Generational Dynamics World View

[John J. Xenakis]

*** 18-Nov-17 World View -- African leaders once again furious that they won't get a climate change bonanza

This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

• Climate change superstars Germany and Norway humiliated at climate change conference
  
• African leaders once again furious that they won't get a climate change bonanza
  
• The flaws in the climate change story
  

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**** Climate change superstars Germany and Norway humiliated at climate change conference
****


Kinshasa, the capital city of Democratic Republic of Congo, has benefited enormously from carbon emissions

The latest annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP23,
ended on Friday accomplishing nothing but a new collection of news
stories about politicians from countries around the world taking
credit for climate change leadership, and expressing outrage that
Donald Trump announced that he was leaving the previous climate change
agreement, and thereby allowing the world to slide into planetary
climate disaster.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel in particular has been a world leader
in feigned environmental concern. Years ago, she promised to close
Germany's nuclear power plants, saying that they were too dangerous.
She has repeatedly lambasted Trump for pulling out of the Paris
climate change agreement.

But it now turns out that Germany is not anywhere close to meeting its
CO2 emission commitments, and in fact is going backwards. Germany's
carbon emissions haven't declined for nearly a decade, and in fact
have been increasing for the last three years.

Germany did reduce carbon emissions in the 1990s, but even that
accomplishment is dodgy. In 1991, Communist East Germany merged with
West Germany to form today's Germany. East German factories were
still the same ones that the Soviets had built in the 1950s when they
annexed East Germany, and by 1991 those old, creaky factories were
spewing huge amounts of environment poisons, including CO2. During
the 1990s, the West Germans spent huge amounts of money to modernize
the East German factories, and in doing so they reduced carbon
emissions.

But those were the easy days. The commitment to close all nuclear
power plants by 2022 means that Germany's huge economy is going to
depend on coal for energy, and today 40% of German energy supply is
coal-based. So Merkel is going to have to do a U-turn on either
nuclear-generated energy or coal-generated energy, and either way,
there is no chance at all that Germany will meet its climate change
commitments.

Norway is another environmental superstar that is having similar
problems. Norway, with its cold, clean, crisp Nordic climate, has
always appeared to be an environmental model, if you didn't count the
fact that it's a major producer of oil and gas, which are its most
important exports.

In 2015, Norway awarded oil licenses to Statoil, Chevron and other
companies, allowing them to drill for oil in Norwegian waters in the
Barents Sea.

Well, Greenpeace and other environmental groups are suing Norway,
saying that the awards are unconstitutional because "Under article 112
of the constitution ... the Norwegian state has a duty to not hurt the
climate." According to Greenpeace:

<QUOTE>"Our goal is that the court agrees with us that
licenses awarded in the Barents Sea are invalid and should be
withdrawn because it violates future generations’ right to a
healthy environment."<END QUOTE>

The attorney representing Norway evoked laughter in the courtroom by
saying:

<QUOTE>"This is a type of constitutional activism we have not
seen before and that is different from our legal tradition in
Norway.

This is an American-style use of our judicial system. ...

It would stop all future oil licenses awarded off Norway and would
imperil hundreds of thousands of jobs."<END QUOTE>

What the examples of Germany and Norway show is that the whole climate
change program is a fantasy put forth by politicians for domestic
purposes. Ironically, Donald Trump is the only politician willing to
tell the truth. Council on Foreign Relations and Reuters

****
**** African leaders once again furious that they won't get a climate change bonanza
****

African leaders were furious
at
last year's climate change conference because Donald Trump had
unexpectedly won the US presidential election and said that he would
pull out of the climate change agreement. Even so, United Nations
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged a rapid scale-up in funding for
climate change programs, especially to support developing countries.
"Finance and investment hold the key to achieving low-emissions and
resilient societies," he said.

So now it's a year later, and there's another climate change
conference, and African leaders are furious again, because there were
plenty of promises made this week, but no commitments.

Africans claim that they're entitled to money because they're the
victims of climate change. That is, the West has caused the climate
change, and the Africans are suffering because of it. Augustine
Njamshi from the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) says:

<QUOTE>"In general, Africa has not gotten what it wanted at
this Cop23. Because the discussions that matter to us, things
that matter to us have been relegated to the background and all
that we're hearing is what the developed countries want, and that
is not in the interest of Africa. ...

Africa has not contributed to this [climate change] problem, yet
it's bearing the consequences in a great way, in a massive way and
we don't have the luxury to adapt to the climate change
consequences, as well as we don't even have the means to do any
mitigation."<END QUOTE>

Actually, Africa has benefited enormously from carbon emissions. At
the beginning of this article, there is a picture of Kinshasa, the
capital city of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). You can see the
skyscrapers, apartment buildings, roads, cars, and other
infrastructure made possible by research and manufacturing performed
by the West. If it hadn't been for the West's CO2 emissions, the
people of Kinshasa would still be living in thatch huts and driving
around in carts pulled by donkeys and camels. Africa is as
responsible as anyone else is for carbon emissions because of
the enormous benefits they get.

