A decade later, we are living in a very different world. At last year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP29), the president of the host country, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, praised oil and gas as “gifts from God,” and though the annual conferences since Paris were often high-profile, star-studded affairs, this time there were few world leaders to be found. Joseph R. Biden, then still president, didn’t show. Neither did Vice President Kamala Harris or President Xi Jinping of China or President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission. Neither did President Emmanuel Macron of France, often seen as the literal face of Western liberalism, or President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, often seen as the face of an emergent movement of solidarity across the poor and middle-income world. In the run-up to the conference, an official U.N. report declared that no climate progress at all had been made over the previous year, and several of the most prominent architects of the whole diplomatic process that led to Paris published an open letter declaring the agreement’s architecture out of date and in need of major reforms.
The climate scam struggles....
