COP 26 was a Scam
Every time world leaders gather to discuss the climate emergency it is all but guaranteed to be a scam. They’re not there to actually solve the climate catastrophe. They’re there to look like they’re doing something about it, brag about what little progress they’ve made or intend to make, and shame those who haven’t done or pretend to be doing as much, to set goals that are insufficient and which will not be achieved. The US, represented by Biden, hit every check on that list. He was quiet about the fact that the US is the world’s worst historical polluter. He pretended we’ve made significant progress and will do even better. He denigrated China (and Russia) for not being at the conference and for being the world’s current worst polluter (except if the US military’s emissions and wastes were factored into our score, the US military being the world’s single worst polluter, which may secure us the top spot). Obama also came and took some shots, as if his own presidency wasn’t marred by the failures and lies of his own climate pledges.
Biden’s words and plans were a scam, belied by his actions. He’s doing very little to help the climate crisis, failing to meet his modest campaign promises. Rather than fighting for the goals put forth by his own administration, he’s readily capitulating to fossil fuel whores both in the US and at the international summit, not committing the US to a coal use reduction pledge at COP26, at the behest of degenerate coal-cum bitch Joe Manchin. But he was far from alone. Everything said by those with the most power to act was bullshit and scams.
Net zero, or carbon neutral, is a scam. It is very much a scheme of economists and creative accountants rather than climate scientists and environmentalists. It’s a system based on “offsets’’ and some moderate reduction of fossil fuel burning, rather than the necessary radical reduction. It makes some sense on paper, but in practice is mostly bullshit. The system of paying other countries and companies not to pollute as much so that your country or company can pollute as much as you want is ludicrously stupid. The notion that you can make up for pumping poison into the atmosphere by planting trees is the reasoning of an idiot child.
Carbon capture is a scam. It’s a scam because it doesn’t exist, not at the required efficacy or efficiency level, and certainly not on the required scale. While possible that it could be improved and more widely deployed, it is a very expensive process, so far prohibitively so for the fossil fuel industry that is its strongest proponent. It’s far cheaper for them to pay a “carbon tax,” if even that, than it is to use carbon capture technology, so they’ve got no incentive. They’ll continue selling the scam because pretending that they’ll eventually do something saves them the cost of doing something now, allowing their profits to grow unimpeded.
Counterintuitive as it may sound, politicians shouldn’t be allowed to decide much of anything. By the nature of their positions, always temporary and corrupt to some extent, and many of them old, their decisions are based on short term interests. The reason they set goals like eliminating coal energy by 2050 or reaching “net zero” by 2070 is because by then they’ll be out of office or dead, their promises forgotten and irrelevant. They’re capitalists: profits in the short term are more valuable than long-term sustainability. Because of course it’s stupid to plan to keep using fossil fuels after another half century from both an existential and a business perspective; by then they may have exhausted the world’s supply and left the Earth a toxic, hollowed wreck.
We need more climate militants. COP 26 would have been much more productive if the conference had been invaded and locked down by armed climate activists. If the bullshitting world leaders had been held captive and forced to face the climate crisis challenge at gunpoint, something might actually have been achieved.
The only people who said anything of worth were those few inside, and many more outside, the conference, with the least power to do anything about the climate crisis. The environmental activists who came to Glasgow to protest and shame the political hacks and failures said things actually worth hearing. They’re on the right side of history. They’re brave and heroic people. They’re not enough. Protests, marches, words, are not enough. I do not encourage or condone violence, but it is only through action and the inevitability of violence that life on Earth can be saved. Violence is already occurring, but it is all one-sided. The corporations that profit from the Earth’s destruction, the people that control them and those that do their bidding, are committing mass violence. They’re killing whole communities as the byproduct of environmental devastation, they’re murdering activists who speak up or fight back, they will destroy organized human society and may cause the end of life on Earth. Words and civilized discourse are the moral course at the beginning of any disagreement, not this near the end, so close to death. When your opposition is intractable, and determined on global extermination, words fail, and violence is the only recourse. Violence awful, but it’s not always wrong. It’s wrong and immoral not to meet their evil violence with righteous violence.