COP26 costly cult could lead to the overthrow of the elites

In the entire annals of human folly, it is difficult to find a contender to rival the charade called COP26. It is a festival of establishment groupthink on supposed climate “disaster”, designed to proclaim the final triumph of the Net Zero cult and to signal the beginning of the serious economic auto-destruction deemed a necessary sacrifice to appease the great Moloch of anthropogenic global warming.

To inhabit the country hosting both HS2 and COP26 is a rare initiation into the illimitable fatuity of those who govern – not merely the government, but all its accomplices, including nominal opponents, in the delusional elite consensus. The lesson of Brexit has been forgotten already; the heady greenhouse gas of entitlement has befogged minds constitutionally disposed to regard all governance as a top-down imposition.

Even the venue chosen for this carbon-demonising circus testifies to its organisers’ detachment from reality. Who thought it was a good idea to select Glasgow as the host city? The only conceivable rationale behind such a decision is a hospitable aspiration to make delegates from Third World countries feel at home. The mountains of uncollected rubbish, the rat infestation and the 1970s-style strikes that characterise a city under the rule of the SNP, supported by Green loons, seems an implausible launch-pad for an ascent to a cleaner, ecologically purer future. The leader of Glasgow City Council, however, has unhesitatingly identified the cause of Glasgow’s malaise as Margaret Thatcher.

Glasgow is also likely to experience the first consequences of COP26. The city is already the Covid capital of one of the worst stricken countries in Europe. The political class thinks it helpful to funnel into one city 25,000 people from more than 200 countries, some of them with ill-developed vaccination programmes, presumably carrying every variant of the virus, and to exempt these wholly unnecessary travellers from the vaccination requirements that would be imposed upon a businessman bringing inward investment.

Even the fantasists running this extravaganza concede the gathering will probably result in a Covid “spike”, an outcome they view with equanimity. But there is no such thing as a Covid spike that does not involve additional deaths. In plain language, some people will lose their lives because a collection of grandstanding politicians and climate obsessives want to indulge in an orgy of virtue signalling. They don’t care. Hurtful though it may be to the self-esteem of the man in the street, in the eyes of his political masters he is expendable.

That principle obtains far beyond any epidemiological consequences of COP26: its core purpose, to enthrone the religion of Net Zero as a global orthodoxy, is predicated upon the total subordination of all human concerns – economic growth, increased living standards, personal comfort, leisure travel, even the traditional Sunday roast – to a fanatical belief in imminent apocalyptic destruction and the surrender to the state of unrestricted powers to counter this imagined threat.

This could be the Big One. It actually could. COP26, not as an event but as the beginning of a process, has the potential to provoke revolution. Not certainly and not in the immediate future; but the unfolding future of climate totalitarianism, already fairly clearly delineated in the plans of governments, is the one phenomenon that anyone with an historian’s insight will identify as a conceivable long-term cause of revolution. What shape such a revolution might take, whether purely political or violent, would probably vary according to the culture of any society in which it occurred. If politicians do not heed the warning signs that will eventually proliferate, future historians may compare the assembling of COP26 to the convening of the Estates General in France, in 1789.

With COP26 it is necessary to distinguish between the short-term reaction and the long-term consequences. Although the meeting could well degenerate, even on its own terms, into a farce, the worst that it  would provoke is derision. The auguries are not good. Xi Jinping, leader of the nation responsible for 28 per cent of greenhouse emissions, to Britain’s one per cent, will not be attending: he is too busy taking old coal mines out of mothballs to meet his country’s energy needs. It will be left to Boris to posture as saviour of the planet, earning brownie points from his wife by pledging trillions of imaginary pounds to futile and tyrannical green projects.

The buffoonery on-stage will hardly bring mobs out onto the streets armed with scythes and pitchforks. The testing time will come later. If Britain endures a winter of power cuts, shortages, deaths from hypothermia and consequent loss of productivity and growth – all, as the public well knows, unnecessary and due to the virtue-signalling abandonment of reliable energy sources – fickle public opinion might well turn sour on green evangelism.

