By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
AEP, who chickened out of my challenge of a debate, loses the plot again!
King Charles should attend the COP27 climate summit in Egypt next month as sovereign of Tuvalu, a cluster of Pacific atolls sinking underwater.
He should go as King of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and in spirit as King of Scotland, all countries with enthusiastic net-zero leaders. He should attend too as titular head of those Commonwealth states that pleaded most vehemently for CO2 and methane cuts at last year’s climate summit in Glasgow.
Unless there is a security risk that we have not been told about, it is mystifying that Downing Street should have urged him not to go. Why bench your star player, and why squander soft-power?
The UK still holds the COP26 presidency and is custodian of this UN process until the Egyptian hand-over. Liz Truss is implicitly playing down the significance, and playing down the achievements of Glasgow, that marvellously-refreshing moment when Big Money and Big Industry snatched the baton and showed us how they are going to solve the world’s problem.
And just what were these achievements at Glasgow?
COP26 was an unmitigated disaster for the Net Zero lobby. If AEP cares to remember, China and India, at the head of a large group of other developing countries, blocked all moves to phase out coal power, while there is no sign of countries coming back with strengthened emission targets. Worse still there are no targets for what happens after 2030, beyond the window agreed at Paris.
Instead, carbon emissions continue to inexorably grow in the developing world.
As usual he claims we are “falling behind” everybody else, even though the UK is on course to hit its Carbon Budget targets at the end of this decade, and even though we are still planning to build a Saudi Arabia of wind. And, as ever, he confuses the size of China’s economy with ours:
Doubling wind and solar capacity to 1200 GW may sound impressive, but with demand for electricity rising even faster, only about 15% of China’s electricity will come from wind and solar in 2030, much less than we are producing now. Meanwhile coal power will carry on increasing to meet ever higher demand.
It’s strange how China has not embraced Net Zero in the way that we have!
AEP likes to rattle on about how cheap wind and solar power is, but always ignores the problem of how you can actually run an economy on weather dependent renewables. Yet if they really were so cheap, then why do we even need COP27s?
Of course, there’s nothing King Charles would like better than to lord it up at COP27, and indulge his passion of telling us plebs how we should live our lives. And that is precisely why he should not go.
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October 7, 2022 at 08:34AM
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