The COP28 charade
Monday 18th December 2023 | Robert Lyman
‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’, wrote William Shakespeare. He might have been foreseeing the show recently concluded in Dubai, where over 100,000 people reportedly came to play their roles at COP 28, the 28th major climate policy summit.
The centrepiece of the gathering was discussion of the ‘stocktake’ prepared by the United Nations, an assessment of countries’ performance in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in accordance with their five-year plans (‘NDCs’). The final stocktake report served as the decision document. The world’s media declared, with almost one voice, that the conference had produced a ‘historic agreement to transition away from fossil fuels’. Professor Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany declared that the decisions taken at COP 28 marked the true ‘beginning of the end of the fossil fuel-driven world economy’.
In fact, COP 28 was a spectacular failure, as measured against the goals that the UN had set for it from the beginning. It did not achieve a single one of the objectives that climate activists sought. Even more important, in spite of the voluntary commitments that various governments made during the conference (mostly aimed at domestic audiences), it is virtually certain to have little or no effect on the global trends in GHG emissions or on the climate.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/the-cop28-charade/