And what would happen if a huge pot of money were given to Joseph
Kabila, the president of DRC, to mitigate climate change? Where would
that money go? Anyone who knows anything about what's going on in
Africa knows the answer. Kabila would use the money to provide
support and weapons to government militias slaughtering, raping and
mutilating thousands of people in Kasai province, where 3.9 million
people have already been forced to flee their homes.

I've been writing about climate change conferences for years, and it's
always been clear that they have nothing to do with mitigating any
climate problems. They have only one objective: To force the United
States and other western countries to pay billions of dollars to
leaders of "underdeveloped" countries, so that those leaders can use
the money to pay their cronies, pad their bank accounts, and buy
weapons to kill their enemies. I'm not aware of any proposal coming
out of a climate change conference that would actually reduce carbon
emissions. And the examples of Germany and Norway described above
illustrate this.

However, the conference did produce some good news for African
leaders. According to Chinese state media:

<QUOTE>"[Xie Zhenhua] said, through donating energy
conserving or renewable-energy facilities as well as climate
change surveillance instruments, and promoting climate-friendly
techniques, China has offered funds, technologies and capacity
building to the least developed countries, small-island countries
and African countries.

Since 2011, Chinese government has channeled 580 million yuan
(about 85 million U.S. dollars) to help other developing countries
to cope with climate change, through various initiatives ranging
from low-carbon and adaptation projects to capacity building
activities.

China has signed 32 MOUs with 28 developing countries on the
donation of materials needed in battling climate change, including
over 1.2 million energy-saving or solar-energy lamps, some 13,000
solar photo-voltaic power generating facilities, and over 10,000
clean stoves, among other donations. China also donated satellite
monitoring facilities to help these countries with early warning
of extreme weather.

Moreover, China helped train thousands of climate officials as
well as technicians from more than 120 countries on five
continents, according to Xie."<END QUOTE>

The 1.2 million energy-saving or solar energy lamps donated by China
should be particularly helpful to the people of Africa in mitigating
the effects of climate change. At least they won't be used to kill
people. Deutsche Welle and Radio France International and Xinhua

Related Articles

• African nations furious over possible collapse of climate change agreement (17-Nov-2016)
  
  
• Democratic Republic of Congo issues farcical call for elections in December 2018 (07-Nov-2017)
  
  
• 175 countries sign farcical climate change agreement (23-Apr-2016)
  

****
**** The flaws in the climate change story
****

As I've written in the past, you can accept all the claims by the
climate change scientists that climate change is occurring, and that
it's caused by human behavior. Even under all those assumptions,
climate change predictions are still wrong, and have been consistently
wrong for about 30 years since climate change scientists have begun
making them.

The reason that climate predictions are consistently wrong is that
climate scientists simply ignore very important issues. I've tried
raising these issues with client scientists, but they simply blow me
off since these issues don't fit their narrative.

Here are two very important issues that client scientists ignore:

• One issue is technology -- how will advances in nanotechnology
  and biotechnology and the Singularity affect climate change? Climate
  scientists don't say, and how can they? There are scientists and
  researchers in every city in the world looking for technology
  solutions to the carbon emission and climate change problem. If a
  solution can be found, then it will be found, and no climate change
  agreement is needed, since the company that finds a solution stands to
  make a billion dollars.
  
  
• The second issue is war. Every continent of the world has had
  massive wars each century for millennia that have killed half the
  population. That this will happen this century is 100% certain. If
  the coming world wars kill half the population through nuclear
  weapons, ground war, disease and famine, then how will that affect
  climate change? Climate scientists won't say.

As regular readers are aware, Generational Dynamics predicts that the
world is headed for a world war that will kill billions of people
through nuclear weapons, ground war, disease and famine. Climate
scientists claim that climate change is caused by human activity, and
so, the large reduction in population will completely remove whatever
threat the climate scientists are predicting.

With regard to technology, Generational Dynamics predicts that the
Singularity -- the point in time when computers will be more
intelligent, more able, and more creative than humans -- will occur
around 2030. Each year we're increasingly able to see some of the
components that will bring that about. Artificial intelligence is
under development in every research lab in the world, and is advancing
rapidly. In particular, every military in the world is doing research
on robots, vehicles and aircraft that can kill enemies without human
intervention. Combine all that with 3D printing, and you can imagine
a world where computer entities are more intelligent than humans, can
duplicate themselves, and can fight against humans.

Even if you don't believe in that scenario, there's no doubt that
a great deal of new technology is being developed that can mitigate
the climate change problem. Think about how much technology has
been developed in the last 50 years, and think about how technology
development is growing exponentially faster. With or without
the Singularity, climate scientists have absolutely no clue
what the temperature will be at the end of the century, because
they have absolutely no clue what technology will be developed
to mitigate it.

Related Articles:

• Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity by 2030 (28-Dec-2015)
  
• Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change (29-Dec-2015)
  
  
• Horse manure and climate change (23-Sep-2014)
  
  
• UN Climate Change conference appears to be ending in farce (14-Dec-2007)
  

KEYS: Generational Dynamics, COP23, Climate Change Conference,
Germany, Angela Merkel, Norway, Greenpeace,
Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, Kinshasa, Joseph Kabila,
China, Xie Zhenhua, Artificial intelligence, Singularity

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John J. Xenakis
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