Hillary Clinton and the elitist climate summit in Dubai – Press Enterprise

It was difficult enough to take the COP28 global climate conference in Dubai seriously, and then Hillary Clinton spoke at the event and declared, “Women and girls disproportionately bear the burden of climactic events.”

She probably meant to say “climatic,” because “climactic” is something else entirely. During her husband’s presidency, the burden of climactic events included a special counsel investigation and an impeachment.

The former Democratic nominee for president, secretary of state, senator and first lady was trying to make a point about global warming. She went on to explain that women and girls “are more likely to be affected by natural disasters, and particularly by extreme heat,” and therefore it was necessary to “figure out what to do about gender.”

Clinton’s remarks were not the comedic climax of the event. The Golden Laugh Track award rightfully belongs to former secretary of state, former senator and former Democratic nominee for president John Kerry, who now carries the title of U.S. special envoy for climate. Kerry told COP28 attendees that the U.S. will align with more than 60 nations that have taken the “Global Cooling Pledge” by shutting down every coal-fired power plant in America within six years.

When the Environmental Protection Agency tried to do something like this, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Congress did not grant the EPA the authority to disrupt the entire economy with a rule that would sharply raise electricity prices and lead to a reduction in Gross Domestic Product estimated by the Energy Information Administration at a minimum of “a trillion 2009 dollars by 2040.”

If Congress didn’t grant that authority to the EPA, it certainly didn’t grant it to the special envoy for climate, whatever that is.

The more you follow the action at one of these global climate conferences, the more obvious it is that this is a robbery in progress.

The consensus among global climate community leaders — easily identified by the tail numbers on their private jets — is that some countries have money, other countries would like to get their hands on it, and what’s most needed now is a justification, a mechanism, and a Swiss bank account.

The justification is the usual hatred of success that flows through the veins of those with no understanding of how wealth is created. The mechanism is always some international fund with “climate” in its name, into which taxpayers in some countries are required to make deposits and sketchy leaders in other countries are entitled to make withdrawals. The Swiss bank account is self-explanatory.

My email inbox holds evidence that climate activists never think anything is self-explanatory. They regularly blast out invitations to free seminars on how to “cover” climate, and they send endless press releases announcing the end of the world.

The publicist for a group called ActionAid International sent along a statement complaining that the “report card that grades global climate action since the Paris Agreement was signed seven years ago” is “quietly devastating.” ActionAid said “a C-minus grade on performance would be too kind,” and warned that the “frankly pathetic action since Paris is already resulting in floods, droughts, cyclones, heatwaves, ocean warming and catastrophic crop failures,” with “billions of lives” at stake.

The solution offered by the group? Guess. “The finance piece is particularly important,” ActionAid said, calling for “rich countries like the EU to put their money where their mouths are.”

There seems to be general agreement among private jet passengers that given enough of your money, they can stop the climate from changing.

The problem for these Champagne-sipping pickpockets is that the prosperous countries all seem to have some degree of freedom and a more-or-less representative government that has to face the voters occasionally. This complicates the entire project of pickpocketing for climate action.

In California, for example, the various laws and executive orders requiring a complete transition to carbon-free energy typically have a tiny but important taxpayer and consumer safeguard: the mandated technology must meet some test of cost-effectiveness and technological feasibility. Unfortunately, the judgment about whether these factors are met is left to the same regulators who came up with the regulation. If it was a baseball game, the pitchers would be calling their own balls and strikes while the umpires sat in the stadium parking lot drafting a public comment.

After several decades of this, bureaucrats have learned that the quickest path to making a monstrously expensive regulation “cost-effective” is to declare that without it, a calculated number of people would totally die.

“We’re seeing and beginning to pay attention and to count and record the deaths that are related to climate,” Hillary Clinton said at the COP28 event. She declared that in Europe, “which has the ability to count and figure out what happened,” there were 61,000 recorded deaths due to heat. “We don’t have that kind of number yet from Africa, Asia, Latin America, but we know and estimate that we probably, uh, could, uh, measure about 500,000 deaths. And the majority of those are women and girls, and particularly pregnant women.”

It’s “pregnant people” now, isn’t it?