The International Hypocrisy and Ignorance Conference Begins!
The International Hypocrisy and Ignorance Conference Begins!
Notes From The Field By Simon Black November 7, 2022
It’s finally here. Today’s the day. More than 35,000 people have begun descending on the picturesque Egyptian resort town of Sharm El Sheikh to participate in the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP27.
Or as I prefer to call it, the International Hypocrisy and Ignorance Conference.
The absurdity starts with the selection of Egypt as the host country, and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s prominence as a heavily featured speaker at the event.
You are probably aware that el-Sisi runs a brutal, highly authoritarian, dictatorial regime in Egypt. He has murdered protesters, tortured activists, snuffed out political opponents, censored the press, and more.
In Egypt’s 2018 presidential ‘election’, for example, el-Sisi miraculously won 97% of the vote, making him even more popular than Joe Biden.
El-Sisi is such a thug that, just last year, he drew a rare rebuke from the UNITED NATION’s Human Rights Council.
Yet only a few months later the very same United Nations saw fit to give el-Sisi the privilege of hosting its COP27 climate summit, effectively legitimizing his regime and setting him up to glad hand with the 90+ other world leaders who will be in attendance.
The fact that he has literally murdered his own people is irrelevant. El-Sisi has bent the knee to the Holy Altar of Climate Change, therefore his brutality is being casually overlooked.
Frankly the UN might as well hold the next conference in western China’s Xinjiang province, where the Uyghur concentration camp is located, and everyone can pretend like there’s no genocide going on across the street.
Even the media has turned a blind eye; despite them having an obvious bone to pick with el-Sisi over his regime’s censorship of the press, there has been barely a word of protest written.
This glaring lack of outrage is pretty bizarre behavior for an institution that is professionally outraged, demonstrating once again that the media has zero moral consistency.
But this doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of the COP27 absurdity.
We know there are at least 35,000 registered attendees from 190 countries coming to the event, plus countless more entourage, security, and support staff who are traveling with their national delegations to Sharm El Sheikh.
Roughly 90 presidents and prime ministers are expected to attend, including Joe Biden, French president Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Olaf Scholz, and the UK’s Rishi Sunak.
On top of that are all the corporate CEOs, celebrities, and billionaires who will be there as well.
In short, there’s going to be a LOT of private jets, flying a very long way to Egypt. Last year’s COP26 in Scotland tallied over 400 private jets that swooped in for the event.
It certainly does seem hypocritical for these people to preach about everyone reducing CO2 emissions after they fly 10 hours on a Gulfstream 650.
But that’s always been the theme with these major policy trends — the rules are for THEE, not for ME. We saw the same behavior during COVID, where hypocritical politicians ignored their own lockdowns while expecting everyone else to suffer.
Even more absurd is how meat will be so heavily featured this year.
Yes that’s right. In the past, climate action has been predominantly about slashing fossil fuels — and given where energy markets are right now, they’ve done a pretty good job of destroying the oil and gas industries.
But now this year, COP27 takes aim at the meat industry, blaming global warming on cow flatulence.
The UN’s State of Climate Action 2022, in fact, which was released a few days ago, lists meat consumption as one of the key initiatives that political leaders need to tackle.
The stated UN goal is for politicians to limit per-capita meat consumption to 79 calories per day. And one proposal on the table is to levy a ‘meat tax’ in order to make it prohibitively expensive to consume meat.
This tax proposal is already gaining ground; New Zealand PM Jab-cinda Arden is seriously raising the possibility of taxing farmers and ranchers based on their livestock’s CO2 emissions.
But naturally such ideas don’t apply at COP27.
In fact, the conference organizers have set up a special gourmet restaurant, just for attendees. You can see the menu for yourself at copgourmet.com, and check out the ‘VIP set menu’ featuring (among other items) $100 angus beef medallions, which you can wash down with unlimited alcohol for an additional $135.
The rest of us plebeians, on the other hand, are expected to eat bugs and weeds in order to save the planet.
You can probably see the trend here — the laundry list of insanity from this COP27 event is extraordinary. And technically the event hasn’t even started yet; there’s still nearly two weeks to go.
The agenda for COP27 is jam-packed full of woke rituals and progressive virtue signaling. There are special meetings, for example, of the ‘women and gender constituency’. And next Monday, November 14th is COP27’s “Gender Day”.
Because apparently gender identity has something to do with climate change???
I mean, these people really go out of there way to be as silly as possible. It’s virtually impossible to take them seriously.
Most egregiously, there is practically zero discussion on the COP27 agenda about nuclear power.
Uranium is one of the most efficient, energy-dense fuel sources in the world. Nuclear power has an incredibly high Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), yet CO2 emissions that are lower than even than solar and wind.
You’d think that an organization which pretends to care so much about CO2 emissions would at least engage in serious debate about implementing such a technology.
But it’s not even on the agenda. Instead they’re showcasing meat taxes and gender identity as the solutions to save the world from the apocalypse that they’re peddling.
Welcome to the International Hypocrisy and Ignorance Conference 2022.
* Final point: the upside of these climate conferences is that they leave us with interesting investment opportunities to profit from their insanity. And one big trend that’s making a big comeback (and will feature at COP27) is carbon credits. Keep an eye on this, because it’s very likely to become a colossal trend.
To your freedom, Simon Black, Founder Sovereign Research & Advisory