COP28: What Was It Like?
Dubai — It’s been called the “Olympics of virtue signaling” for good reason. The annual UN Climate Conference, or COP (short for “Conference of the Parties” of the UNFCCC), attracts hundreds of global leaders, including presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs, to some swank resort or similar venue. Alongside the besuited wealthy elites in their private jets come thousands of left-wing activists ranging from respectable-seeming NGO delegates, to noisy, ultra-radical street agitators, to representatives of aboriginal cultures. And mingling with the agenda-setters are thousands of journalists, representing everything from establishment “newspapers of record” and major news channels to environmental news aggregators and blogs.
This superficially discordant crowd with its manufactured “booming, buzzing confusion” has convened almost every year for more than three decades, and despite the appearance of heterogeneity, almost everyone present agrees wholeheartedly with the broad mission: to save the planet Earth from man-made climate catastrophe. And while the annual antics at the climate conferences may appear to be more spectacle than substance, the radical global movement to dismantle modern civilization in the name of saving the climate has become a clear and present danger to national sovereignty and to civilizational progress.
December’s UN climate conference, COP28, was the most ambitious yet (and given the previous year’s COP27 landmark agreement on loss and damage payments, that’s saying something). Held at the sprawling Expo City in sumptuous Dubai, COP28 benefited from the enormous wealth and other resources of the host country, and the tone at the event was shriller and more insistent than previous such events. As with every global climate conference stretching all the way back to Rio de Janeiro in 1992, this year’s event featured the usual amalgam of global elites (including a delegation of U.S. senators and even, for a brief interval, Vice President Kamala Harris) and corporate special interests, along with a motley array of NGOs, including outrageously costumed environmental activists and representatives of indigenous people decked out in colorful attire. There was anticipation among the thousands of globalist activists and policymakers who descended on Dubai that the years of slowly tightening strangulation of the world’s economy and political system by the global climate regime is about to enter a new, much more ambitious phase. The “energy transition,” as it’s called, whereby the human race will be forced to repudiate centuries of technological progress and unfettered economic growth in order to appease the guardians of the planet, has reached the breakout point. Or so we were told, over and over.
JBS Member or ShopJBS.org Customer?
Sign in with your ShopJBS.org account username and password or use that login to subscribe.
Subscribe Now
- 24 Issues Per Year
- Digital Edition Access
- Exclusive Subscriber Content
- Audio provided for all articles
- Unlimited access to past issues
- Cancel anytime.
- Renews automatically
Subscribe Now
- 24 Issues Per Year
- Print edition delivery (USA)
*Available Outside USA - Digital Edition Access
- Exclusive Subscriber Content
- Audio provided for all articles
- Unlimited access to past issues
- Cancel anytime.
- Renews automatically