by Tom Harris, America Outloud:
Rarely is a media interview worth the time to transcribe into print. But last week, an interview that is key to properly understanding the ongoing 28th UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) being held in Dubai was broadcast on Rebel News. Everyone should either watch it or listen to it here or at least read the following excerpts of the discussion to understand how citizens in the West are being taken to the cleaners by overreaching UN bureaucrats and their activist allies.
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The interview was conducted between Sheila Gunn Reid, the Alberta Bureau Chief for Rebel News and host of The Gunn Show, and Ottawa-based climate and energy economist Robert Lyman. Robert is the International Climate Science Coalition – Canada Economics/Policy Advisor and Principal at ENTRANS Policy Research Group, Inc. Mr. Lyman spent 37 years in the Canadian public service as a diplomat, economist, and policy advisor and ten years as a consultant on energy, transportation, and the environmental policy issues. Important points made in this interview are as follows:
Robert Lyman concerning COP28: “The developing countries are asking for $2 trillion per year [in the period from 2025 to 2030] from the OECD countries, and if you break that down in terms of the percentages, that would probably be asking for Canada, that’s about $78 billion a year that Canada would be required to pay and that works out to just under $5,000 per Canadian household that would be asked of us.”
Additional information learned from Robert in personal communications after the interview: He estimates that the cost to the United States would be about US $640 billion per year, as a conservative estimate. He concluded: “..the average cost of the climate aid asked is US $5,079 per [American] household. That does not include the costs for the “loss and damages” fund, which could be virtually unlimited.”
Robert continued in the interview: “I think that it’s almost impossible to imagine that the governments of the OECD countries would agree to do that because if they did, the reaction of their citizens, and as in Canada, would be to basically throw out of office those who would agree to that. It’s an interesting question as to whether … they’re [the developing countries] really serious about it because it’s so far beyond the pale that it may well be that what they’re doing is using that as a negotiating tactic in the hopes that …, maybe they won’t get 2 trillion, but they’ll get one trillion or they’ll get some other extraordinarily large number.
“There’s another possibility and that is that the developing countries, under the terms of the UN agreement, are not required to reduce their emissions unless they get funded by the developed countries, and so if, as is highly likely, the developed countries refuse to provide that funding, then that basically lets them [developing countries] off the hook. They don’t have to do the things to reduce emissions they really didn’t want to do anyway.”
Sheila Gunn Reid: “Yes. So make the ask so great that nobody’s going to pay it. So you just get to keep doing whatever you’re doing, and that’s fine.”
Robert: “I estimate that the cost that will be incurred by all of the 70,000 participants at this conference [COP28] will be something in the order of $460 million that’s spent on hotels and restaurants and other expenses that they have in getting there and so on. So there is a real financial benefit to Dubai in having the conference held there. But the conference organizers are very shrewd people, and they know where their economic interest lies; while they are nominally on the side of phasing out oil production, they have no intention of doing that within the United Arab Emirates. That is one of their most important assets for the future economic development of their people, and they don’t plan to give that up.”
Sheila: “…Poland did something similarly when they held the conference in Katowice [COP 24 held in Poland in 2018]… They put the conference right next door to the coal miners museum and then they opened the conference with the coal miners marching band. And I thought, you know what, that’s some high-level trolling. I kind of admired that.”
Robert: “This is supposedly an international conference of diplomats and government leaders that are there to negotiate an agreement. I spent ten years in the Canadian Foreign Service, and I can tell you that most international conferences do not have 70,000 people involved in them. What is involved here is more theater than international climate conferences and every one of the literally thousands of organizations that are there is there to put on a show and to tell their own story.”
Sheila: “…there’s this constant push for renewables coming out of these United Nations climate change conferences. What can we expect from this latest one?
Robert: “The goal of the conference with respect to renewables is to double the share that renewables have of electricity generation in the world and ideally to triple it. Of course, the ways that they want to do that is through increasing yet again the subsidies that the member countries provide for renewable energy production and ensure that all the countries of the world begin through regulatory and taxation measures to reduce the use of coal and natural gas and electricity.
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