The U.N. predicts disaster if climate change is not stopped. A U.N. spokes person has said “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed in the next decade. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco- refugees, threatening political chaos”, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.
All the above U.N. quotes about a looming climate apocalypse are real but they were actually said in June 1989, thirty two years ago.
The popularity of the end of the world cult never seems to be dented by the world never actually ending.
Some key things that anybody trying to understand COP and the politics of climate change need to understand are:
a) all climate measures can only ever be implemented inside nation states. Structures and initiatives at the global level, such as COP, will never be able to mandate any national government to do anything because sovereign political power always resides at the national level (except of course inside the the EU where there will attempts to mandate binding transnational climate action, these attempts will fail because of national political opposition long before reaching net zero). It is inside the nations that the politics of climate change will play out.
b) Fossil fuels are utterly necessary for continuing human welfare and for improving human welfare. No national population will accept being colder or poorer or hungrier because of attempts to rapidly reduce fossil fuel use. Political rebellions by national populations will destabilise and ultimately overthrow any government that tries to impoverish their citizens.
c) The Green New Deal is imaginary. It is impossible to end, or even drastically reduce, fossil fuel use without incurring massive costs. The idea you can move from a cheaper reliable source of energy to a more expensive and unreliable source of energy and at the same time make everybody better off is a truly intense form of magical thinking. The costs of a Green New Deal will ultimately be borne by the people. They will not tolerate it.
d) If the Left persists in focussing on net zero as a response to climate change, along with ideas like the Green New Deal, it will be engaging in an act of reckless self sabotage and will as a result suffer a generational defeat.
e) The most progressive way the world could respond to climate change is to calm down, stop talking about the end of the world, promote in the short term the use of gas as a way to replace coal (thus halving emissions), promote longer term the widespread adoption of nuclear power generation, accept that some fossil fuel use will continue pretty much for ever, accept that although global warming will continue its effects won’t be really noticeable for several decades and will be pretty easily coped with in much richer world towards the end of the century.
