EDITORIAL: Greta Thunberg is right, for once

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While we seldom agree with 19-year-old global climate change activist Greta Thunberg, we’re hard-pressed to fault her condemnation of the United Nations’ latest global gabfest on climate change as “people in power … greenwashing, lying and cheating.”

Thunberg also said she’s boycotting the UN’s 27th annual Conference of the Parties on climate change from Nov. 6 to 18 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt because it’s being “held in a tourist paradise in a country that violates many basic human rights.”

Canada, on the other hand, will send a delegation headed by Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault to this annual, massive UN conference, colloquially known as COP 27.

COP 1 was held in Berlin, Germany in 1995 and since then everywhere from Paris to Bali, Copenhagen to Cancun, Doha to Marrakech and Buenos Aires to Madrid.

Never has it convened in a place where the energy that powers modern civilization is actually produced — for example Fort McMurray in Alberta’s Athabasca oil sands.

These massive UN meetings, attended by tens of thousands of politicians, protesters, special interest groups and UN and government bureaucrats descending on the world’s vacation hotspots, was appropriately mocked by British musician Matt Bellamy in 2007 as “Private Jets for Climate Change”.

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That’s because of the annual fly-ins by attention seeking celebrities these outdated events attract, who are oblivious to the massive carbon footprints they leave in their wake.

Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change are at record levels following a brief decrease in 2020, caused not by UN conferences but by the global economic downturn in the first year of the pandemic.

While the Trudeau government has pledged to reduce Canada’s emissions to at least 40% below 2005 levels by 2030 and to net zero by 2050, a UN report last week said even if every nation on earth met its current commitments under the UN’s Paris climate accord, the world will still be heading for catastrophic warming.

Nothing meaningful will be achieved as long as the UN continues its blatant hypocrisy of demanding everyone drastically reduce their carbon footprint, except the UN.

Its approach to addressing climate change has failed. It should be scrapped.

The UN can start by cancelling these ridiculous meetings and using video conferencing.