GOLDSTEIN: COP26 should be the last UN talk on climate change

Article content

It is time to take the annual United Nations global talk on climate change out of its misery and ours.

Article content

The last one in Glasgow, formally known as COP26 because it is the 26th meeting of the UN Conference of the Parties on climate change since the first, COP 1, was held in Berlin in 1995, is now on overtime.

This is typical of these conferences where official delegates from around the world draw up a joint statement, debating where the commas should be placed, drafting a non-binding document that will be touted as either a magnificent success or an inglorious failure, depending on what medium do you think.

The Canadian public has lost faith in these annual charades, where hundreds of global elites fly to the conference venue in private jets, one of the worst things you can do for the planet when it comes to gas emissions. greenhouse effect, and tens of thousands of delegates, protesters and security forces create a giant carbon footprint during two weeks of rhetoric and demonstrations.

Article content

Especially egregious, arrogant and hypocritical this year was the UN’s decision to hold the conference live rather than by video conference, amid a pandemic in which ordinary citizens around the world are urged not to take unnecessary travel.

A survey conducted last week by the Angus Reid Institute found that 84% of Canadians surveyed did not believe that “the world’s top emitters will make significant progress in controlling / reducing their emissions during the COP26 conference” compared to just the 9% who did, with 7% undecided.

That’s not surprising given that, like the boy who screamed “wolf,” the UN COP conferences have shattered their credibility for more than a quarter century of dire predictions of an impending climate apocalypse that have not come to pass. .

Article content

Before COP26, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that “the climate crisis is a code red for humanity,” but the UN’s hysteria about impending environmental collapse long predates even his conferences at the COP.

In 1972, Canadian Maurice Strong, the first director of the UN environmental program, warned of an impending environmental disaster at the UN Stockholm Conference, although at the time he was talking about freshwater supplies, ocean pollution and urban settlements.

In the real world, the UN, with a great help from the global media, has contributed mightily to “climate pornography.”

That phrase was coined in 2006 by the UK Institute for Public Policy and Research, a progressive think tank, to describe the alarmist rhetoric that permeates public discussion about climate change, following an extensive review of government websites and environmental and media coverage.

Article content

In his role Warm words: How do we tell the story of climate change and can we tell it better? – authors Gill Ereaut and Nat Segnit concluded:

“Climate change is most commonly constructed through the alarmist repertoire: as staggering, terrible, immense, and beyond human control … It is typified by an inflated or extreme lexicon, incorporating urgent tone and cinematic codes.

“It employs a quasi-religious record of death and doom, and uses a language of acceleration and irreversibility.

“The difficulty with this is that the scale of the problem, as shown, excludes the possibility of real action… on the part of the reader or viewer. It contains an implicit advice of despair: ‘the problem is too big for us to face’ … “

Clearly, the climate of despair at the UN has become counterproductive to effective policy. Time to end that.

[email protected]