By Don Ritter – CFact
John Kerry tilts at reality like Don Quixote tilted at windmills. While the 28th UN-related Conference of Parties (COP 28) was wrapping up in Dubai, America’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate fumed about funding and building new coal-fired electricity-generating plants. He declared himself a “militant” opponent of coal. He very personally decried those who would build new coal plants.
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Yet he knows full well that China has funded and built over a hundred coal-fired plants in the past year alone and is building a staggering 234 gigawatts of coal-fired generation. Each gigawatt of generation is equivalent to a new 1000-megawatt coal plant.
Those mind-boggling numbers and the respective increase in emissions of CO2 dwarf hard-won CO2 reductions in the U.S. and Europe. China alone is the mega, indeed, giga windmill Kerry is tilting at.
COP 28 was hosted by the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. The leader of a giant Abu Dhabi-owned oil company was the conference chairman who actually advocated for the importance of fossil fuels in the future of the global economy, stating that “there’s no science to support demands for a phase out of fossil fuels.”
The next host country for COP 29 is another oil-wealth producer, Azerbaijan. The major petro-state producers in the Middle East, plus Russia, Algeria, Guyana, Iran, Venezuela, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, and other nations, are all looking to expand production for the foreseeable future.
The consuming world is paying them handsomely to do so. They may pay lip service to a politically and publicly popular climate-change narrative, but given the global economic reality, there is no reason to believe that producers will ever give up their primary wealth creators, oil and gas, and for that matter, coal. Nor will the energy-consuming nations, given the symbiosis between producers and consumers.
According to the UN, some 70,000 attended COP 28, with the wealthier, including Mr. Kerry, arriving on their jet-fuel-consuming, CO2-creating private jets. The conference was a boon to Dubai’s tourist industry and a remarkable destination for tourists. But, in the end, the COP 28 final statement incorporates only hortatory language to “transition” away from fossil fuels, not a pledge to “phase-out” fossil fuels.
Hard-core climate activists, led by Kerry, aggressively pursued “phase-out language” but did not get it. That means China, India, and developing nations all over the world will continue to burn coal to get their electricity.
The benefit for others
They will continue to need oil and gas to drive their cars, power their economies, and use refined derivatives of oil and gas that are part of just about everything produced in the modern world. When John Kerry declares that there should be no coal plants “permitted anywhere in the world,” his words are applied, in fact, only to the United States, not “anywhere in the world.”
