrew from International Court of Justice jurisdiction 39 years ago, will officially withdraw from the Paris climate accord in January, will not participate in COP30, and is unlikely to pump billions of dollars more into U.N. climate funds for leftist notions of “reparations” and “resilience.”

COP30 and other U.N. and European Union programs will also attempt to encroach on U.S. sovereignty, especially through mechanisms such as the “Baku to Belem Roadmap” for climate finance.

Meanwhile, British House of Lords member Daniel Hannan observes that all 50 U.S. states — including Mississippi, the poorest of them all — are now richer than Britain. While Britain lessened use of fossil fuel energy to assuage its climate fear neurosis, thus destroying its industries and jobs, Mississippi’s pro-growth policies and cheap fossil and nuclear energy increased household incomes by 6% in 2024.

In fact, the average electricity price for British households now equals 35¢ per kilowatt-hour and is projected to rise to 54¢ by 2026 or 2027. By comparison, families pay 19.5¢ per kilowatt-hour in Pennsylvania, 15.1¢ in Florida and 13.5¢ in Mississippi. No wonder many Britons can’t afford to heat or cool their homes and their employers can’t afford to stay in business.

The ironies, insanities, hypocrisies and hard realities hardly end there:

• While COP30 pushes for “phasing out” fossil fuels in favor of wind, solar and other “clean” energy, host Brazil is expanding its offshore oil and gas exploration and development.
• Belem is largely surrounded by Amazon rainforests. So participants can reach the city more easily, Brazil constructed an 8-mile, four-lane highway through those protected areas, felling thousands of trees and clearing tens of thousands of acres. Crews used gasoline and diesel-powered equipment and paved the road with oil-based asphalt.
• Belem and surrounding communities had only 25,000 to 53,000 hotel beds. Officials went on a building spree, erecting new accommodations, converting shipping containers into private quarters, turning schools into dorms, docking cruise ships as floating hotels — and clearing more rainforest in the process.
• Greenpeace, the United Nations and other climate scolds and Earth protectors have decried (and exaggerated) rainforest destruction for decades. They have ignored the fact that wind, solar, backup battery and transmission line installations wipe out millions of acres of biodiverse habitats and kill countless birds, bats and other wildlife and plants — dozens of times more than coal, gas and nuclear power plants.
• Their enormously greater raw material requirements mean that mines, processing plants, factories and pollution dumps pollute and destroy even more crop, scenic, and wildlife habitat lands.
• COP29 in Azerbaijan agreed on a Collective Quantified Goal for climate finance of $300 billion annually by 2035, to be transferred from industrialized nations and corporations to poor and rapidly developing nations. However, the recipient countries decided this was far too little and launched the Baku to Belem initiative to demand $1.3 trillion annually by 2035. The money will supposedly come from currently or recently wealthy industrialized nations, as they de-develop, strive for net zero and impoverish more of their citizens. Meanwhile, China and India will be exempt from payment obligations or might even become recipients.

These concerns barely scratch the surface, but, as always, “hopes are high” that this time, under Brazil’s liberal environmentalist president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, real “progress” will be made in saving the planet, even if a few hectares of rainforest must be slashed and burned to get us there.

• Craig Rucker is president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org).