The bureaucratic charade of UN climate conferences

The greatest irony of the yearly United Nations climate conferences, the most recent of which, COP30, wrapped up last weekend in Belem, Brazil, is the huge number of delegates flying into an event that preaches massive restrictions on flying. For example, when I attended COP15, the United Nations' 15^th major climate conference in 2009 in Copenhagen, I was astonished to find that, at about 30,000 attendees, it was literally the biggest conference in world history, up to that time. More than 85 world leaders attended COP15, another record for any conference on any topic, ever. Everyone from U.S. President Barack Obama to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as well as the heads of state of the UK, Germany, France, India, the Philippines, and many other countries were all in attendance.

The event planners never expected all 30,000 registrants to actually make the round trip to Denmark, so when practically all of them showed up, the Bella Center, where COP15 was held, was overwhelmed and had to turn thousands away. I got in simply because I arrived and checked in well before the high level second week of the conference.

To make matters worse, especially for delegates from poor, hot countries who had spent the equivalent of a king's ransom to fly in, Al Gore showed up, and the statistically coincidental "Al Gore effect" was in full swing and Copenhagen found itself in it's coldest December in decades. So, after standing in line outside the center in sub zero temperatures for eight hours, only to be refused entry, thousands of delegates were furious at the organizers' ineptitude. Many of the protesters on the streets outside the event were undoubtedly angry delegates.

But COP15 was small in comparison with the most recent UN climate conferences. Below are the attendance figures of all COPs up to last year's since the first in 1995 as assembled by Carbon Brief. This year's COP30 was the third-largest COP in history with 56,118 delegates registered, while COP28 in Dubai was attended by an astonishing 80,000+ people. Expenses have also sky-rocketed along with attendance numbers.

One of the stated goalsof COP30 was "refocusing efforts on action and implementation by translating words into transformative actions on the ground." Yet the main action and implementation we see each year when countries send hundreds of delegates across the world to attend the conference, incurring huge expenses for taxpayers, is a massive expenditure of energy, and related carbon dioxide emissions, blatantly contradicting their own dogma that air travel has one of the worst impacts on climate change. Even Microsoft CoPilot AI, generally a supporter of all UN climate activities, prepared the image to the right when I asked it to create an image to show the emissions impact of 60,000 delegates flying to COP30.

We can get a sense of typical expenses involved by analyzing the expenses from recent COPs. Here are some examples:

As reported by Business Day, COP29 cost the Nigerian government N866 million (approx. $600,000 USD) in flight costs alone, with 634 delegates attending. Ministers attending are paid $900 per day, which comes $11,700 each for the 13-day conference. Permanent secretaries are paid $600 per day, amounting to $7,800 for the same period. Even those supporting the climate scare have said that, "Nigeria's delegation to COP29 could have been substantially reduced while maintaining effective representation" and that "The funds spent on COP29 delegates could directly support community-led initiatives addressing climate-related challenges locally." Regardless of one's views on climate change, these expenses are extravagant, especially for a developing nation, and we can all agree that the funds would have been better spent elsewhere: adapting to climate change should be a priority, for climate change is natural and will always happen. Building resilient infrastructure and communities is thus key for ensuring a country's prosperity.

The Australian governmentspent almost A$1.7 million (approx. $1.1 million USD) to send their 75 bureaucrats and 2 ministers to COP29. This has also been heavily criticized, for instance, by shadow finance minister James Patterson, who said that the Labour government has been "spending extravagant sums of taxpayers' money on climate junkets." Australia also spentA$871,000 (approx. $570,000 USD) at COP29 for a pavilion to share "stories of Australian climate action."

Fiji spentFJ$1.2 million (approx. $500,000 USD) to send their 56-member delegation to COP29, and Pakistan spentover $1 million USD to send their 35-member delegation.

Although Canada has not released their expenses for COP29, we can get an idea of their expenditures by looking at the 2023 conference. At the COP28 conference, Canada spent $1.4 million CAD (approx. $1 million USD) to send 633 delegates to Dubai, even more than the US under Biden, which included transportation, accommodations, meals, and incidentals. This included no less than 114 federal employees. In addition, the government put $1.3 million CAD (approx. $0.9 million USD) toward a Canada Pavilionto "showcase the breadth of Canadian climate leadership." The total cost for Canada's participation in the meeting was over $2.1 million USD.

The U.S. has apparently not released their expenses for past COP conferences, but we can determine a rough estimate for COP28 based on Canada's numbers. The U.S. sent 405 delegates, again on Joe Biden's watch, which is about 64% of the number of delegates sent by Canada, and also had a USA Pavilion. Assuming that the delegates stayed at similarly priced hotels and that transportation costs were comparable, this would lead to a total $1.3 million USD.

Happily for the American taxpayer, the Trump administration decided that no top White House officials or negotiatorswould fly to Brazil for COP30. In addition, neither Trump, nor any of his people, attended the leaders' summit ahead of the main conference in Belem. Yet, while Trump's administration sensibly ignored the summit, over 100 state and local U.S. leaders - including governors and mayors of towns and cities - were still expected to attend CP30.

Of course, none of these expenses are even remotely necessary. There is no climate emergency, so each country is spending millions of dollars annually to attend nothing but a bureaucratic charade. Bill Gates' recent statementthat climate change "will not lead to humanity's demise" is a step in the right direction, especially given his extreme views on climate change in the past. His statement that "It's time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies" is certainly reasonable, for we should always help people adapt to climate change. He goes on to say that "Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world's poorest countries."

However, Gates still supports the mistaken idea that climate change is caused mostly by humans and is a serious problem, so these statements, although a step in the right direction, do not mark as critical a turning point as many believe. Indeed, he says in the same memo that "Climate change is a very important problem…Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people's lives" and further details how "renewable" technologies can help achieve this goal. The climate alarmist narrative is dampened, but it is still very prevalent in his outlook.

In the UN's recent press release in preparation for COP30, "Climate and Nature Solutions," Catherine McKenna, former Canadian environment minister, now Chair of the UN's High-Level Expert Group on Net-Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Actors, pushed for companies and cities to commit to Net-Zero emission goals and detailed a framework to hold them accountable. She said that "83 percent of the global economy is covered by net zero commitments" and that we must "accelerate climate action."

So, although the tide turning, it hasn't yet reached its peak before an inevitable decline. Using a very simplified illustration, the trend could look something like this:

The Rise and Fall of Climate Alarmism

Climate alarmism still rising, at least outside of the U.S. federal government. But change is in the wind, and Net-Zero projects will, hopefully sooner rather than later, become an embarrassment of the past. Then the real "stranded assets" will be expensive, inefficient, and environmentally damaging wind turbines, solar power plants, and massive Battery Energy Storage Systems.

Let's hope that President Trump's realistic view of climate change will help the alarmist narrative crumble and that COP30 may indeed be one of the last such hypocritical, expensive, and useless gabfests. The death of climate change alarmism cannot happen soon enough.