The Glasgow COP26 meeting, and the global energy crisis should have been a wakeup call for the climate debate. Regrettably, that did not happen. As Walter Russell Mead wrote in the Wall Street Journal “The intellectual and political disarray on display in Glasgow was terrifying” as leaders committed their countries to “carefully crafted, unenforceable pledges.”
Proof yet again that global gatherings of “preaching to the choir” climate activists are not the place for balanced discussion or practical solutions. Hypocrisy on the energy/climate debate is running rampant. Climate change advocates have badly miscalculated the complexity and the pace in which the world can realistically move from 80 per cent reliance on fossil fuels to net zero.
Instead, and in the face of a global energy crisis and renewals of coal-fired energy in Europe and Asia, they continue to set targets that will, like those sanctioned previously in Kyoto and Paris, never be met.
Major financial institutions have joined the hypocritical trend, embracing the moral fervour underpinning cataclysmic climate prophecies while myopically disdaining needed investments in oil and gas that are the lifeline for the global economy.
For the rest of this column: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/derek-h-burney-climate-obsessed-politicians-must-wake-to-reality-of-how-essential-oil-and-gas-are-to-life