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Climate conference hypocrisy continues to be instructive
COP28, this year’s edition of the annual United Nations climate conference, has come and gone, setting a record for accredited participants, with more than 70,000. That’s a sizable increase over the previous year’s 49,000, and there were estimates of 400,000 others in the trade and technology expo around the conference. Canada sent more than 700.
The Nov. 30 to Dec. 12 event took place in the United Arab Emirates, one of the planet’s leading fossil fuel producers. There’s an irony there, but more pointed is the hypocrisy. These are the same politicians who are deliberately making fossil fuels more expensive to discourage your and my usage. It needs to be done, we’re told, because we face an “existential crisis.” Whatever it takes, because there is no Planet B!
But what’s up with the 70,000 plane tickets? What’s the CO2 count for that? Why doesn’t that matter? If we’re really at a crisis point, wouldn’t drastic measures be warranted at the highest levels too? How painful is it, really, to hold their conference via Zoom?
But no, we’re not at that level of crisis yet.
The hypocrisy is aggravating, but more importantly it is instructive. Whatever our leaders might be saying about a crisis, their actions tell us what they really think (1 John 3:18, Tit 1:16a, James 1:22) and what we should think too.
In a Dec. 6 post, the folks at the Climate Discussion Nexus made a plea for world leaders to demonstrate good faith by showing they can actually do what they propose.
“To all the people gathering at COP28 ….if you’re so sure this energy transition can work, and be fun exciting cheap easy and great, stop with the grand pontificating and finger-pointing, and show us a demonstration project. Show us just one large or even medium-sized jurisdiction that can run its economy on ‘green’ energy.”
We need to move off of fossil fuels? Before you propose it for the entire world, show us it can work in a small town somewhere. Show us how it can be done reliably and affordably. But until you can do that for a town, what reason would we have to think you could ever do it for the world?