But if petrol-powered cars are banned in favour of unaffordable and unreliable electric vehicles, and householders are compelled to exchange their reliable gas boilers for absurdly expensive and under-performing electric pumps, along with a multitude of other petty harassments, financial impositions and a gradual decline in living standards, then the only thing that might avert revolution, of whatever kind, would be the speed with which the political class retreats from this kamikaze policy. However, as we saw with Brexit, graceful withdrawal is not in the DNA of the current elite and that is why an extreme outcome cannot entirely be ruled out.

If so, this would indeed be the Big One, with climate tyranny the issue that finally dethroned a political class already shaken by Brexit. In recent years, the chief axiom among political commentators has been the dangerous chasm separating the governing elites from the governed. Nowhere is that fissure wider than on the issue of climate. It epitomises the entitlement of the middle-class Guardianista liberal claiming “I don’t mind paying higher taxes if it benefits [permutate any bien-pensant cause],” heedless of the effects of any policy on poorer people inhabiting the real world.

And what is this all about? The earth has warmed by up to 1°C since the pre-industrial age. Certainly that is something to take into consideration, while trying, neutrally and calmly, to assess its possible consequences. If, as claimed, greenhouse gases are contributing to likely further warming, what is the composition of the greenhouse effect. Alarmists claim that Co2, both natural and man-made, is responsible for 72.3 per cent of the greenhouse effect. But that calculation excludes the largest component of the greenhouse effect, water vapour, accounting for around 95 per cent.

When the totality of greenhouse gases is assessed, Co2 accounts for only 3.6 per cent of the greenhouse effect, of which just 4 per cent is generated by human activity; alarmists claim that figure is 29 per cent. That is immaterial: eliminating 29 per cent of 3.6 per cent of the greenhouse effect would hardly have significant consequences. When water vapour is factored in (and why would it not be, when it is the largest part of the greenhouse effect?), if every nation on earth achieved Net Zero tomorrow, the  result would be to eliminate between 0.14 per cent and 1.04 per cent of the greenhouse effect. Is that outcome worth beggaring the world and setting back human development?

Politically, this issue is hugely significant. The reality is that, even if there is a climate “emergency” (and the evidence does not suggest there is), there is no practical global response to avert it. As regards the significant, but not catastrophic, warming that is likely to occur, each nation must look to the protective ameliorations appropriate to its particular situation: in Britain, that means investing in widespread flood defences. Otherwise, some of the consequences might actually be benevolent.

What makes no sense is the fanatical drive for Net Zero. The phrase itself is redolent of the absolutist prescriptions of leftist fanatics: it was they who first coined such expressions as “zero tolerance”. It seems the Conservative Party is resolved to commit electoral suicide over this extravagantly un-Tory issue, pursuing the extension of state power. Other institutions are similarly courting disaster: the Prince of Wales announced in March, 2009 that the world had just 100 months to prevent irreversible climate disaster. That meant the jig should have been up by July, 2017. Yet last weekend HRH was now warning of “a dangerously narrow window of opportunity” to save the planet.

The Duke of Cambridge has been recruited into the COP26 crusade: this is extremely ill-advised. Presumably royal advisers have calculated that, since climate issues do not belong purely in the realm of party politics, it is safe for two future kings to pontificate on what, before long, will be the most contentious issue in public life. If the political class purblindly pursues its hair-shirt Net Zero policy, ultimately provoking a volcanic reaction, things will go badly for anyone identified with that oppressive regime. Only the silence the Queen has always preserved on controversial issues is a safe policy for members of the royal family.

Other institutions have long lost any credibility. In 2007 the BBC predicted the Arctic would be ice-free by the summer of 2013: in the autumn of that year, the volume of Arctic ice increased by a third. There will be plenty of such shamans, charlatans and Fifth Monarchy Men capering at COP26. What none of them are likely to predict is the backlash that will inevitably be provoked by their extravagant religious obsession with Net Zero, which could also herald a new political order.