Good COP? Bad COP!

Emissions Impossible

I’m just old enough to remember when mums down the laundrette (no proper washing machine for us yet, though my nan did have a twin tub) would chat over their kid’s head about how so and so must be doing well for themselves, because they were ‘getting central heating put in.’

It seems mad now, but in 1970 only 30% of British homes boasted a central heating boiler and radiators.

Now we expect our cosy homes to boast a toasty room temperature of around 20C (68F), if not a bit higher when Dad’s not policing the thermostat. But back in the early 1970s average household temperatures were a chilly 12C. (54F)

So there’s great news for nostalgia fans.

Because the days of icy rooms, dark homes and big jumpers, are back!

We’ll soon be ripping out perfectly functional gas boilers and returning to the days of power cuts, energy rationing and candlelight. And not by accident, or because of some unavoidable calamity, but wilfully, pointlessly, and on purpose.

The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 29, is currently being held in Baku, Azerbaijan,

I didn’t know much about Azerbaijan. But I’d assumed it was part of Scotland because according to Wikipedia

‘the conference is [being] held in an authoritarian state with extensive corruption […..] indicating a suppression of free speech and civil society’

Only joking. Of course not!

I wouldn’t want to slur a great country by comparing it to such an awful, tyrannical hell hole.

So apologies to Azerbaijan.

The Conference of The Parties (snappy!) has been going for twenty nine years. So by now it must have achieved a significant reduction in the world’s carbon emissions, right?

Wrong.

Global emissions are currently at a record high.

Which means that despite twenty nine years of hot air, back slapping, lecturing, pontificating, and browbeating, these COP jamborees have done absolutely nothing to reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon, which they claim, is clogging up the planet.

In fact, with 70,000 delegates regularly flying in on chartered flights, helicopters, and private jets, to condescend, hector and scaremonger to debate, discuss and enlighten, they have, by any objective measure, actually increased it.

Way to go Leonardo. You’re killing the planet. Still. You were good in the Revenant.

It’s actually surprising COP 29 can boast so many delegates this time round. Because none of the leaders of important ‘A’ list countries, like The USA, China, India, Germany and, OK, go on then, France, have bothered to turn up.

Even the EU, always keen to look down its nose and wag a sanctimonious finger at everything from free speech to phone chargers, is a no show.

Which is a shame because the cosy glow radiating from Ursula von der Leyen’s warm and welcoming personality could surely be enough, all on its own, to chill the planet by a few degrees.

Oh. And Argentina is also a no show. Which means my admiration for Javier Milei only continues to grow.

Meanwhile Americans have just told the world how seriously they take the threat of a looming Climate Apocalypse by electing Donald Trump.

The Donald made his desire to ‘drill baby drill’ a part of his winning election campaign. And has already indicated he will withdraw the States from the Paris Climate Agreement (Again).

Essentially his message to the green lobby is ‘frack off.’

China might not be attending COP this year, but it is already a world leader in those much promised ‘well paying green jobs’ we keep hearing so much about.

Well not’ well paying’ exactly. It’s more an internship scheme. But those ambitious Congolese children, forced to mine the cobalt we need for our eco friendly, virtue signalling, EVs, have to start somewhere.

So if COP is dead, over, and forgotten, the fidget spinner of eco activism, what sort of misguided idiots, true believers and empty headed acolytes have nevertheless decided to make the dutiful pilgrimage to Azerbaijan?

A country so drenched in oil it wouldn’t look out of place at one of Diddy’s parties.

Step forward Sir Keir Starmer. And his wonky faced High Priest of Nonsense Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband.

The pathetic pair are making Britain a global laughing stock by marching around Baku, like proud toddlers in their big boy pants, still promising to immolate the British economy in the misguided and insane expectation that watching our once great country crumble into ash will ‘inspire’ other nations to follow suit, and lemming like, hurl themselves off the Net Zero cliff, back into pre-industrial oblivion.

Yeah. Never going to happen.

The world is clearly waking up to the utter madness of this madness. And is slowly dialling back, in actual deeds, if not empty words, on the suicidal, misanthropic cult of environmental extremism.

