Pirate's Cove

I can only hope so

It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics.

Ten years ago this fall, scientists and diplomats from 195 countries gathered in Le Bourget, just north of Paris, and hammered out a plan to save the world. They called it, blandly, the Paris Agreement, but it was obviously a climate-politics landmark: a nearly universal global pledge to stave off catastrophic temperature rise and secure a more livable future for all. Barack Obama, applauding the agreement as president, declared that Paris represented “the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got.” (snip through several paragraphs of yapping about Paris Agreement)

A decade later, we are living in a very different world. At last year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP29), the president of the host country, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, praised oil and gas as “gifts from God,” and though the annual conferences since Paris were often high-profile, star-studded affairs, this time there were few world leaders to be found. Joseph R. Biden, then still president, didn’t show. Neither did Vice President Kamala Harris or President Xi Jinping of China or President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission. Neither did President Emmanuel Macron of France, often seen as the literal face of Western liberalism, or President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, often seen as the face of an emergent movement of solidarity across the poor and middle-income world. In the run-up to the conference, an official U.N. report declared that no climate progress at all had been made over the previous year, and several of the most prominent architects of the whole diplomatic process that led to Paris published an open letter declaring the agreement’s architecture out of date and in need of major reforms.

This year’s conference, which takes place in Brazil this November, is meant to be more significant: COP30 marks 10 years since Paris, and all 195 parties to the 2015 agreement are supposed to arrive with updated decarbonization plans, called Nationally Determined Contributions, or N.D.C.s. But when one formal deadline passed this past February, only 15 countries — just 8 percent — had completed the assignment. Months later, more plans have trickled in, but arguably only one is actually compatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement, the climate scientist Piers Forster recently calculated, and more than half of them represent backsliding.

Perhaps they are all tired of it? Perhaps the politicians pushing the scam realize that the peasants are tired of it all, and politicians usually do not want to lose their positions, eh?

And neither is it a story particular to America. The retreat from climate politics has been widespread, even in the midst of a global green-energy boom. From 2019 to 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate-adaptation and mitigation policies each year, according to the energy analyst Nat Bullard. In 2023, the number dropped under 200. In 2024, it was only 50 or so. In many places — like in South America and in Europe — existing laws have already been weakened or are under pressure from shifting political coalitions now pushing to undermine them.

And therein lies a big problem: more and more citizens are noticing that this has less to do with science and more to do with Government controlling the citizens, all while the people implementing these laws and policies refuse to practice what they preach dictate

Few advocates believed naïvely in the caricatured versions of those propositions, but even so, it was seductive to imagine a kind of flywheel effect unfolding, with faster action enabling still faster action through public enthusiasm for a new and transformative green industrial revolution. At least when it came to politics, the flywheel never got spinning. Globally, concern about warming is still rising, but only slowly — and while large majorities in many countries say they support faster decarbonization, other polls show that voters don’t actually prioritize decarbonization and, crucially, aren’t willing to pay much to bring it about.

Yeah, Doing Something is popular in theory, but, when it comes time to practice it? Not so much. I also suspect that those in the 1st World are tired of the constant litany of doom and gloom. You can only take so much.

I hope this trend continues.

Read: Bummer: The Whole World Has Soured On Climate (scam) Politics »