"We need courageous leaders who will withdraw from the Paris Agreement"

 

"The lead-up to the COP 28 climate conference ... had a consistent theme: previous COPs have done an okay job of restricting fossil fuels in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but this one needs to restrict fossil fuel use far faster so as to reach net-zero by 2050.
    "This is 180° wrong.
    "COP 28’s net-zero agenda—i.e., rapid elimination of fossil fuels—is unnecessary, and pursuing it faster would be catastrophic because ...
"1. Fossil fuels are making us far safer from climate.

"One huge benefit we get from fossil fuels is the ability to master climate danger—e.g., fossil-fuelled cooling, heating, irrigation—which can potentially neutralise fossil fuels’ negative climate impacts. ...
    "Even though we obviously need to factor in both negative and positive impacts of rising CO2 with precision, most designated experts ignore big positives (e.g., global greening) while catastrophizing negatives (e.g., Gore portrays 20 feet sea level rise as imminent when extreme UN projections are 3 feet/100years)
    "Every report you hear about fossil fuels having made climate more dangerous commits at least one of 2 fallacies: ignoring the enormous climate mastery benefits of fossil fuels or wildly exaggerating negative climate side-effects of fossil fuels. ...
    "If we do factor in fossil fuels' enormous climate mastery benefits and carefully weigh their climate side-effects, we find that fossil fuels are a tremendous climate net-positive and will remain so in the future....

"2. Even barely implementing COP’s net-zero agenda has been disastrous. ...

"Net-zero policies have caused catastrophic energy shortages even with minuscule implementation. Just by slowing the growth of fossil fuel use, not even reducing it, they have caused global energy shortages advocates didn't warn us of....
    "The 'net-zero' movement, led by UN COPs, is the root cause of today's energy crisis because it has restricted
     1. fossil fuel investment
     2. fossil fuel production
     3. fossil fuel transport
    "This has artificially suppressed fossil fuel supply, leading to high prices and shortages. ... the “net-zero” movement has caused an energy crisis just by achieving a tiny fraction of its goals. While it has advocated rapidly reducing fossil fuel use, it has only succeeded globally at slowing the growth of fossil fuel use. And even that is catastrophic....

"Instead of focusing on rapidly eliminating fossil fuel use, we should focus on rapidly liberating energy production and use of all kinds of energy via energy freedom policies ... [that] protect the ability of producers to produce all forms of energy and consumers to use all forms of energy, so long as they don’t engage in reasonably preventable pollution or endangerment of others....
    "The obvious path forward for the world is energy freedom: the freedom to produce and use all cost-effective sources of energy—including, essentially, fossil fuels—which means rejecting all net-zero targets.
    "We need courageous leaders who will withdraw from the Paris Agreement."

~ Alex Epstein, from his post 'COP28 should be the last COP' [emphasis in the original]