A climate summit in an oilfield was always a hiding to nothing, says Fleet Street Fox. But with Donald Trump in charge of the free world, it’s time to invest in a dinghy
If an alien were to land and ask you to explain the word ‘futility’, you could do no better than point to the COP29 climate summit which is held this week in Azerbaijan.
Our own Prime Minister Keir Starmer is among 100 world leaders – including, for the first time since they took over Afghanistan and ownership of women’s hair and faces, the Taliban – in Baku to discuss how to avert worldwide weather disaster.
The fact that Azerbaijan is one big oil field, with billions of dollars raked in every year from exporting to richer nations and 7billion barrels of oil still in the ground, all of it destined to destroy the planet in some form or other, would be ironic enough.
But all those world leaders’ efforts this week are nothing more than an advertisement for their own uselessness, when the biggest economy in the free world is about to drill, baby, drill through whatever half-arsed fudge these politicians come up with.
Joe Biden has two months left in the White House, and if reports are to be believed is spending it binge-watching Netflix and sucking his thumb. From January we will all be citizens of a Free World led by someone who’s cross he didn’t get to burn it down last time, and has returned with a can of petrol and a bigger box of matches.
Trumpelstiltskin waited four days after taking office in 2016 before signing an executive order for an oil pipeline across protected indigenous lands in Dakota. As a result he faced repeated lawsuits, drilling opened up across public lands and wildlife reserves, and it was Biden who got to oversee record highs in oil and gas production.
Second time around, Trump’s going in studs-first. He’s going to end Biden’s Green New Deal and start a nuclear and fossil fuel drive to bring down inflation and “power American cars, homes and factories with reliable, abundant and affordable energy”.
The Republican manifesto fails to mention that radioactive minerals, oil, and gas are finite, unsustainable, and will cost (literally) the Earth. But who cares, when the most narrow-minded people in the world get the chance to take it back to the 1840s when everything was so much *checks notes* worse.
Drilling, burning and exporting more fossil fuels makes more floods, more wildfires, more hurricanes, more tornadoes. It destroys harvests, damages economies, leads to undocumented migration, religious extremism, and wars.
America doing those things makes it easier for other countries to do the same. Which in turn brings down oil and gas prices, shrinks the economic gains for Trump, and will force him to do more just to get inflation and other measures where, domestically, he needs them to be.
Last time, he came to power towards the end of California’s worst-ever drought. It was followed by devastating floods. Sea temperatures warmed so much that his first period in office also saw increasingly-intense hurricanes hit the southern states, and five flooding events each causing $1billion-plus of damage.
Here’s a clue to how bad a Trump presidency is. He doesn’t just have sh***y climate policies that make things worse. His OTHER polices do the same, accidentally. So the border wall aimed at stopping migration increased flood risk, which in turn increased migration. A public sector hiring freeze to save public money “was a contributing factor” in the official response to super-hurricanes, which cost America billions. Stable genius, my fat bum he is.
The fact he redrew hurricane maps at a whim, threatened to fire nuclear weapons at them and left citizens in some of America’s poorest areas to fend for themselves is not the worst of it. The worst is, that despite having done it before and being told how badly it went, he intends to do it again.
So when Starmer sits down with the Taliban trying to wrangle a way to get British solar panels into the Hindu Kush; when Emmanuel Macron begs the Chinese climate envoy to give Peugeot a better deal on car batteries; when a communique is produced at the end of this week making promises full of loopholes about doing a lot to get no further on, don’t bother to listen.
Look instead at the sheer amount of hot air being pumped into the atmosphere at Baku, and the bloviating arsebag preparing a massive fart from the Oval Office, and understand this: for the next little while, climate change is going to be on you.
You’ll be the one who’ll flood, and won’t get insurance. You’ll be the one whose back garden catches alight. It’ll be your family that demands two foreign holidays a year, more plastic toys, more devices packed with rare minerals, more stuff they don’t really need. And your vote these same asshats will be asking for, with promises that nothing has to change.
It’s a lie, and they’re liars. When the leader of the greatest Western economy embodies all seven of the deadly sins, everyone knows it and nobody much cares to the point where 10million people didn’t vote for the other one, some sort of apocalypse is due. Probably the one we deserve, as a species.
My advice therefore is to move to higher ground, stock up on canned food, and accept the fact that other people will wish to seek refuge in the same place as you. And remember whose big ideas led you all to be fighting for a seat in the dinghy..
As for COP29 – the world would be in at least a more honest place if Starmer had opted to save himself the airfare, and us the carbon footprint, by publicly admitting it is a total waste of time.
