"This month, climate change celebrates its 33rd birthday. On June 23,
1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified that the greenhouse effect
had been detected. “Global Warming Has Begun,” The New York Times declared the next day. Indeed, it had.A year older than Alexander the Great when he died, climate change took less than one-third of a century to conquer the West.
Before the month was out, the Toronto climate conference declared that
humanity was conducting an uncontrolled
experiment “whose ultimate
consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.”The tendency to catastrophism was present at the outset of global warming. The previous year, at a secretive meeting of scientists that included the IPCC’s first chair, it had been recognized that
traditional cost-benefit analysis was inappropriate, on account of the
“risk of major transformations of the world of future generations.” The
logic of this argument requires that climate change be presented as
potentially catastrophic—otherwise, the cure would appear worse than the
putative disease.
Although catastrophism gave climate change emotive power, the most consistent feature of climate change is the failure of
predictions of catastrophe to materialize. In 1990, Martin Parry,
a future cochair of an IPCC working group, produced a report claiming
that the world could suffer mass starvation and soaring food prices
within 40 years. Yet the prevalence of undernourishment in
developing countries has been on a downward trend since the 1970s and
was nearly halved, from 23.3% in 1991 to 12.9% in 2015.In 1990, the General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing the
Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on
Climate Change, which produced a final text in time for the 1992 Rio
Earth Summit.
The most important features of the 1992 climate convention are its ground plan, carving the world in two, with
the developed North listed in Annex I, and the doctrine of “common but
differentiated responsibilities” (the first principle listed in the
convention and arguably its governing one). The bifurcation was made
concrete in 1995 at the first conference of the parties in Berlin.
Presided over by Angela Merkel as Germany’s environment minister, the
Berlin Mandate stipulated that Annex I parties should strengthen their
commitment to decarbonize on condition that non–Annex I parties did not,
preparing the way for the Kyoto Protocol two years later.The
Clinton administration hadn’t given much thought to the
implications of
the Berlin Mandate. The Senate did. In July 1997, by 95 votes (including
those of then-senators Biden and Kerry) to zero, it adopted the
Byrd-Hagel resolution: America should not sign any protocol that imposed
limits on Annex I parties unless it also imposed specific, time-tabled
commitments on non–Annex I countries. Although the Clinton
administration signed the Kyoto Protocol, the Senate had killed U.S.
participation; it was left to the incoming president, George W. Bush, to
garner the opprobrium for stating the obvious. Both he and Barack Obama
pursued essentially the same post-Kyoto strategy of trying to get China
and other major emerging economies to make treaty commitments to
decarbonization, an attempt that failed at the 2009 Copenhagen climate
conference, when China, India, South Africa, and Brazil vetoed a new
climate treaty.Todd Stern, President Obama’s climate negotiator, had the twin objectives of crafting something that China would accept but that didn’t require the Senate’s advice and consent. The outcome was the Paris climate agreement. It embodies the climate equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Sinatra Doctrine of
allowing individual parties to the agreement to “do it their way.”
Hailed as a game changer in the fight to save the planet, the reality of
Paris was rather different. Just as Gorbachev’s Sinatra Doctrine was an
admission that the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War, the Paris
agreement signaled that the West had given up on having a global
decarbonization regime, with credible sanctions against free riding.
Although
the Obama administration played an essential role in its gestation, the
U.S. is the biggest loser from the Paris agreement. America is to forfeit its recently won position as the world’s largest producer of hydrocarbon energy. For what?
----By 1988, despite the economic expansion of the 1980s, the
West’s
emissions had grown by only 3.8%, while the rest of the world’s had
grown by 27.0%.----After 2002, non-Western emissions grew even
faster. In the 12 years before 2002, non-Western emissions grew by
21.2%; and in the subsequent 12 years, by 76.8%. By 2014, with Western
emissions broadly flat over the 24-year period, Western emissions had
shrunk to 26% of the total, and the share of non-Western emissions had
risen to 74%. In less than a decade and a half, the increase in
non-Western emissions outstripped the combined total of U.S. and E.U.
emissions. In terms of affecting the physics of global warming, it
doesn’t really matter what the West does any more.
Environmentalism would not have become the dominant ideology in the West
without the deployment of the UN’s climate apparatus: the annual cycle
of climate conferences spliced periodically with ones that are going to
save the planet (Kyoto in 1997; Bali in 2007; Copenhagen in 2009; Paris
in 2015; and Glasgow in 2021). Then there’s the IPCC, set up by the UN
Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, and its
five—soon to be six—generations of assessment reports.
---All ideologies seek power. Seen in this light, global warming gave
environmentalism the means for it to conquer the
West and become the
dominant ideology of our age. Environmentalism’s attitude toward nuclear
power provides a test for this proposition. If the paramount concern of
environmentalists had been to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and
slow down climate change, they would campaign to keep existing nuclear
power stations and build new ones. Yet viable nuclear power stations are
being prematurely closed in California, New York, Germany, and Belgium.
Why?Nuclear power is a Promethean crime of humanity
stealing the deepest secrets of nature to release unlimited quantities
of energy, in the eyes of environmentalists—a crime far worse than
global warming. Instead, humanity must live within the rhythms and
constraints decreed by nature; hence environmentalists’ belief that
power stations should be replaced by inefficient, weather-dependent wind
and solar farms.
The growth of wind and solar generation
is not a market-driven phenomenon of a superior technology displacing
an obsolete one. It’s what happens when governments heavily subsidize
zero-marginal cost output, flooding wholesale
markets with unwanted electricity when there’s too much sun and wind
and risking power failures when there’s too little.
Yet the lopsided arithmetic of the West versus the rest’s
emissions has not softened the effectiveness of global warming as an
ideological weapon because it is not based on any rational calculus but
derives from its threat of planetary catastrophe. ---The future,
as it had been in Marxism, again becomes “the great category of
blackmail,” as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes in “The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse.”
---Climate
change does represent an existential threat to Western civilization,
although not in the way environmentalists say. Net-zero climate policies
threaten to undermine the internal cohesiveness of Western societies
and drain them of economic vitality. Externally, they will accelerate
the redistribution of power away from the West to those nations that
decide not to decarbonize, especially to China.
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, candidly admits that
forcing companies to disclose their emissions isn’t transparency for
transparency’s sake: “disclosure should be a means to achieving a more
sustainable and inclusive capitalism.” This collusion between the
administrative state and climate activists to bypass Congress has been
condemned by Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee. “Activists
with no fiduciary duty to the company or its shareholders are trying to
impose their progressive political views on publicly traded companies,
and the country at large, having failed to enact change via the elected
government,” Senator Toomey and his colleagues wrote in a letter to SEC chair Gary Gensler earlier this month.
In
addition to this usurpation of the political prerogatives of democratic
government, forcing business to take on governmental functions to
address societal problems will see them, over time, acquire the modes
and culture of government bureaucracies." ZeroHedge
Now we see one way that the Little Horn Power (via Laudato Si' - the Green Encyclical) can force the Merchants of the World to do what it wants---for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived. Revelation 18:23
#3 Sweden (3.3%) 
#4 Germany (3.1%) 
#5 Canada (0.9%) 
#6 South Korea (0.6%)
#7 Indonesia (0.3%)
#8 Netherlands (0.3%)
#9 Poland (0.3%) 
#10 Portugal (0.3%) 
