Climate change activists and world leaders 70,000 strong have convened in Dubai, of all places, to once again lecture the world.
“Do as we say, not as we do” could once again be the theme of the 28th “Conference of the Parties,” nicknamed (these things must have some panache!) “COP28.”
Dignitaries like former Sen. John Kerry fly in from thousands of miles away, on private jets, to make speeches promising to reduce US dependence on oil, gas, and — errr… jet fuel.
“They want to impose real costs on Americans now, in exchange for speculative and hypothetical damage that might occur 20 years from now,” says Eric Eggers, co-host of The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer.
“Their goal is to change your life because of their claim that [climate change] is affecting everybody on the planet, and it’s essentially your fault,” Schweizer says. “So, they want to change the way you drive. They want to change what you eat. They want to change the temperature in your home. They want to change the lifestyle that you live, and the products that you buy, all in the name of this abstract claim that they can control the rise in temperatures globally.”
Schweizer notes that one of the leading climate change apostles, former vice president Al Gore, is these days co-running an investment fund called Millennium Generation. The fund has $40 billion currently under management and invests in a lot of things that generate greenhouse gases (tech and construction firms), but few that try to reduce it. Schweizer can’t resist pointing out that Gore’s partner is named David Blood, so the venture is literally a “blood and gore” fund.
More seriously, Schweizer calls out the hypocrisy of Gore’s “telling people to do something he’s not actually doing himself.”
The Government Accountability Institute has previously reported that during the Obama years, his administration gave billions of dollars to start-up green energy businesses, but that eight of every ten companies that received that funding had at least one board member that had been on the Obama campaign’s finance committee.
As Eggers notes on the show, “If enough people are making money on the ‘solution,’ the problem will never go away.”
And COP28 is full of high-minded plans to reduce carbon emissions or at least capture them, sometimes using processes that themselves take enormous amounts of energy. Carbon “capture” technologies often dissolve captured carbon into a liquid form and then pump it underground using pipes that have had problems with leaks. The manufacture of electric car batteries requires mining enormous quantities of cobalt, manganese, and lithium.
Meanwhile, conference attendees are gathered in heavily air-conditioned conference centers in Dubai, calling for the world to turn down their heat and consume less meat.
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