Weirdly, the Paper Of Record forgot to mention all the long fossil fueled trip, mostly on private jets, world leaders took to NYC
At Global Climate Summit This Week, U.S. Isolation Was on Full Display
At a climate summit at the United Nations on Wednesday, the vast majority of the world’s nations gathered to make their newest pledges to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.
Geopolitical heavyweights including China, Russia, Japan and Germany were there. Dozens of small island states were there. The world’s poorest countries, including Chad and the Central African Republic, were there. Venezuela, Syria, Iran — there, too.
The United States was not.
There are few issues on which the United States is more diplomatically isolated from the rest of the world than climate change. President Trump’s hostility to renewable energy, which he clearly broadcast in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly, is at odds with the rapid construction of wind farms, solar arrays and other renewable energy sources in a range of countries. The construction boom includes even oil-producing giants like Saudi Arabia, which is adding solar capacity at a rapid clip.
Do we care? Does Trump care? If the other nations want to mortgage their future on this scam, have at it. If the Elites in other countries want to use this to initiate authoritarianism, real, that’s on them. None of those Elites at the UN nor their staffs are practicing what they preach.
At Wednesday’s climate summit, 121 countries were scheduled to deliver a message very different from Mr. Trump’s, pledging to rein in global emissions not only for the sake of trying to slow catastrophic global warming but because renewables are getting cheaper faster than was previously thought. In some cases, renewables now produce electricity more affordably than plants that burn fossil fuels, bolstering the argument made by some countries that solar and wind can help with economic growth while providing energy security by limiting reliance on imports of fuels like coal, oil or gas.
Can they start by making their leaders take trains and sailing ships back to their home companies?
Diplomatically isolated, perhaps, but actually isolated, not so much, because what we’ve seen are grandiose promises from much of the rest of the world, promises which they have not kept!
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My darling bride — of 46 years, four months and six days — and I just spent two weeks in Greece, and the Greeks have invested a lot of money in solar panels and windmills, along with miles and miles of roadbed tunnels under the mountains, yet the rest of the country is poor. Driving along the A1 and A4 superhighways, I was constantly struck by the number of abandoned houses and commercial buildings. The Greeks tend to build with stone and masonry, using far less wood than we do, so the walls stand, but the windows are broken out and the roofs collapsed.
Prices are low: we could eat out twice in Greece for what one meal would cost us in the United States. Property is cheap: I was tempted to buy a good house on the Ionian Sea beach in Kefalonia, for only 315,000€, though Mrs Pico was vetoing that.
What we saw were government projects, heavily financed by money from the EU, and far, far less local jobs and opportunities.
Well, investing in windmills and solar panels might look good to the cultists, but they provide few jobs on the back end: the maintenance jobs on those windmills and solar panels do not require many workers. What Greece really needs is industrial development that puts real people to work in real jobs.
Of course they’re going to build solar farms in the Mid East, they’re got tens of thousands of square miles of nothing but sand. But where I live, someone wants to put in a 500 acre solar farm on the edge of town. Why would you put it there other than someone owns some land and can make a buck selling it to Solar Panel D-Bags R Us ? No one opposes alternative energy, just the stupidity that has been shown over the last 30 years of govt corruption.