Ross McKitrick: The only thing wrong with the globalist climate agenda — the people won’t have it

financialpost.com:

It’s tempting to dismiss the outcome of COP28, the recent United Nations climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates, as mere verbiage, especially the “historic” UAE Consensus about transitioning away from fossil fuels. After all, this is the 28th such conference and the previous ones all pretty much came to nothing. On a chart showing the steady rise in global CO2emissions since 1950 you cannot spot when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol entered into force (2002), with its supposedly historic language binding developed countries to cap their CO2 emissions at five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, which they didn’t do. The 2015 Paris Agreement also contained “historic” language that bound countries to further deep emission reductions. Yet the COP28 declaration begins with an admission that the parties are not on track for compliance.

Still, we should not overlook the real meaning of the UAE Consensus. COP agreements used to focus on one thing: targets for reducing greenhouse gases. The UAE Consensus is very different. Across its 196 paragraphs and 10 supplementary declarations it’s a manifesto for global central planning. In their own words, some 90,000 government functionaries aspire to oversee and micromanage agriculture, finance, energy, manufacturing, gender relations, health care, air conditioning, building design and countless other economic and social decisions. It’s all supposedly in the name of fighting climate change, but that’s just the pretext. Take climate away and they’d likely appeal to something else.

Climate change doesn’t necessitate such plans. Economists have been studying climate change for many decades and have never considered it grounds to phase out fossil fuels, micromanage society, manage