EDITORIAL: UN irrelevant on climate change
Article content
A sure sign of the growing irrelevance of the United Nations’ annual gabfest on climate change is indicated by who isn’t there this year.
Article content
The key absentee at what’s formally know as the 30th conference of the parties, or COP 30, being held in Belem, Brazil is U.S. President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a hoax.
Article content
But also missing is Prime Minister Mark Carney who, prior to entering politics, was the UN’s special envoy for climate action.
At the time, he was the world’s leading corporate spokesman for carbon taxes, which he said were too low.
But that was then and this is now.
As prime minister, his first act was to kill former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s wildly unpopular consumer carbon tax.
He’s also postponed Trudeau’s unrealistic mandate that 20% of all new car sales had to be EVs starting next year and is currently in talks with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith about building a new oil pipeline to export bitumen to Asian markets.
Article content
Carney says he intends to replace Trudeau’s consumer carbon tax with an “improved and tightened” industrial carbon tax — details still to come.
But as for the UN, its hypocrisy and tone deafness on climate change has finally caught up with it.
Flying into the world’s vacation hotspots year after year, accompanied by political leaders, billionaires, celebrities and lobbyists travelling by corporate jets, urging everyone else to lower their standard of living to “save the planet”, no longer impresses the masses.
Ditto the tens of thousands of NGOs, rent seekers and protesters — this year there were more than 50,000 registered delegates — who in the space of 12 days from Nov. 10-21 will generate a carbon footprint nearly equivalent to the annual greenhouse gases emitted by the island nation of Samoa.
And what does the UN have to show for these annual orgies of consumption?
Not much. When most nations on earth signed on to the UN’s Paris climate accord in 2015, pledging to lower their energy-related emissions, the global total stood at 32.1 billion tonnes.
Last year they reached a record high of 37.8 billion tonnes, an increase of almost 18%.
“Do as we say, not as we do,” has never been a convincing way of inspiring people.
RECOMMENDED VIDEO
We apologize, but this video has failed to load.
Share this article in your social network