100,000 Rainforest Trees Likely to Have Died In Vain as COP30 Faces Brutal Net Zero Reality

Your correspondent is a kind chap who doesn’t care to intrude on private grief. For that reason I shall not be attending the upcoming COP30 conference in the Brazilian city of Belém. With the Net Zero fantasy falling to pieces, the faces of those attending will be as long as the local eight-mile highway that cleared 100,000 mature rainforest trees to help speed the 70,000 climate cultists on their way. In a pre-conference interview, the UN chief Antonio ‘boiling’ Guterres told the Guardian that “we don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah”. As always, when the bloviating Guterres and the COP brigade rolls into town, you couldn’t make this stuff up, although they frequently do.

Alas, it seems some of the over-priced hotel accommodation might fall short of the usual standards of comfort expected by the annual saviours of the planet. It is reported that thousands of rooms in ‘love’ motels have been turned into ‘diplomatic suites’ by replacing heart-shaped beds, dance poles and leopard-print décor. It seems hourly rates are not on offer and prices are as high as $1,000 a night, with ceiling mirrors presumably thrown in at no extra charge. 

Whatever the rooms are called, it seems unlikely they will be occupied by the grander members of the corps diplomatique, such as East Timor’s Adão Soares Barbosa. He recently informed BBC radio that his country was very much affected by sea level rise, a claim that might be less risible if it was not for the fact that over the long term the land of East Timor is leaping out of the sea due to complex underground plate movements. In common with many other Pacific islands, East Timor is growing in size helped by natural forces that also include surface accretions. Despite this, hundreds of billions of dollars are being sought at this COP for alleged climate damage caused by wealth-producing industrialised countries burning hydrocarbons.

At the COP meeting, someone always ends up getting screwed. 

Alas, again, the money spigot has been turned off. In the United States, until last year the biggest supporter of all things Net Zero and the ‘climate-stopping’ Paris Agreement, the Donald has been kicking 10 bells out of the whole boondoggle. Where possible, green energy projects have been cancelled, federal funding of climate alarmism wiped out, foreign aid to boost said alarmism overseas removed, while climate scientists have been told to stop peddling nonsense and resume the scientific process. The UN already knows what President Trump thinks of the Net Zero project – it’s a scam and a con job he told them at the General Assembly. They laughed at him during his first term, but they are not laughing now.

Few heads of state are expected to show up this year although the UK, secure in its role as the sacrificial canary in the Net Zero mine, is being represented by the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and the Prince of Wales. Not much point asking Starmer for more money, he is flat broke, while the Mountbatten Windsors have been having a few extra calls on their finances of late. While money will be in generally short supply, the tipping will be plentiful. Tips as in the Gulf Stream collapsing, the Arctic ice vanishing and the corals disappearing. However many times we hear them, they remain firm favourites, something mere evidence and observation have little chance of ever removing from the public stages and prints. 

Things just ain’t what they used to be. Mark Poynting of the BBC, presumably one of those destined to travel down the Belém ‘Highway of Shame’ in the next few days, did his best with a ‘What is COP30 and why does it matter?’ It was a dull, routine article, one that in future could easily be outsourced to AI. “A major step forward looks challenging this year, not least because of the effect of the Trump administration,” he concluded. Er, duh.

Elsewhere, support is slowly fading as the costs and impracticalities of Net Zero become apparent. Not to put too fine a point on it, renewables are useless for running a modern industrial economy and hydrocarbons are vital and likely to remain so. Who really wants to be on the side of those who would ban artificial fertiliser made from natural gas and condemn half the world to death by starvation? More questions are being asked about the underlying science of climate change, a subject that has been essentially banned by elite activists for the last 25 years. A considered and well-sourced report on climate science that has not been able to speak its name for decades was written by five eminent scientists this year and officially published by the US Department of Energy. Activists were enraged and there were a number of ‘fact checks’ run by Green Blob-funded operations. Not a punch has been laid, but it has had the effect of pushing the entire debate into the open. The abuse showered on the five scientists has given a clear signal that politics has been at play here, not science.

COP30 is supposed to be significant since it is 10 years since Paris and the agreement that was supposed to save the world by a programme of global decarbonisation. But this year, barely a third of countries have submitted supposedly binding plans to decarbonise. The fact is that voters don’t care about decarbonisation schemes when they are asked to spend money. They will not pay to avoid imaginary climate scenarios based on junk climate models. Even if there is a problem – and natural weather variation makes that impossible to ascertain – the extent of generosity is limited. If the temperature ticks up a tad, so be it. The rises are tiny and have been seen countless times in the past. The USA is out of it, and the rest of the world is bound to follow in the end.

Last year, the president of COP29 in hydrocarbon-rich Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev praised oil and gas as “gifts from God”. This year as the war-on-humanity party reassembles in the Amazon, we remember the words of the Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.