The CO2 world tour

Note: A reader recently asked that I include a hot beverage warning at the start of my posts to avoid spillage due to laughter although why anything I write could be seen as funny is beyond me. Anyway, here it is: hot beverage warning.

The latest edition of the event poetically, though elliptically, called Conference of the Parties gifted us a lame climate finance deal that almost everyone hated as soon as it was closed but it also gifted us a global carbon market. Starting, according to hopes and dreams, next year, countries around the world would be able to buy and sell carbon credits between themselves or, if they so wish, on a centralised, UN-managed platform and keep your chuckles about the managerial skills of the UN to yourselves, okay?

The idea is already familiar from the smaller carbon credit markets. Large CO2 emitters buy credits from small emitters to keep their forests big or their oceans clean or however they want to spin it, while they, the former emitters, get a cleaner conscience and a lower carbon footprint because carbon footprint obsession is the new anorexia.

In a gesture of extra generosity, the European Union took it upon itself to provide registry services for carbon market participants that “can't afford to set up their own ledgers for issuing and tracking credits,” because the EU is all about giving, even if what it gives is the political equivalent of syphilis with a side of rabies. The U.S., meanwhile, “ensured that a transaction merely being recorded on such a registry does not qualify as a U.N. endorsement of the credits,” as Reuters would have us all know.

That latter part appears to mean that the EU will simply record credits but will not judge their quality, which task, I expect, would be the prerogative of the UN, just to make it all straightforward, easy to use, and, last but not least at all, transparent because that’s a powerful magic word.

So far, so good and countries are already trading carbon credits directly between themselves, possibly because some countries, such as Switzerland, have nothing better to do with their time and money, but if anyone dares think the carbon market is totally unproblematic they are deeply mistaken. The carbon market agreed at COP29 is very problematic indeed — countries can use it to… cheat.

That’s right. As The Guardian of Climate Dogma informed us, while COP29ers were discussing the global carbon market, “Relying on natural carbon sinks such as forests and oceans to offset continued fossil fuel emissions will not stop global heating,” citing “the scientists who developed net zero.”

Not only that but, according to other scientists, and unless otherwise specified I use the term in the loosest way conceivable, carbon sinks are not even working properly any more — because of climate change. I feel this might be a good time to take a moment to appreciate the work of The Guardian’s climate reporters and those scientists.

So, based on the The Guardian’s reports, the carbon market deal would do more harm than good — but it’s expected to become a $250 billion-per-year market by 2030. The internal rot within the climate cult is accelerating, probably because of the acceleration in global boiling. I’d speculate the climate cult is warming twice as fast as every other cult.