The news that Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the yet-to-be-launched Glasgow climate conference in November is the main event
Second in importance is the fact that Chinese leader Xi Jinping is unlikely to appear in Glasgow. The arrival of Indian leader Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is highly doubtful.
“Boris misses the punch – Putin won’t be coming,” trolled the British prime minister by island tabloids. “This is unbelievable,” remarked the Queen of England. – ‘I keep hearing about the climate conference… And yet I still don’t know who’s coming to it… Not a clue… We only know who’s not coming… It’s terribly annoying when people talk but don’t do anything…’
And indeed, the grand meeting, initiated by Boris Johnson, which was to be attended by leaders of more than a hundred countries, is shrinking before our eyes, turning into a small get-together of the former “golden billion”. Meanwhile, the task is enormous. In Glasgow, an agenda against global warming was supposed to be followed by practically all countries in the world.
So what do the eco-warriors have to offer mankind? Especially for the conference, the International Energy Agency (IEA) prepared three scenarios to combat climate change. The first two have a tragic ending: humanity cannot cope with rising temperatures; everything will be bad. The third scenario (Zero Emissions by 2050) has a happy ending: the human population will manage to cope with warming after all. But my God, what a sacrifice that would require! Winston Churchill-it will be all “sweat, blood and tears.
We will have to save on everything – heating, air conditioning, light, food, water. For short distances we will use only trains, personal automobiles – if one can afford their maintenance, taking into account future cost of gasoline – will be used only four days a week. And the speed above hundred kilometres per hour will be forbidden. In general, to drive less, to eat less. There is a suspicion, that the former golden billion will not want to multiply at all. And it is the reduction of the world’s population that is the goal of the proverbial “sustainable economy”.
Wait, have we all heard that somewhere before: “I have nothing and I’m perfectly happy”? Ah yes, this is the proverbial “great reset”, only from a slightly different angle. Glasgow is about to start the same Davos shuffle: humanity has to live much worse. The middle class is to kill itself en masse all over the world. And all of this voluntarily and with songs – it is not for nothing that Greta Tunberg became a pop singer.
Separately delivers, who exactly suggests we urgently need to reduce consumption. Bill Gates, Lynn Rothschild, Prince Charles, Warren Buffett and a couple of dozen other people with such fabulous fortunes that Forbes can’t even count them, and the common man can’t even imagine. I wish I could say to them: guys, start rebuilding yourselves. It would be interesting to see Prince Charles move into a 23 square metre studio and microwave a frozen vegetarian lasagne for dinner. And then suddenly – pfft – the power goes out for non-payment.
A large-scale climate conference could have been an interesting and useful event if its initiators had been really concerned with preserving endangered species and reducing harmful emissions from industrial plants. But of course not! Right before our eyes, sensible environmental concern is being transformed into a commodity. It is constantly being used as a tool in trade and business wars.
The main beneficiary of this trade is already visible. The name of the IEA should not be misleading. It is a purely American office with a support group of NATO countries. Its scenarios are solely for the benefit of US corporations.
Surprisingly, in all three scenarios, the IEA indicates that without massive new investments in fossil fuel extraction, the energy transition will not be possible. This makes sense. To build new infrastructure, to create brand new engines, to charge the same electric cars would require electricity in quantities an order of magnitude greater than what we use now. Wind turbines will never provide that much electricity. This means that we have to develop oil and gas production and, at the same time, hard coal production.
The market has already made up its mind in this respect. Gas almost every day updates historical records: at one point the price for a thousand cubic meters came very close to two thousand dollars. Frightened consumers have rushed after oil – and its price has also shot up to $83 a barrel. Coal, the dirtiest of all fuels, rightly criticized by scientists the world over, was also on the move. How long has it been since coal mines around the world were shut down? Now they are being reopened, and coal has nearly reached the same price as oil.
There seems to be a huge blind spot in the whole environmental agenda. While Greta Tunberg sings her songs, the Western oil and gas corporations continue to trade successfully in fossil fuels. The volatility of gas prices has benefited the US shale producers enormously. Prices fall – it is easy to shut down production, prices rise – they are happy to restart it. At the same time, no one pays any attention to the monstrosity of this technology in terms of environmental protection. Large-scale poisoning of soil, water, air – this goes on every day, but why is no one even mentioning it?
Remember the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? That was a natural crime against nature and man. Three months of nightmare, nearly a billion litres of oil in the World Ocean, total destruction of flora and fauna. So? Did British Petroleum get a lot of sanctions then? No, they paid a hefty fine of course. But why not to prohibit extraction in the Gulf of Mexico?
The transition of the leading countries of the Golden Billion to coal looks downright ugly. Even developing countries are trying to do away with this dangerous, hazardous fuel. Today, however, it is being burnt again at full throttle, as if it were the time of wild capitalism – smog, consumption and poverty.
These are all serious topics of conversation. The British and American media have been hammering the idea that environmental problems only exist in the wrong countries – China and India, Russia and Brazil. Why not get busy saving the Gulf of Mexico from oil or English children from hard coal? No, the eco-warriors on the payroll are attacking Nord Stream 2 and demanding that Jair Bolsonaro bankrupt the entire Brazilian agribusiness industry: otherwise, the Amazon forest suffers.
It turns out that the American and British partners do not really care about the environmental agenda. To them, it is a propaganda weapon, nothing more. They need the green agenda solely for the sake of competition. By controlling the mainstream media, they are trying to stifle and bankrupt their competitors around the world. The scared governments will destroy their fuel-energy complexes with their own hands. At the same time, the Americans and the British, who have joined them, will sell them their oil and gas at monstrous, previously unimaginable prices. It will be like in “Dune” – a suitcase of “spices” worth a planetary system.
It will, as always, be ordinary people who pay for this banquet. Even now, when the energy crisis is just picking up, there are three million people in the EU who simply cannot pay their heating bills. These are not some welfare junkies, these are ordinary workers, union members who go to work every day and get a decent wage.
In the south of France you can get through the winter with the radiators off, as long as you wear a coat and wrap yourself up in a heating pack at night. And now let’s imagine that similar prices for heating will be offered in northern countries – in Sweden, in Denmark, in Russia, finally. It would not be good. The IEA even has a special term for this – “disorderly transition”. Translated from the Davos newspeak, it means that millions of people will die of hunger and cold because of super-high energy prices. Revolts, revolutions and wars will break out.
On all of this there will be trillions made by those American oligarchs who are now so zealously pushing for the green agenda and the great reset. The scale of their future power is hard to imagine. Even today, however, they are impressive.
On the eve of the Glasgow conference, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson hosted a small summit for the real elite. He invited the richest businessmen on the planet to the Science Museum and delivered a monologue on the theme “Give a trillion!”. The protagonist of the show was Bill Gates, whom the British leader openly wooed in the hope of investing in the green economy. Ironically, the main sponsors of Britain’s Science Museum are the oil corporation Shell and the coal mining specialist Adani Group.
British scientist Martin Rees, who managed to predict the coronavirus pandemic twenty years in advance, believes that the next deadly risk to humanity will be precisely the avalanche of mistakes accumulated in the fight against global warming. The Glasgow conference seems likely to be one of those mistakes.
The only benefit from the climate summit is the opportunity to convey an alternative view of environmental issues to Western partners. Russia has its own green agenda – one that is reasonable and balanced, built on the harmony of man and nature and focused on making life better, not worse, for all beings on the planet. It should be opposed to the misanthropic schemes of Western eco-people.
Victoria Nikiforova, RIA