Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

Globalists’ Climate Grift Returns In Full Force

State Department Photo

America has walked out of the UN climate racket. The rest of the world hasn’t gotten the message.

Next month, some 100,000 politicians, bureaucrats, functionaries, activists and other grifters will descend on Antalya, Turkey (COP folks prefer Türkiye) for COP31, the UN’s annual climate Conference of the Parties. They will fly in, talk endlessly, and enjoy the best hotels, food, beverages, and hospitality Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can offer. Then they’ll fly home having plotted how to pry trillions more out of whatever wealthy nations are still willing to pay.

Even now, after real-world scientific, energy, and economic realities have bashed the UN’s fraudulent science, garbage-in/garbage-out climate models, anti-fossil-fuel activism, and renewable energy fantasies, climate crisis assertions still dominate news cycles, policy, and spending.

Türkiye will serve as a “bridge” between developed and developing countries. Co-host Australia will push global “clean energy acceleration” — the very policies that are crippling its own citizens’ energy reliability, jobs, economy, and living standards.

Like COP30, this will be an “implementation” conference, focused on turning existing commitments into “investment-ready projects,” especially by browbeating reluctant, once-wealthy nations into financing it all with trillions more dollars. The agenda hasn’t changed: “clean” energy, electrifying everything that now runs on “evil” fossil fuels, slashing methane and (plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide emissions, and a new “Climate Implementation Bridge” to turn plans into projects, which, by the COP31 president’s own admission, comes with no new funding to pay for those projects.

Here’s what the COP dignitaries know but won’t say.

More than 80% of global energy still comes from fossil fuels. China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Argentina and others are building coal and gas-fired power plants at breakneck speed to industrialize and lift people out of poverty. The most important government on Earth has walked away from the UN climate treaty, is skipping their gabfest — and is doing all it can to spur oil, gas, and coal production and use across the United States and the world.

And Canada, Britain, Germany, and the other countries they’ve counted on to bankroll their pipe dreams have wrecked their own economies with net-zero policies.

So, they are hedging their bets with a plethora of new crises, themes, and programs. Above all, they don’t want to lose their sinecures, program budgets, prestige, or power. Among them:

• Dynamic and resilient health systems (running on expensive, unreliable wind, solar, and backup power)
• Recycling materials of every description (they prefer the term “circularity”)
• Resilient, sustainable food policies (to restrict meat consumption and use of nitrogen fertilizers, biotech crops, and even tractors)
• Youth education (indoctrination and fearmongering, instilling fervent activism alongside the belief that they have no future)

They’ll have help from nearly 100 “civil society” groups: Climate Action Network, Greenpeace, 350.org, Amnesty International, the Turkish Climate Network, and more. All support the official “implementation” agenda but really intend to rant their demands for a “just, orderly and equitable” transition to “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy — and money (to them and their comrades) to make it happen. They want “accountability” for corporate and government “greenwashing” — but never for their own lies.

Now for the realities they want the world to keep ignoring.

Host country Turkey still generates 46% of its electricity with coal and natural gas. It uses less electricity than the increasingly reduced European average. And it remains one of Russia’s biggest natural gas customers.

“Green” energy is not clean, renewable, or sustainable. Wind, solar, backup, and transmission installations require massive amounts of metals, minerals, and plastics. They also generate monumental amounts of pollution and waste materials in mining, processing, manufacturing, and disposal. It cannot power modern industrial economies or build thriving communities where squalor and disease now reign.

Still-impoverished countries need abundant, reliable, affordable electricity, fuels, and petrochemical products to lift their people out of poverty, disease, malnutrition, and hopelessness. They should do what we did: employ their God-given free will, fundamental rights, and natural resource bounties to finance and build their own futures.

For decades, “We the People,” the taxpayers of America, helped bankroll these junkets and the schemes cooked up at them. Taxpayers in Britain, Germany, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere still pay for COP attendees’ airfare, hotels, and dining, and for the rising energy costs net-zero policies impose on workers and families, driving entire companies and industries to China and other nations still using fossil fuels.

None of this is just or equitable. It is eco-imperialism and carbon-colonialism.

The United Nations and its climate COPs have outlived their usefulness. The United States has finally said so. Every nation that truly cares about its people and future should follow, defund these programs — and reject the net-zero insanity these grifters intend to inflict on us all.

Craig Rucker is president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that champions free markets, property rights, and innovation as the keys to protecting both people and the environment.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.