The overwhelming focus of the environmental movement over the past three decades and more has been the push to eliminate the use of hydrocarbon fuels and transform the world’s energy system into something based on supposedly cleaner wind and sun. This effort has always been doomed to failure, because energy produced by wind and sun does not work satisfactorily and is wildly too expensive. So it has long been obvious to the well-informed that this whole effort will inevitably go away at some point. But after the desperate cries of crisis and alarm from thousands of activists for decades on end, and after the trillions of dollars government funds invested, how could that possibly occur?

My prediction has long been that at some point the whole thing would just quietly fade away, as if it had never happened. It would become like dozens of other (admittedly less pervasive) environmental scares of my lifetime, from acid rain to gypsy moths to alar to bee colony collapse and many more. One day there would just be no more news stories about these things, and they would pass from public attention. Despite the much larger effort behind the climate scare, there is no reason that the same thing could not happen. Nobody who had promoted the scare would ever admit they were wrong. Those people would just move on to the next cause without mentioning that this one had been forgotten.

Frankly, with regard to the global warming scare, I thought that this would have occurred well before now. However, somehow trillions of dollars of government funding can have a magical effect of motivating those feasting on the bounty to keep the scare going.

But very recently, something significant seems to be changing. It’s not only that Donald Trump just decisively won the presidency on a promise of “drill, baby, drill”; or that Kamala Harris, to try to win the swing states, decided to back off her prior promises to ban fracking and internal combustion cars. As an example that something bigger may be going on, how about this: Do you even know that one of the big annual UN climate conferences just got under way in Baku, Azerbaijan?

These annual UN conferences have been big news for almost as long as I can remember. They started back in 1992 following the UN’s so-called Framework Convention on Climate Change; and they have occurred almost every year since, going by the name of “Conferences of Parties,” or “COP.” COP 21, held in Paris in 2015, was the meeting when the Paris Climate Agreement was signed, supposedly committing all the nations of the world to emissions reductions and energy transformations. Lots of big names showed up, including then U.S. President Barack Obama. The world press reacted with glee. There were hundreds upon hundreds of stories. Six years later, after a year off for the pandemic, it was COP 26, held in Glasgow, Scotland. The UK chaired the conference, and wowed the world with enhanced pledges of emissions reductions. No fewer than 120 heads of state attended, just a few highlights being UN secretary-general António Guterres, United States president Joe Biden, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, French president Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Angela Merkel, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, Indonesian president Joko Widodo, Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida, Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, and Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven. Again, the zone got flooded with press coverage.

By contrast, this year’s conference is passing largely under the radar. This year’s event goes by the name COP 29, now being held for the second year running in a petro-state (last year it was in Qatar). It would be an understatement to say that this conference has been totally overshadowed by the U.S. election. At the New York Times, one of their climate activist reporters, David Wallace-Wells bemoans the new situation in an article yesterday with the headline “Climate Change Is Losing Its Grip on Our Politics.” Excerpt:

[Donald Trump’s] election is . . . a confirmation of an international turn in the politics of warming as much as it is a sharp or distinctly American break. Yes, a global renewables boom is well underway, with worldwide investment in clean energy reaching $2 trillion this year and total solar capacity doubling since 2022. But the climate logic of that transition increasingly goes unspoken in all but the most committed corners, replaced by chin-scratching about energy politics. Governments have retreated from even their legally binding promises to decarbonize, trusting markets to deliver comparatively meager emissions reductions instead, and activists have been unable to generate meaningful public outrage at the walkback.

It’s almost as if nobody cares any more. This is most notable in Wallace-Wells’s list of who failed to show up — in summary, everybody important:

When the COP29 climate conference comes to an end next week, it will have concluded without an appearance by President Biden. . . . The president-elect isn’t attending, either. Neither is Vice President Kamala Harris. . . . Hardly any of the world’s most powerful leaders will be making an appearance in Baku, Azerbaijan . . . . President Xi Jinping of China won’t be there, and neither will Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. President Emmanuel Macron of France, . . . is skipping the conference, too. Also missing will be Lula da Silva, who is the leader not just of Brazil but also of the Group of 20. As recently as the Glasgow summit in 2021, the annual climate confab was a who’s who of global power politics. These days, it’s more about who’s missing.

A separate New York Times article here notes that over 50,000 people will be attending this year’s conference, including participants, observers and media. That is a lot, but well down from around 70,000 last year. And what will they all be doing? It seems that the main point of the meeting is the attempt to reach a new “climate finance agreement “ — otherwise known as the effort by the governing cliques in developing countries to shake down the rich countries for sums in excess of $100 billion per year, using the cover of “climate” to fill their Swiss bank accounts. From Reuters, yesterday:

The main task for nearly 200 countries at the U.N.'s COP29 climate summit is to broker a deal that ensures up to trillions of dollars in financing for climate projects worldwide. . . . Wealthy countries pledged in 2009 to contribute $100 billion a year to help developing nations cope with the costs of a transition to clean energy and adapting to the conditions of a warming world. . . . Those payments began in 2020 but were only fully met in 2022. The $100 billion pledge expires this year. Countries are negotiating a higher target for payments starting next year. . . .

Yes, outgoing President Biden fell for this scam and sent off billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funds. Put this at the top of President Trump’s agenda: zero this one out. Once it becomes clear that the U.S. isn’t going along any more, maybe we can even save the annual expense of sending thousands of people off to these remote corners of the world.