By David Wojick
The mainstream press run-up to COP 30 is the most subdued I have ever seen, and I have seen them all. No grand global plans or calls for astronomical sums of cash. Likely a Trump effect — but as a scientist with no hard evidence, I will not claim that, just point out the possibility).
The big thing missing is easy to see. This is the strident call for trillions of dollars in “financial flows” from developed to developing countries via various UN funds.
If payments are mentioned at all, they now tend to be in hundreds of billions a year, not trillions. Mind you, a few hundred billion is still ridiculous, but it is way less than trillions, definitely a new low profile.
President Trump has done several big things to contribute to this lack of financial grandeur. He is pulling America out of the Paris Accord, effective this January. He denounced climate alarmism as a colossal scam to the UN General Assembly, in their face as it were.
On the financial side, he has terminated the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which was throwing billions of dollars a year around the world in climate money. Many other US agencies have also terminated climate spending.
Thus, it is perfectly clear that no climate change “financial flows” will be coming from America for at least the next few years. The other developed countries, some of which are still rabid on climate, are in no position to make up for the loss of America.
Moreover, and this may be another reason for the somber COP, these other developed countries are experiencing serious economic problems. Ironically, some of these are energy cost crunches brought on by ill-conceived climate policies. This is certainly true for the EU and UK.
Mind you, the monster-dollar “financial flows” rhetoric was mostly motivational. It had little to do with the actual work program of the COP, so that will still proceed, albeit cautiously, when it comes to costly national commitments.
Perhaps the best example of this newfound caution is the program that promised to be the biggest of all financially. This is the so-called loss and damage program, whereby the developed countries would pay the developing countries for all the bad weather they were hurt by. That plus non-weather events like wildfires and sea-level rise.
Because all this damage is claimed to be due to climate change. In fact, they have coined nonsensical language to codify this claim. Every big bit of bad weather is now termed a “climate event.” The green press constantly uses this ridiculous terminology.
Of course, the potential losses and claims are in the untold trillions of dollars, because there are billions of people in developing countries and a lot of bad weather. In previous COPs, these trillions were often flaunted in order to motivate creation of a “Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD),” which finally happened at COP 28.
This year, the FRLD is instead very low-key. To begin with, they have no money, as the financial flows have failed to flow. They have something like $250 million, which is as nothing.
They are going to issue a call for proposed projects so they can begin to work out who gets funded for what kind of losses, but these will obviously be small. And of course, they will spend a lot of time loudly wishing they had a lot more money.
The other UN Climate Funds and Programs are in pretty much the same sinking boat. America has pulled out, and nobody else has any money. The green press will have to work hard to find something interesting to write about. Human-interest stories could be it.
I, on the other hand, will be happy to chronicle the sadness of COP 30. Stay tuned to CFACT for more good news from this angle. COP 30 is going nowhere.
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Interesting. It makes me wonder how much of this “climate” money is being used to fuel left wing riots across the globe.
It’s money laundering for left-wing causes, like USAID. Imagine, American taxpayer dollars being funneled by democrats into NGOs, and other more overt gov’r agencies, that were/are working to destroy America, and our Constitutional Republic. It’s the way of the Deep State and the Administrative State which have long been working to usurp the “American Way” that the greatest generation fought to preserve in WWII. America has several cancers.
CON 30 is more about direct bribes – buying governments , creating loyal oligarchs and experts
and in return they have to go green and open up their education systems to LGBT , diversity,pronouns etc.
The regime change stuff,arab springs, no kings protests, is being done by NGO’s with unlimited access to taxpayer money,
the CiA,NED,embassies and ambassadors(like the US ambassador to Iraq Ford who trained Al Qaida leaders like Al Julani).
They usuallyuse climate money for self enrichment and bribery ,
but they can not afford to kill the climate scam reputation as globalist main tool( the number of government changes,wars and revolutions per year is very limited,therefore corruption and blackmail is the main tool.) as countries would back out of the climate scam as soon as they’d realize that the climate money is connected to regime change.
Though this may have changed since FTX was created as massive and very effective money laundering tool.
Lula is in talks with DJT in Asia. It must be embarrassing to be hosting the largest climate money fest conference celebrating the largest con job in world history. Well, not as embarrassing as Rod Ford in Canada for Carney. Elbows stuck.
