From CFACT

By Peter Murphy

UN & China make impervious demands for cash & control

Belém, Brazil

Absurdities abound at this year’s United Nations Climate Summit, COP30, in Brazil. This is not unique to these annual gatherings, yet never cease to amaze.

The standouts at this year’s summit thus far start at the top, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres, whose opening speech raised hysteria and gaslighting to new heights. China’s Vice Premier, whose nation seeks global dominance, also weighed in with calls to uphold “true multilateralism… [and] coordination.” The host country’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, screeched about those in opposition to the UN’s climate agenda, evidently with U.S. President Donald Trump living rent-free in his cranium.

It’s all too rich for leading globalists demanding more cash and control over the sovereignty of individual nations, including their economies and living standards — just to keep the average global temperature increase from exceeding 1.5 degrees a quarter century from now, which they assume will occur — but cannot prove — based on carbon emissions.

Secretary-General Guterres claims that “science now tells us that a temporary overshoot of the 1.5 [degree] limit starting at the latest in the early 2030s is inevitable.” This “overshoot,” he claims, “could push ecosystems past irreversible tipping points to unlivable conditions and amplify threats to peace and security … more hunger, displacement, and loss.”

As is so common with these screeds, “science” is mentioned, but none was given by the secretary-general, nor by anyone else at the podium. No data and zero evidence of forthcoming catastrophe were presented. Rather, even as emissions have increased, World Bank data show that global poverty is way down in the last three decades, especially in nations with their own oil and gas development, from the United Arab Emirates to Azerbaijan, the two previous hosts of UN climate summits. Climate policies do not reduce poverty — they will increase it in developed and developing countries alike by raising the cost of all energy.

As we have noted, Bill Gates himself evidently is done with such fatuous existential climate claims and has called for refocusing resources on directly fighting poverty and disease among the world’s poor, rather than on spurious attempts to alter global temperature.

The secretary-general’s claim of a nexus between climate change and “threats to peace and security” is especially insulting to populations suffering in war zones. Are there any Ukrainians or Israelis blaming the climate for being invaded by their hostile neighbors? Was “climate change” motivating Vladimir Putin or Hamas to launch their attacks?

The truth is, Secretary-General Guterres and his fellow travelers are demanding $300 billion in annual contributions, growing to $1.3 trillion annually, mostly from the United States and Europe, to fund their climate fantasies throughout the developing world. These projects certainly will enrich corporations, lawyers, and NGO bureaucracies, but will do nothing to ameliorate hunger or mitigate disease.

Last year at COP29 in Baku, self-congratulations among the climate delegates were pervasive with their agreement for nations to provide carbon mitigation plans and new financial commitments. Most nations have done little to nothing since. With so many countries annually refusing to cough up such largesse, Guterres sounds more desperate and dishonest with every COP summit.

Then there is the People’s so-called Republic of Communist, dictatorial China. Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang said that nations need to cooperate more on expanding “green technology” and pushed for more “global climate governance… [for] global sustained development.” This from a nation that is expanding coal capacity and production in 2025 at the fastest rate in nearly a decade, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

According to this report, China has failed to live up to its pledges on using coal in a more supporting role for renewable energy and to phase down coal production. Still, the CREA report, while documenting China’s coal expansion, speculates that it “signals … a last-ditch effort before China’s 2030 carbon peaking deadline,” after which it “should be the priority to meet climate goals.”

I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell to these geniuses and every UN bureaucrat who takes China’s word on climate “goals” or “commitments.” They never have, and never will.

Lastly, on a note of hilarity, Brazil’s President Lula da Silva said the world must “overcome fossil fuels” and defeat those “extremist forces [that] invent untruths” about climate change. Those who oppose the UN climate agenda, he said, will “perpetuate social and economic disparities.”

This thinking is backward, as Belem’s own shanty towns reveal. Oil, coal, and gas fueled development in every first-world nation and improved living standards for more than a century. These sources are needed more in the developing world, which is why China is relentless on coal expansion.

Solar and wind energy, which rely on fossil-fuel backup, remain a tiny percentage of the energy mix. Attempting to impose such sources on any nation’s people — rich, poor, or middle class — is foolhardy and impractical.

Unfortunately, such impediments to energy reality are no barrier to national leaders gaslighting and fantasizing at UN climate conferences.