Well, there’s a welcome surprise! Governments aren’t as completely ga-ga on climate alarmism as their spin doctors want the powerful green lobby to think.
Thanks to documents leaked by Greenpeace, we can get a glimpse of some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans behind yet another upcoming UN climate doom report. Talk about an own goal! Greenpeace clearly want us to be outraged by the revelations, but unless you’re one of those bourgeois loonies dressing up in silly cosplays and gluing themselves to roads, it’s a relief to know that governments aren’t quite so barking mad as they make out.
The leak also strips away any threadbare pretence that these UN piffle publications are anything but ideological manifestos dressed up in a stolen labcoat.
The documents passed to Unearthed show how fossil fuel producers including Australia, Saudi Arabia and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), are lobbying the IPCC – the world’s leading authority on climate change – to remove or weaken a key conclusion that the world needs to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.
Well, if you’re far gone enough to think the IPCC is a leading authority on anything except snake oil, there’s not much helping you.
Meanwhile, Brazil and Argentina, two of the world’s biggest producers of beef and animal feed, have been pressing to delete messages about the climate benefits of promoting ‘plant-based’ diets and of curbing meat and dairy consumption.
And good for them. You can shove your “Impossible Burger” where the sun possibly doesn’t shine, hippy. Remind me to send a thank-you card to Jair Bolsanaro and Alberto Fernández for showing some uncommon good sense.
The news comes just days before these nations take their places at the COP26 negotiations in Glasgow – a UN conference that has been described as the world’s “last best chance to get runaway climate change under control”. It is likely to raise questions about the threat posed to progress at the summit by some economies that remain highly dependent on carbon-intensive industries.
Unearthed
Described by whom? Oh, yes: John Kerry. No further comment needed.
But what Greenpeace sees as a threat, more sensible folk might see as an opportunity: an opportunity to turn the global bandwagon aside from hurtling into the abyss of green lunacy.
Overall, what emerges from the leaks is not some dastardly plot by moustache-twirling industrialists but perfectly legitimate complaints from governments that the IPCC is overstepping the bounds of democracy. Governments of various nations rightly object to the IPCC declaring what are in fact political-economic prescriptions, not unvarnished scientific truths.
OPEC is perfectly right to complain that the demands in the report are not “policy-neutral statements”.
Argentina is absolutely correct that it is not the role of the IPCC, nor any government, to mandate peoples’ diets. The IPCC cannot say on the one hand that “We don’t want to tell people what to eat”, yet immediately follow that by stating that politics must “create appropriate incentives to that effect”.
As the Argentine government rightly says, these are “biased concepts”. As Rodrigo Rodriguez Tornquist, Argentina’s secretary for climate change, sustainable development and innovation, says, there is “no scientific basis for such affirmation on plant based protein diets”.
Indeed, this comment lays bare the entire problem with the IPCC and its reports: they are Stephen Schneider’s ludicrous “post-normal science” in action. Scientists participating in these reports have abandoned proper science and, in the words of climate scientist Mike Hulme, “traded truth for influence”.
The only problem is that, as Richard Feynman wrote, once you do so, you’re no longer a scientist: you’re a cargo cultist.
Fortunately, thanks to Greenpeace, we at least know that not all governments are completely bamboozled by the IPCC and its cargo cult science.
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