But here at home we’re not so lucky.

During a car crash interview with ITV, Miliband not only repeated his plainly preposterous claim that his ridiculous Net Zero scheme would ‘save £300 off our heating bills’.

But also regurgitated the lie that ‘renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels.’

Neither of which is remotely true.

I can’t be bothered to go into the ins and outs of how rebuilding the entire electricity grid, and then relying on wind that doesn’t always blow, and sun that hardly ever shines, is a less efficient and more expensive system than just digging stuff up and burning it.

Or less green than building a new generation of carbon free nuclear reactors. Which we will also not be doing.

So instead, here’s a graph.

It’s from the Financial Times, and shows how, thanks to Tory energy policies and eco lunatics like Miliband, Britain now has by far the most expensive industrial-use electricity in the world.

Way to go Team GB!

And this is just the cost of the electricity itself.

The graph doesn’t factor in the other economy busting burdens which have been visited on the British taxpayer in the hope of appeasing Greta Gaia.

Like the cost of Great British Energy. An £8.3 bn slush fund which won’t create a single watt of power, but will efficiently transfer tax payer cash, wages, and pensions, from regular workers like you and me, to mega minted subsidy kings like Ecotricity’s Dale Vince. The mega bucks Labour donor, and one time JSO paymaster, who wants to slap health warnings on bacon.

Plus, the Starmer government might recoil from exploiting, as cleanly as possible, Britain’s own energy resources, but remains determined to painfully extract a further £11.6bn from our children’s inheritance, shivery pensioners, and British farmers to throw haphazardly into the fire pit of waste, pointlessness, and vanity that is Overseas Climate Aid.

Miliband claims

‘Fossil fuels simply cannot provide us with the security, or indeed the affordability, we need,’

Really Ed? They seem to have done a pretty good job so far.

And that brings us to another point. Miliband has the cheek to claim that relying on renewables will make the UK ‘more energy secure’.

But it won’t. Because they don’t work. At least not all the time.

So we are already left importing a record breaking 20% of our energy from abroad. And of course this isn’t magic energy. It still produces emissions. But just in a way that allows sneaky weasels like Miliband and Starmer to pretend they aren’t ‘British emissions’.

It’s like dumping an old fridge over your neighbour’s fence. Then complaining to the local council about the awful state of their garden.

At this point I feel the need to state again, that I am not a climate change denier. Even if I know many of my readers err very much on the side scepticism.

Instead I believe that with a developing world which rightly wants to develop, a China which clearly desires to unseat the USA from the Super Power top spot, and a USA which might (finally) do something to prevent that from happening, global warming is inevitable, so we might want to concentrate our energies and resources on mitigating the worst of its effects.

Maybe we should be building dams, rather than knocking them down, and clearing forests of dead wood, rather than leaving them to burn. Instead of simply labelling every avoidable, man made disaster, as a herald of Climate Armageddon.

Meanwhile it has been revealed that one in three of the Met Office’s temperature monitoring stations has faked its data.

Or they would have done, if they existed.

Which they don’t.

An exhaustive report in the excellent Daily Sceptic explains how data from over one hundred of the Met Office’s supposed three hundred and two weather stations is being invented to suit the alarmist climate agenda.

This means that many apocalyptic predictions are based on little more than guesswork, or to be more generous, ‘modelling’.

Which we learned from covid rule breaker, the reliably wrong, Prof Nial Ferguson, is what top neutral, and impartial, clever clogs scientists call making up data to confirm their biases.

Sure, they might be doing it with super computers and a lot of chin scratching. But it’s still about as scientific, and probably accurate, as cutting open a chicken and guessing the weather from the colour of its guts.

Worryingly, simply freezing our nuts off when we inevitably run out of wind and solar power still isn’t nearly enough for the fanatics at the UK’s Climate Change Committee, which claims

‘in an ideal scenario, meat and dairy consumption should halve by 2050 and products be substituted with plant-based options. ‘

Ideal for who? Not people who like eating nice things it isn’t.

