COP30 is the Biggest Flop So Far

Climate momentum is fading fast

Ed Miliband is back from the COP meeting Brazil. Though now even the most committed green fake journalists are openly citing the meeting as a failure, and even questioning the viability of the COP process, Miliband is adamant that “for all its flaws, COP has reaffirmed the belief of the vast majority of the world in this ideal”. But that is obviously false. If the “vast majority of the world” really had such a conviction, then there would be no need of the COP process at all, and certainly not 30 of them. What lies beneath Miliband’s statement in the Guardian this week, in which he claims he has snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, is a need to hang the UK’s agenda on an international process.

The Secretary of State for Net Zero and Energy Security’s understanding of green politics is at best upside down. “We went to COP because working with other countries to tackle the climate crisis is the only way to protect our home and way of life,” he claims. False. Since the reformulation of Malthusian ‘population bomb’ economics in the 1960s took shape as the UN’s green agenda in the 1970s, its advocates have demanded radical changes to ‘our way of life’ and used the prospect of ecological crises to make the urgent case for them. Of course, the various doomsdays predicted by those neo-Malthusians all passed without event, despite the confidence their prophets evinced in seemingly unimpeachable simulations of industrial society’s interactions with the world’s natural processes.