https://spectatorworld.com/topic/afghanistan-climate-change-west-failures/
The West’s humiliation in Afghanistan has an older brother: climate change.
As siblings, the two share characteristics, most obviously an inability to confront unwelcome facts. In Afghanistan, there was a large constituency led by the Pentagon invested in the mantra of proclaiming progress in the fight against the Taliban. Climate has its own industrial complex of NGOs, climate scientists, renewable energy lobbyists profiting from the energy transition, eager helpers in the media, and politicians posing as world saviors.
Energy experts tell us renewable energy is cheaper than building new fossil fuel power stations. If they’re right, why did China build the equivalent of more than one large coal plant a week last year? Its slave labor camps help produce materials for Chinese solar panels, which make them the cheapest in the world. This led the Biden administration to ban their importation. In 10 years, India — a country more susceptible to Western fads — increased the amount of electricity it generated from coal nearly six times faster than from wind and solar. In 2020, fossil fuels accounted for almost 90 percent of India’s primary energy consumption.
These facts help explain the biggest fact of all. The first 20 years after the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change saw carbon dioxide emissions rise 60 percent. From 2012 to 2019, they rose a further 5.4 percent. However this is dressed up, it’s failure. Meanwhile, the West’s energy emissions have been more or less flat for nearly three decades and on a downward trend since 2007. Emissions from the Rest of the World account for all the growth in global emissions, suddenly accelerating in 2002 from an average of around 1 percent a year to nearly 5 percent a year in the 12 years until 2014.
As a matter of simple arithmetic, the West’s declining share of global emissions means that whatever it does or doesn’t do is of diminishing relevance to the future of climate change. The West’s solipsism of ‘we’ — as in ‘we must act’ — is a profound self-deception.
This delusion is mirrored in the West’s climate diplomacy. At the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, Western nations made their most determined attempt to include the powerhouse economies of the rest of the world in a legally binding global emissions reduction regime. It failed. China and India, joined by South Africa and Brazil, said no. Without a global emissions regime, unilateral emissions cuts are senseless. The Senate understood this in 1997 when Joe Biden, John Kerry and 93 other senators voted unanimously to adopt the Byrd-Hagel resolution, effectively vetoing American participation in the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that it excluded the majority of the world.
