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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Is it too late to pause and look at the physics of this supposedly warming greenhouse?
An internal combustion engine is cooled by transferring energy from water to air. The warmed air is displaced upwards. As it rises its density falls away. That rising air cools via decompression and radiation. It loses the energy it gained from the ‘radiator’ before it reaches an elevation of 10 km, a distance that be walked in an hour and twenty minutes. At that elevation 90% of the bulk of the atmosphere is beneath. The atmosphere is not a sink for energy. Never was and never will be. The atmosphere very efficiently vents energy in the process called ‘convection’. Manifestly, in any gaseous environment convection is suicidally efficient. Boil a kettle of water and see how long it takes to return to the same temperature.
The land does not absorb energy to depth and by and large it loses that energy overnight.
The ocean is a sink for energy and highly influential in transferring energy from low to mid and high latitudes. Solar energy is chiefly absorbed into the oceans where the air tends to descend in mid latitude high pressure cells that form over cool surfaces including the oceans. These cells are variably extensive and largely cloud free because the air is compressed as it descends, becomes warmer causing relative humidity and cloud cover to fall away in the highly reflective ice cloud zone. Ice cloud efficiently reflects solar radiation back into space. The prime source of ascending air to feed the mid latitude high pressure cells can be found in the near polar regions in winter where the partial pressure of ozone increases and especially so as the sun sinks to the horizon or disappears below it so that the quotient of ozone busting UV radiation is diminished. This manifests to a greater extreme in the southern hemisphere where the partial pressure of ozone is always diminished and in consequence more UV radiation reaches the surface. Secondly, ozone busting oxides of nitrogen descend from the mesosphere greatly influenced by waxing and waning solar phenomena. These are the so called ‘polar cyclones’ associated with the presence of ozone at jet stream altitudes, a potent absorber and exchanger of long wave energy that is emitted by the Earth itself. Ozone proliferates at the elevation of the upper troposphere driving the high latitude ascent over massive areas where surface pressure falls blow that seen in the core of a tropical cyclone. This feeds into the mid latitude descent driving change in cloud cover over the oceans. In this fashion the Earths energy budget is altered.
The energy absorbing and warming influence of carbon dioxide and water vapour are insignificant and minor players, if players they be at all, in the grand scheme of things. Yes, there is a warming influence, but it’s efficiently dealt with overnight, not so when solar energy is absorbed by the ocean. And that is governed by solar influences as these change the composition of the atmosphere in high latitudes chiefly in winter. This is described as the ‘annular modes’ phenomenon whereby surface atmospheric pressure between high and mid latitudes is inversely related. This very simple but overwhelmingly influential phenomenon has been studiously ignored by those who rejoice in an anti-human agenda. It has replaced the notion of ‘original sin’ that was promulgated by breast beaters in earlier times. It’s about social control. The climate fanatics are the witch doctors of this age.
Yes, man changes the planet, urbanizes, creates heat sinks, gathers energy that inadvertently releases heat, clears vegetation that is the natural agency for evaporative cooling but in the bigger picture these influences are transitory. When that part of the earth that is warmed faces away from the sun, it quickly cools, a phenomenon studiously ignored by catastrophists.
Good question,especially when it comes the power grids in the EU. Should be balances nationally before being interconnected.