Is nationalism the answer to a successful energy transition?

The globalist architecture of climate policy has proven structurally incapable of delivering the transformations it promises. What if the answer to a successful energy transition lies in nationalism?

As the latest UN climate summit in Brazil, COP30, draws to a close — marked by deep global divisions, familiar yet futile calls to phase out fossil fuels and widespread public indifference — I argue for Compact that the globalist approach to climate policy has proven to be an utter failure and that is it time to retire this exhausted ritual once and for all:

In the recently published book The Truth About the COPs: 30 Years of Illusions, veteran EU energy official Samuel Furfari, drawing on his 36 years of experience at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy, argues that three decades of international climate conferences have produced not a single structural result except the illusion of progress. The global climate process, he argues, has become an elaborate theatre of virtue, sustained by bureaucracies, NGOs and politicians who have turned “the climate emergency” into a permanent ritual of self-justification.

Furfari dissects the history of the UN’s Conference of the Parties (COP) process from its birth in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to its latest iteration in Belém, Brazil. His conclusion is stark: “Since the Rio Conference in 1992, global CO2 emissions have not decreased but have in fact risen by 65 percent”. Yet the meetings continue. Every year, thousands of delegates, activists and journalists descend on a new city, delivering the same speeches, signing the same declarations, and producing the same failure. […]

Each meeting, Furfari observes, follows the same choreography: a dramatic opening about the “last chance to save the planet”, a flood of apocalyptic imagery—polar bears in distress, ice floes breaking up, icy landscapes disappearing—followed by days of negotiation, a final “breakthrough” headline, and a quiet return to business as usual. This is the heart of his argument: The COPs are not instruments of change, but ritualistic exercise of political and moral symbolism detached from material reality. They have become “an eternal negotiation process”, an industry unto itself, sustained by the bureaucratic logic of its own continuation. […]

Furfari stresses that he is not a climate denialist. He accepts that the climate issue is real, but not in the apocalyptic sense promoted by the COP narrative. Policies based on emotion and fear, rather than technological and economic realism, can only lead to “counterproductive results, and even major energy crises”. His conclusion is unequivocal: “The continuation of these major international masses, which mobilise thousands of participants, generate significant CO2 emissions and end in insignificant results, no longer has any rational justification”. […]

It is difficult to dispute Furfari’s claim that the COP framework has failed. Yet for all his criticism of global governance, he overlooks a crucial question: What if the core problem is not climate policy per se, but the globalist model through which it is pursued? And if that is the case, might nationalism—so often dismissed as parochial or regressive—offer part of the solution? At first glance, this idea may sound counterintuitive, even absurd. Yet it is precisely the argument advanced by Anatol Lieven in his 2020 book Climate Change and the Nation State: The Case for Nationalism in a Warming World.

Read the full article here.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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