Doug Ford even.
Don’t you mean, Doug completely braindead idiot Ford?
I mean Doug the tire slasher.
Doug Ford who runs the
“Vote For Me Because I’ll Do Anything To Get Votes From Anyone Who Wants To Suck Canada Dry Like I Do”
Party.
Doug “Fat Trudeau” Ford. 😏
They could document a “night on the town” by some of the attendees.
Get copies of the menus.
Get photos of the “companions.”
Lots of news waiting to be published.
Of course reporting on the rain is a must especially in a rain forest.
Here’s why Germany and by extension all of Europe won’t make up for a lack of funding by the U.S unless they quit pretending a modern society can function on wind and solar. The table compares future wind and solar spending in Germany with natural gas priced at $5/mcf. It’s not the U.S tariffs, it’s the failure to understand the rule of diminishing returns from W&S:
Energy Source Estimated EROI Cost per MWh (USD) Scalability Issues Economic Impact
——————————————————————————————————————————-
Wind (Future Deployment) ~3.0 $80–120 Land use, grid congestion, declining site quality High upfront cost, low net energy, increasing marginal cost
Solar (Future Deployment) ~1.5 $100–150 Low insolation, high storage needs, recycling costs Very low net energy, high lifecycle cost, poor scalability
Natural Gas ($5/mcf) ~30 $20–40 Carbon emissions, geopolitical supply risks High net energy, low cost, strong industrial support
It is not quite diminishing returns. More like a faceplant. It hits when the penetration tries to exceed the natural capacity factor. At that point, overbuild begins because storage is just too expensive for an industrial grid.
China is close to that threshold now and about to faceplant. India quite some distance to go.
Australia is well past the facplant stage and in full blown de-industrialisation. Rooftops are the dominant generating sector in added capacity and the only sector growing in energy delivered. Al grid scale generating sources are now in decline.
Germany and UK have already face planted. USA, on average, is not there yet thanks to Trump’s first term.
Mind your language.. you are falling for their distortion.
The topic to discuss is the “amount of anthropogenic contribution to global warming”!
Once that is settled you can try to move on to those other terms/questions, which are a lot more uncertain.
I petition you and all other bloggers here to call things by their correct name.
I understand why alarmists would like not to use the term “anthropogenic global warming” anymore since for the last 40 years there was little to no progress reducing the uncertainty of relevant parameters.. in some IPCC report they reduced the uncertainty of some parameters only to reverse it in a later version – in that regards the CMIP6 models were eye opeing showing that improved cloud physics and higher spatial resolution massively change the simulation results.
I think I only use the term “climate change” once and that is in reference to the climate change social movement.
I try to remember to add a ™ sign. 😉
No worries.. it was not as much a critique on your nice post, but a remidner that they sucessfully shifted the narratvie – something worth to push up against.
On further review, you used “climate change” two times. For shame! 🙂
Just as well he didn’t say – “Jehova”.
You can get stoned for that.
Agree +100. Don’t allow them to change the narrative. The whole scam is based on AGW.
Climate is the average of weather events over time, using the term ‘climate event’ for a weather event is duplicity. Real climate events are things like climatic boundary events, where weather patterns alter strongly in multiple regions over a number of years, which won’t be driven by changes in CO2 levels.
The massacre of AGW budget items by Trump/Zeldin is a large part of the story. But only part. A decade after approving the Paris Accord, the treaty-which-is-not-a-treaty is completely dead. No one has the slightest intention of meeting its emission reduction targets. No one has submitted meaningful national emission reduction programs.All of the largest emitters, USA, China, India have renounced any part of the Accord despite Barrack Obama making it so very easy to come into force. Worse yet for the warmistas, emissions have risen relentlessly over the past decade.
So, it’s not just the Trump administration. It’s the absolute indifference to all the world’s major industrial powers that has demolished the annual UNFCCC. No one cares about the gibbering little communist Antonio Guterres running around pretending as UN Sec Gen to be important. No one cares about the AGW bleating of Pope Leo XIV.
It’s over. Last one out, please turn out the lights.
Just about all of the world’s organized religions have an annual get-together where “the faithful” travel from all over to rub shoulders and sing the favorite hymns.