Some claim that Klaus Shwarb and the EU plan to stop us eating beef, BBQs and burgers, and force us to choke down insects instead.

A conspiracy theory? I don’t think so.

Here’s the World Economic Forum itself saying literally, ‘Why we need to give insects the role they deserve in our food systems’. And the EU, which throws its hands up in disgust at the thought of chlorinated chicken, has already approved insect protein for human consumption.

But maybe I’m pushing things too far.

Glassy eyed and imperious, Starmer, a man with all the people skills of E.coli, assured us during his COP speech that he’s not going to start telling British citizens what to do,

‘I don’t think that as we tackle this really important issue the way to do it is to tell people how to run their lives and instruct them how to behave.’

Well, no, not unless that behaviour might result in them owning a farm. Buying a car. Heating a house. Starting a business. Eating a steak. Or drinking a milkshake.

Apart from that. You are good to go. As long as where you ‘go’ is not on holiday.

Because that will also be banned.

Starmer droned on

‘I see this not just as a global challenge but a global opportunity’

Yes. A global opportunity for guess who? That’s right. Globalists.

An opportunity to expand the state. Enrich the elites. And impose authoritarian rule on the masses.

Next Starmer claimed that

‘This is how we move towards better jobs, cheaper bills, high growth, [….] and ensure the prosperity and security of our nation for decades to come.’

But the thing is, we used to have all that.

Up until a few years ago we were living in a country with plenty jobs, cheap energy, and high growth.

A country which seemed to be well on the road to building a prosperous future for our kids, and the next generations.

Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but everything was going broadly in the right direction.

Even the left’s other shibboleth, ‘racism’ was, thankfully, in decline.

But then people like Starmer, in cahoots with his Marxist fellow travellers, and the idiot Tory party, decided they knew best. And sacrificed it all on the altar of progressivism.

Warning we were destroying the world, while they systematically destroyed our world. Informing us that civilisation was at risk, while they took a sledge hammer to the building blocks of our civilisation.

Finally Keir went into full lecture mode and, according to the Telegraph,

‘urged Donald Trump to learn the ‘lesson from history’ and back the shift to green energy’.

Of course Starmer has got it wrong. Again.

The actual lesson from history, British history in the 1970s, and more recently from Donald Trump’s own historic landslide election victory in the US, is that voters don’t like the idea of being cold, overtaxed, over regulated, and poor.

That they will summarily kick out any leader who promises their country nothing more uplifting than a slow death through managed decline.

Brutally punishing any government whose long term plan is to make its people live in penury, huddling in fearful misery in their own homes, while cackling progressives strut about outside, finding ever new and vindictive ways to relieve them of their wages, culture, and freedoms.

Today Starmer might be striding about the international stage like a jolly green midget, but before too long the voters will undoubtedly teach him, Ed Miliband, and his whole rotten government, an actual history lesson.

*****************************************************

Thank you for reading Low Status Opinions.

I just want to start by saying thank you to my thousands (Look at me Mum! Thousands!!) of subscribers and supporters for your ongoing generosity with paid subs and my Buy Me A Coffee button. Which is here👇

I don’t like throwing around words like ‘community’ but I am incredibly grateful to all of you who take the time to read this Substack, and leave such erudite, funny and thoughtful comments.

As I stumble towards the end of my second year here on Substack I’ve noticed a recent slowing down of new subs. Maybe that’s just the way it is, maybe there’s been too much going on in the world for my little corner to get much attention, or maybe I’m reaching peak saturation with my brand of ill informed snark. But maybe I just need to get out there a bit more

I don’t really do much to promote this stuff except write it. -yes that’s a fault in me-but it means I’m relying on you to help Low Status Opinions grow, and reach new readers.

So I would appreciate it immensely if you would share my work or subscribe if you haven’t already. Free or paid. Even a like helps. And sincere thanks to you who already do share LSO, by reposting my stuff here and on X. I see you! 👀 Thanks!

Thanks again so much. And all the best to you and yours.

LSO.