17 hours Ago By Bill Cloutier
Columnists and editorial writers whose work appears on this page are not in the habit of speaking well of Greta Thunberg, the sanctimonious 21-year-old who preaches endlessly about global warming. But there’s a first time for everything: Ms. Thunberg was absolutely right in her criticism of the climate summit organizers’ decision to host this year’s Conference of the Parties, known as COP29, in Azerbaijan.
“Swedish activist Greta Thunberg chose to skip the conference,” The Washington Post reported Nov. 12. “Speaking (Nov.
11) at a protest in Tbilisi, Georgia, she called the summit’s host Azerbaijan ‘an authoritarian petrostate’ and added that the choice of location was ‘beyond absurd.'” Foremost among the countries that have joined Ms. Thunberg in declining to participate in the conference is France, where at least 75% of electrical power is produced by nonpolluting nuclear plants.
France also has some of the lowest electrical-generation costs in the world. Yet the United States and most other countries – as well as most COP29 delegates – ignore France’s admirable environmental record. Instead, they sat on their hands while Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, tore into France on the eve of the conference for practicing “neocolonialism” – prompting the French delegation to boycott COP29.
One might wonder why COP29 organizers didn’t simply give the French their due and move the conference to Paris, since the city’s Charles de Gaulle Airport is a major commercial destination, unlike Azerbaijan’s Heydar Aliyev International Airport in Baku. Attendees could have been encouraged to fly commercial or ride a bullet train to Paris, in the spirit of the event – so all those right-wing “climate deniers” would simply have to shut up about well-heeled government officials and celebrities jetting off to climate conferences aboard carbon-dioxide-spewing private aircraft. Last year, 644 private jets flew into Dubai for COP28, according to a Nov.
14 Daily Mail report. While President Biden, President Xi Jinping of China, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and others are sitting out COP29, the U.S.
delegation reportedly numbers about 250. Donald Trump’s victory in the Nov. 5 presidential election undoubtedly has cast a pall over COP29, especially since the president-elect has said he will pull out of the 2015 Paris climate accord – as he did during his first presidency.
Mr. Biden rejoined the agreement in 2021. The trouble with organizations like the Conference of Parties is not that they’re misdiagnosing the state of the world’s climate, though their unwillingness to acknowledge the impacts of natural forces is problematic.
The larger defect in their thinking, as the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald has observed, is their dogged insistence on pursuing the wrong treatments. “If these climate gatherings focused on reviving nuclear energy – the solution to a warming planet – one could take them seriously,” she wrote Nov. 12.
“But nuclear remains an afterthought at best in the romantic pursuit of ‘renewable’ sources of power, whose harnessing requires mineral extraction, energy-consumptive manufacturing, and unsightly and sometimes lethal disruptions of natural ecosystems.” As COP29 wends its way toward its closure tomorrow, perhaps Ms. Thunberg’s rebuke, Mr.
Trump’s ascension, and nuclear-powered France’s withdrawal from the conference, will inspire Big Climate to reconsider its articles of faith..
