David Seymour’s call around the Paris Accord merely adds to the list of calls around the Paris Accord.
If we could park the emotion and the bandwagons associated with the obsession around saving the planet, the case for 2050 would no longer add up.
For example, take the countries that never signed up, take the countries like America that are leaving, take the future British Tory Government who will bail, take the world’s biggest climate alliance for banks who have suspended their activities and proposed a vote on scrapping its current structure after a whole pile of members bailed.
The Net-Zero Banking Alliance stated their commitment was to align their lending with achieving net zero. It didn’t work.
It didn’t come close.
Since Paris in 2015, banks globally have provided loans of $6.4 trillion USD to oil and gas and $4.3 trillion to green projects.
The founder of Reclaim Finance Lucie Pinson says the reality is the banking alliance never truly challenged the fossil fuel business models.
On facts alone, climate is losing. You can argue forever about why and whether that’s good or not, but if it is fact you are using, then the Seymour call and the growing actions of places like America are actually sensible.
Just how much farce, how many COPs 18, 19, 27, 32, do you want to continue the failure?
How many press releases do you want asking for us to redouble our efforts, knowing it will never happen?
How much funding? How many air miles? How many promises that will never come close to reality do we want to pursue in what is simply a vain hope?
A well-intentioned hope, yes. Laudable, but futile.
Maybe net zero or Paris is a guide and an aspiration. A “let’s give it a go and see how close we get” sort of thing. Perhaps with no target the whole thing falls apart.
But like a lot of nonsensical ideas, this one has fast become exposed as a bust.
If good intention and hot air was currency it might be different, but the facts and the truth tell us it isn’t. Maybe we are all going to hell in a handcart, a dirty, filthy, climate-induced hand cart. Or maybe we aren’t.
But the juggernaut of Paris isn’t working and never really did.
Good, clear, decisive decision making would mean we stop the rot, expense and energy sooner rather than later.
