The Paris Agreement seems to have dwindled into a farce - Yorkshire Post Letters

A short month has gone by and November’s COP29 is already a distant memory. Did we notice it?

The host president called his country’s oil and gas reserves ‘a gift from God’, and although the official business was to move away from fossil fuels, the chief executive was filmed promoting fuel deals from the very beginning.

Almost 2,000 fossil fuel lobbyists and around 480 ‘CCS’ lobbyists were there in Azerbaijan, all working against the publicised goals.

Although $300 billion was finally pledged to help developing countries to drop fossil fuels and move to renewable ‘green’ energy, that sum is universally recognised as nowhere near enough to achieve the COP goals.

There’s no doubt that this is a global problem. The historic hard-won and much-hailed Paris Agreement, almost ten years ago in 2015, seems to have dwindled into a farce where world leaders speak inspirational empty words about reducing emissions, while behind the scenes they adopt policies which increase emissions: so emissions worldwide continue to grow in a way that our civilisation may well not survive.

Even locally in Europe and the UK, large numbers of people still think climate change is a joke despite the very clear message from our government’s own advisors (IPCC) and real life evidence of increasing floods, fires and storms.

The media often call challengers ‘woke eco-zealots’ or ‘extremists’, while politicians claim that voters don’t talk about climate change on their door-steps.

Our new Labour Government is allowing North Sea oil licences created by the last Conservative government and is following their far-fetched Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) plans, despite overwhelming evidence that they will cause massive destruction, cost taxpayers billions and not even be effective.

So, if you care about survival, we better start talking about climate change – and loudly!