International Climate Changed: Putin’s War Destroys Great ‘Green’ Energy Reset

Vladimir Putin’s march across Ukraine has wrecked plans to slash man-made carbon oxide gas emissions with net-zero targets.

Remember a month or so back, when the most pressing challenge was the apparent need to tame global weather using endless subsidies for billions more solar panels and millions more giant industrial wind turbines?

When fossil fuels were anathema, and nuclear was the emissions-free generation source that dare not speak its name?

Suddenly. Oh, so suddenly, those who pretend to lead us are talking an entirely different game.

Placating the doomsday crowd with cheap talk about cheap renewables has been displaced by the need for hard talk about truly affordable power; affordable, simply because it is always and everywhere, reliable.

Terence Corcoran takes the same point a little further in the article below.

Putin blows up NetZero and the green reset
Financial Post
Terence Corcoran
2 March 2022

There can be no greater demonstration of the massive failure — and the paralyzing contradictions and disconnect — revealed this week between two branches of the United Nations that allegedly serve to protect and assure peace and prosperity around the world. One branch is the United Nations Security Council, allegedly dedicated to international peace and security. The other UN operation is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was created to ”provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation options.”

As Vladimir Putin dropped bombs on Ukraine and invaded its cities, the UN Security Council, along with the UN General Assembly, sank into paralysis and debate, unprepared and unwilling or simply incapable of rousing serious opposition to the Russian military operation. On Monday, the UNIPCC delivered its latest report, “Climate Change 2022,” subtitled “Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability.” A monumental 3,675-page document packed with incomprehensible science and meaningless geopolitical jargon, the report in effect outlines how the global fixation on climate policy and net zero carbon targets laid the groundwork for Putin’s move to invade Ukraine.

The split UN personality was personified on Monday by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who said the IPCC report demonstrated that “As climate impacts worsen — and they will — scaling up investments will be essential for survival … Delay means death.” Then, on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Guterres said “civilian deaths” were totally unacceptable. “It must stop now.”

But Guterres’s warnings fail to acknowledge the climate/invasion links. Without the UN-led climate crusade it is highly unlikely Putin would have been in a position to launch the Ukraine invasion.

The IPCC, along with political leaders and activists everywhere, portrayed the 21st century war on carbon to be a do-gooding crusade that aims to avoid what they refer to as “risks” associated with climate change. What the UN climate warriors failed to appreciate were the real-world risks associated with political actors who controlled the governments that were being enlisted in the seemingly benign business of protecting the world from climate disaster. Putin, after all, had committed to net zero by 2060.

The opening chapter of the new report, a “Summary for Policymakers,” starts with a fleeting mention of risks and warning of “violent conflict’ over climate issues, but no mention of inter-state military invasions or conflict. Instead, it baffles its way through a claim that the IPCC “recognizes the interdependence of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societies and integrates knowledge more strongly across the natural, ecological, social and economic sciences than earlier IPCC assessments. The assessment of climate change impacts and risks as well as adaptation is set against concurrently unfolding non-climatic global trends e.g., biodiversity loss, overall unsustainable consumption of natural resources, land and ecosystem degradation, rapid urbanization, human demographic shifts, social and economic inequalities and a pandemic.”

No mention of possible invasions or military attacks. The language is classic UN climate geobabble. The report goes on to state that “the subject of risk is central” to the IPCC report, which “recognizes the value of diverse forms of knowledge such as scientific, as well as Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge in understanding and evaluating climate adaptation processes and actions to reduce risks from human-induced climate change.”

The prospect of “violent conflict” is noted 55 times over the 3,675-page IPCC report, including a warning that “climate change may increase susceptibility to violent conflict, primarily intrastate conflicts, by strengthening climate-sensitive drivers of conflict.” Mostly, the IPCC sees violent conflict as something that could occur in regions where climate change may provoke local populations to react to floods, fires, and extreme weather.

Nobody saw Putin coming, riding on the back of Germany and other European nations as they attempted to remake their energy systems to conform with IPCC decarbonization programs. Germany sought to bring in more Russian gas to offset its plans to eliminate coal power from its energy grid. In the wake of the invasion, Germany has withheld approval of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and has now begun to remake its energy strategy to include the continued use of coal.

Nations around the world, including Canada and the United States, are now under economic and strategic pressure to rethink the IPCC climate crusade toward NetZero 2050. There comes a point when the banal pursuit of the overwhelmingly complicated science of climate change becomes the source of serious geopolitical and military risk. Fossil-fuel energy, thanks to Putin, is now about to make a major comeback as a relatively inexpensive and readily available secure source of energy.

Neither Prime Minister Trudeau nor President Joe Biden can, in the wake of Putin’s disruption of the world energy and political system, continue to regurgitate the Build Back Better and Green New Deal slogans that have dominated their pronouncements over the last two years. The era of the pipeline blockers is over.

Also coming to an end, perhaps, is the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset movement led by Klaus Schwab. Accompanied by Vladimir Putin and other member of the WEF’s Davos organization, Schwab envisioned using the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic as spring boards for a new global political system that would change the way the world is governed. It took Schwab several days after Putin moved on Ukraine to announce that the WEF “deeply condemns” the aggression.

It may be too late. The damage has been done; the green reset and the great march to NetZero 2050 are now in disarray, blown to pieces by Vladimir Putin.
Financial Post