COP28, the summit of hypocrisy, begins

The most important climate event of the year begins today, the Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Unfccc). This is its 28th edition, and world leaders will meet in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, (yes, in an oil country). COP28 will be presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, Minister of Industry and Technology, his top official is the executive director of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), this paradox has raised several complaints and many rumors of resignation in the run-up to the event, although they already seem to have been settled the suspicions. The COPs aim to negotiate and reach international agreements linked to climate change. At the 1997 COP, the Kyoto Protocol was established, and in 2015, the Paris Agreement was signed. Both documents have been complete failures, except for their ability to consume huge amounts of money that countries invest in sustaining the hypocrisy of world leaders.

This year, COP28 will have the notable record of leaving the largest carbon footprint in the history of UN summits, the result of the thousands of airplanes that will transport its ostentatious participants, a colorful detail that will not make those interested blush. The conference, which will be held from November 30 to December 12, will focus on global strategies to reduce emissions and accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels in favor of green energy. Historically, top conference attendees have come under fire for traveling to them on private jets while lecturing about the importance of reducing emissions, but particularly this year, the number of attendees and a luxury concierge service that offered flights private charter for the climatological business event, reveals the false nature of the meeting. In addition to flying to the United Arab Emirates, attendees will stay in high-end hotels where they will serve, according to the COP28 website, "environmentally sustainable, socially responsible, delicious and nutritious food and beverages" - a relief.

One of the keys to COP28 is a kind of balance called "loss and damage," which amounts to an international program of "climate reparations." These are millionaire budgets that will come out of the pockets of taxpayers, mainly Americans, to reinforce the coffers of non-governmental organizations. A sidereal budget for activists that will attract record numbers of fans of the "climate emergency" willing to attack works of art and stick to the asphalt. Recently, the US special envoy for climate, John Kerry, suggested that the United States will pay "millions" to the fund, while China has very few obligations to said fund because it is classified as a "developing country" although it is the main emitter and the second economy in the world.

Usually in the COPs, in the first days, reports are presented and the systematically failed forecasts that, despite being inaccurate, continue to be widely disseminated. In addition to the reports on rising temperatures, the Global Carbon Project (GCP) report is added and the calendar of activities is extended to the protests of environmental groups such as Extinction Rebellion and its second brands. The second part is the plenary session, where the 198 signatory parties must show whether they did what they said they were going to do at COP27 in Egypt. Spoiler: no, they didn't, it's not their fault, COPs always toast to the Sun.

Summit after summit the objective is the same: decrease Co2, generate more funds for climate policies and their managers and everything possible to cut CO2 and methane emissions. The largest emitters do not do it, but on the other hand the EU does insist on condemning its countries and their economies with its obsession with cuts. The other issue is who pays for the commitments that leaders declaim. This is where the Fund takes center stage to compensate for losses and damages that is about to be launched. The sultan Al Jaber, in a letter to COP28 participants, argued that "if we want to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement, emerging and developing countries will need more than 2.4 trillion dollars of annual investment in climate action by 2030," but it remains to be seen which economies are candidates for these funds, because according to the agreement they would be developing countries, but with the definition of COP2, in 1992, China or Saudi Arabia belong to this group.

It should be remembered that there is also the UN Green Climate Fund (GCF), created in 2009 that was going to raise $100 billion annually from developed countries to implement the energy transition in developing countries, and which, according to OECD data, in 2021 added $89.6 billion, of which 73.1 billion were public funds, also achieving meager results, bordering on zero. According to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), rich countries should multiply their contributions by between 10 and 18 times, just to cover adaptation needs, but recently the UN published the Global Balance report in which he denounced that the States and economic agents had not done their homework either.

It has been almost a year since Joe Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia. The trip was intended to get the Saudis to produce more oil and gas and the same message was given to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, with the aim of reducing Russia's influence as a global producer. As always with multilateral forums, there is a disconnect between the rhetoric and the "realpolitik" that drives the real world. While some European countries are fervently embracing the green agenda, condemning their farmers to misery and mercilessly slaughtering their livestock. On the other hand, the production of fossil fuels is promoted in the Middle East, which apparently is on another planet and that must be why it does not receive Stop Oil demonstrations. All these manipulations will not take place on the COP agenda.

There is a strong moralizing component aimed at social control on the part of the West when it comes to this and other similar conferences. The global elites have long been mocking their citizens, formerly known as voters, who do not seem to be able to cross-reference the simplest variables or unite causes (their growing poverty) with consequences (the green policies imposed without sense or criteria). That is why the world's leaders have the luxury of not telling people that sustainable development goals and climate mandates will mean poverty, hunger, control and loss of property rights, mobility and expression. The disconnect is such that, for example, Charles III, Rishi Sunak and Lord Cameron, all committed heat fans, will fly separately, each on their private planes, to the climate change summit.

There is enormous financial power behind COP28 that will wield considerable power to impose policies that do not have the support of ordinary taxpayers who suffer from the implementation of these delusions. There are plans to change diet, reduce car ownership, limit flights, restrict the use of fertilizers and ban the use of natural gas. The media are going to flood the front pages with good news that is not even spent writing, but rather comes from the plants gathered at the COP, to prepare the population to accept these restrictions. It is impossible to overstate how delusional and catastrophic the UN proposal is. More than 80 percent of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, the idea of NetZero is simply hunger and misery. Furthermore, China is not going to suspend its industrial revolution nor will India stop producing billions of dollars in fossil fuels. Neither will the US, where more than 60 percent of electricity generation comes from gas and coal.

But the narrative of alarmism is what these meetings pursue. In the United Kingdom alone, the Gates Foundation donated more than $83 million to British publications, with The Guardian and the BBC being the biggest beneficiaries of such generosity. Associated Press announced the hiring of 20 climate change journalists after receiving $8 million in funding from green foundations. The Covering Climate Now (CC Now) Foundation supplies more than 500 media outlets with ready-to-publish material. The mainstream media will double down on stories about climate breakdown, especially in the COP period.

In his feverish campaign to star at COP28, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that "the era of fossil fuels has failed," ignoring that the Industrial Revolution is humanity's greatest achievement, which propelled the world from misery to abundance thanks to which health and life expectancy increased exponentially. Guterres proclaimed that humanity had entered the era of the global boil that would bring us almost irremediably closer to extinction. And then he made a trip to Antarctica to reveal to the world that he had "personally" verified the effects of climate change on the penguin population and the extent of glaciers, a waste of fakes and statements without scientific rigor.

But the question is how did Guterres move to Antarctica? On an airplane and a ship whose engines run on diesel. How many greenhouse gases has Guterres generated to make his video? This performance in Antarctica is similar to that performed by the Chilean socialist president Ricardo Lagos who, in March 2008, made a flight in a Hercules C-130 of the Chilean Air Force, also to denounce global warming (at that time this euphemism was fashionable). Nothing that was predicted came true, the apocalyptic messages never come true, that has not changed, nor has the use of airplanes so that the elites can go to conferences to tell us that we cannot use airplanes. Nor has the hypocrisy of the summits changed, nor their ulterior purposes: colonizing public debate for alarmist purposes, imposing their degrowth agenda and curtailing freedoms on a global scale.