That’s what the CoP gatherings are, except that all “the faithful” have engineered their governments to use taxpayers’ $$$$s to pay their international business class airfares, 6-star hotel accommodation, Michelin-rated meals, top-shelf liquors, and “entertainment / company”.
But hey, religious movement poobahs have been scamming the naive populations for millenia.
Human nature doesn’t change . . .
COP30 has a nice ring to it for the final one. Maybe just have a big party, and never mind all the foolish climate nonsense. It’s over, and they know it.
I have to disagree. The movement is still very strong, albeit somewhat weakened. This might be the beginning of the end but it is certainly not the end.
Germany has a parliament vote scheduled for December 5, 2025,to provide $18 billion in subsidies to lower electricity prices. The last onshore wind auction was hugely over-subscribed. Wind and solar is alive and well in Germany and will continue to be until the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) has a controlling vote in a coalition government. It better happen sooner instead of later or the recession will deteriorate into a depression IMHO.
I tend to agree with you. UN processes generally never die. They just increasingly become irrelevant to their stated objective. An example is GATT – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. It was started in 1947 but making only very slow or negligible progress for more than 50 years. GATT only was converted into the World Trade Organization after global political and specific national circumstances had changed utterly from 1947. Two huge changes that allowed WTO were the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Maoism in mainland China.
But until those two events happened, GATT was going nowhere because of the ongoing trade war over agriculture between the US and EU.
It’s not even the beginning of he end. It might be the end of the beginning…
Its support systems are crumbling. The total collapse is all but guaranteed, even if it takes a couple of years.
I doubt a couple of years. I expect a couple of decades.
The movement is well established, well funded, and while chinks are forming and bits are broken off, it is still quite formidable.
Consider US elections in 2028. A regime change could alter the landscape is horrific ways.
My one modifier to your expectation is the simple fact that a number of countries are hitting the proverbial green wall. If this winter in Europe is unusually cold, and both solar and wind perform even lower than usual, the potentially resulting outages and societal harm will get hard to ignore.
I don’t wish this misfortune on anyone, but it’s probably the only thing that has a chance of reversing the course.
Of course, some will take such an event as “we didn’t build enough wind and solar!” but that excuse gets increasingly difficult to back up.
Australia’s situation is harder to see an end to. Deindustrialization appears to be the goal, so it’s actually succeeding.
More good news.
Just an observation…. back in the dark ages of print journalism, it was traditional to type at the end of a story…-30- Maybe this COP will have -30- appended to it…. we can only hope.
It’s not merely the Trump effect and actions; it’s the realization that all these green initiatives and pledges either aren’t being fulfilled or are being recognized as unattainable. A typical example is the fact that, despite rapid renewables expansion worldwide, coal use reached a record high in 2024.Then we learn that, according to the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy, fossil fuels still account for 87% of global energy consumption. In addition, fossil fuel use is declining so slowly that it would take well beyond the end of this century to reach Net Zero, which may be beyond reach anyway unless some major technological breakthroughs are forthcoming. Besides consumers and taxpayers have become increasingly skeptical of any supposedly urgent need for climate action that just going to cost them money and adversely impact their lifestyles. So the decline of the COP conferences is no more than an inevitable result of climate alarmists trying to wring payments out of more prosperous countries to combat what is a non-problem from the outset.
Yes it’s the Trump effect. Give credit where it is due. The world doesn’t revolve around the USA but it does listen to it. This time around for Trump he is being very vocal and actively shutting down the various worldwide scams in America ….invasion masked as immigration, deindustrialization in the West as saving the world, corruption called foreign aid and help for the poor, vote integrity instead of fraud, and looking out for Americans instead of appeasing foreign powers. Every country should be so lucky, and many …. especially the UK … should have the same backing.
Yes, with American leadership the world might finally begin being honest about how wind and solar is an unworkable solution for a non-existing climate crisis. 2026 is shaping up as the year that consensus scientists begin hinting at retracting from CO2 as an “immediate eminent threat”. New findings indicate that phasing in nuclear over the next several decades for a major reduction in fossil fuel combustion by the end of the century will “avoid a climate catastrophe” (or words to that effect).
I’m afraid it’s back to basics weather worriers-
Storm brews as new BOM site blamed for ‘risking lives’