This year 70,000 people descended on two major conferences in the desert. One was the latest climate change talkfest (the so-called COP28) held in Dubai. The other was the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada wilderness.
Burning Man 2023 ended with thousands trapped as heavy rains turned their camp to mud. Despite all that, Burning Man was the more successful and productive of the two conferences.
I will concede that the climate partygoers are better at spin and promotion. In the aftermath of COP28 the news was awash with headlines like that from The Guardian about the “COP28 landmark deal to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels”.
Very few of these articles revealed the fine print. China, India and Indonesia had not agreed to the deal to move away from coal. These three countries only account for 70 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions! COP28’s so-called agreement to end coal will do no such thing.
The one useful outcome of this is at least the actions of these three countries are now aligning with what they say. In the same week that the climate mogul’s were jetting off from the Arabian desert in their private planes, the International Energy Agency announced that coal use had hit a record high for 2023, beating the previous record set just last year.
We have now had 28 climate conferences and they have produced more hot air than actual cuts to carbon emissions.
Burning Man attendees are known for copious drug taking but the psychedelic effects of whatever is eaten at COP28 (bugs?) seem to produce wilder effects.
On returning from the conference John Kerry, the US envoy on climate change, who owns multiple homes, cars, a private jet and a yacht, told the media that the one thing that worries him is greed.
Our Climate Change Minister, Chris Bowen told the conference that “we need the use of fossil fuels”. Australia’s biggest export is coal. Our third biggest is gas. And, there is record demand for both from our customers.
Despite many climate activists imploring us to eat bugs, because doing so apparently lowers the temperature, I can find no evidence that bugs were actually served at COP28. Instead the climate summit’s own website advertised the availability of “juicy beef,” “slabs of succulent meat,” smoked wagyu burgers, Philly cheesesteaks and “melt-in-your-mouth BBQ”.
The United Nations demand that we limit ourselves to just 14g of red meat a day to save the planet but that edict is obviously meant for those of us who cannot afford to attend a climate conference.
With 70,000 people attending the latest climate conference, it was statistically likely that some sanity would break out and it came from an unlikely source. The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, told a young Australian pro-nuclear activist, Will Shackel that “I hope that you will manage to lift the ban (on nuclear energy in Australia).”
There are some similarities between Burning Man and your average climate conference. At Burning Man you listen to music around a campfire. The plans of climate activists are destroying our electricity networks, forcing us back to campfires.
This year’s Burning Man festival had to enforce a lockdown to stop people driving through the mud and making things worse. Towns in the UK taken over by radical activists are stopping people from driving every day.
The Burning Man festivals were begun by former members of the Suicide Club of San Francisco. Climate activists want us to commit economic suicide by shutting down our factories and sending them to China and India.
The Burning Man festival ends with the burning of a 23m wooden effigy known as “The Man”. Despite this massive conflagration, the annual climate conference generates much more carbon emissions just from the hundreds of private jets that ferry billionaires to and from the conference.
Figures for this year’s conference are not out yet, but the Glasgow climate conference a few years ago created a whopping 130,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.
Which raises the interesting prospect of an interesting carbon emission saving. Why don’t we combine the two conferences? In 2024, let’s hold a joint Burning Man/climate change conference in the Nevada desert. Not only will that save carbon emissions, when all the climate billionaires get stuck in the Nevada mud they will get the useful experience of what life is like without fossil fuels.
Given this is what they want to impose on the rest of us, the least the greenies could do is practice what they preach.
