ANDREW NEIL: More than 90,000 flocked to Dubai to preach about climate change... But the truth is the race to Net Zero is slowing to a crawl

More than 90,000 folk gathered in Dubai this week for Cop28, the annual United Nations-sponsored climate change jamboree which is meant to produce agreements to reduce emissions of CO2 and, thereby, mitigate the global rise in temperatures.

That’s well over twice as many as gathered in Glasgow only two years ago for Cop26 — a remarkable increase. I wonder why.

I’m sure it’s nothing to do with the fact that Dubai is somewhat sunnier and warmer in December than Scotland’s largest city, with beaches and swimming pools Glasgow can only dream of; or that it has massively more five-star hotels, glitzy restaurants and well-stocked bars — plus extensive flight schedules with the rest of the world for those unable to cadge a lift on one of the hundreds of private jets that headed for Dubai and reduced to the indignity of flying commercial.

The fact that Dubai is the business hub of a country (United Arab Emirates) which owes its wealth and influence entirely to fossil fuels — and which is ramping up its output of oil and gas — certainly hasn’t deterred thousands of climate activists from flooding in from all over the world to join the jamboree.

Some of them were shame-faced enough to point out that, though they had emitted copious amounts of CO2 to get there, they were being ferried around in electric vehicles. They didn’t mention that more than 80 per cent of the UAE’s electricity is generated by natural gas.

For those of you offended, even disgusted, by the planet-sized extravagance, waste and hypocrisy of Cop28 I say: Take heart!

Dubai marks the beginning of the end of the whole Cop (Conference of the Parties) process.

For all its relentless global gallivanting and grand-sounding declarations, the circus has achieved next to nothing since it was launched in 1995. (Remember the ‘Glasgow Climate Pact’? Nope, me neither). It is now destined to descend into irrelevance.

Of course, Cop will continue to gather in exotic climes, an annual boondoggle for green grifters, renewable energy hucksters, two-faced fossil fuel executives, snake oil ‘scientists’, political and royal virtue-signallers, billionaire hypocrites, a compliant media addicted to green propaganda and disingenuous green-washers.

There are too many vested interests — and so much fun still to be had — to close the circus down. They will also assemble in increasing numbers: on current growth rates there will be 45 million people at Cop46.

But as a vehicle for dealing with climate change, it’s over.

Despite all the warm words and protestations of earnest resolve to make a difference, it’s becoming increasingly clear that nobody is taking any notice of it. The more Cop talks and grows, the faster CO2 emissions expand.

Electricity generation in China and India — still hugely coal-fired in both countries — and booming oil and gas production in America have caused the biggest increases in global greenhouse gas emissions since 2015, when the Paris climate agreement was signed.

This negotiation was seen at the time as a sign of achievement by the Cop process, but is now in pieces.

More than £5 trillion has been spent globally on renewable energy over the past couple of decades, including vast sums on 300,000 wind turbines. Yet fossil fuels still account for more than 80 per cent of the world’s energy consumption, which is broadly where it was at the end of the last century.

As Cop28 convened in Dubai, it was revealed that the world had used record amounts of coal, oil and natural gas in 2023. U.S. energy officials now predict that CO2 emissions will continue to rise for the next 30 years.

As I write, the usual wrangling over the final communique is under way in Dubai. The delegates are arguing about whether it should settle for a vague and meaningless ‘orderly and just’ phasing out of fossil fuels or simply avoid the issue altogether. How this is resolved really doesn’t matter.

The Saudi energy minister has already categorically ruled out any phase-out — and he speaks for the world’s biggest oil exporter.

The UAE’s Sultan Al Jaber, president of Cop28, greeted delegates with the claim that there is ‘no science’ to indicate that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global warming to 1.5c. He added that those who argued for phasing out fossil fuels wanted to ‘take the world back into caves’.

These statements are, of course, controversial and contentious (though none of the green activists in Dubai glued themselves to the streets in protest — again, I wonder why).

But they are hardly surprising: the Sultan is also head of the UAE’s state oil company, just one of the many anomalies surrounding gathering in Dubai to discuss climate change. There is, however, a blunt honesty about his remarks which is rarely emulated by dissembling Western politicians.

John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s climate tsar, regularly travelled the globe in a private jet lecturing the rest of us on how we need to get to net zero. He never mentions that America is producing record amounts of hydrocarbons.

In September, it pumped out 13.2 million barrels of crude oil per day — the highest level ever. It is also now the world’s largest producer and exporter of natural gas. So just why Kerry is fit to lecture us on net zero is far from clear.

Plain folk are tired of climate change lectures from the high and mighty. King Charles touched down in Dubai to urge us all to do more to reduce our carbon footprint. Naturally, he flew by private jet. The implication of what he says is that you should cancel that Ryanair flight to Benidorm.

He then spent time with the Emir of Qatar, who has an entire fleet of private jets, and the Sultan of Brunei, who has 7,000 luxury cars. But you need to trade in your dirty old banger for an electric vehicle you can’t afford.

Nothing has done more than the hypocrisy of the rich and powerful — intimately wrapped up in the Cop process — to undermine public support for climate change policies. Politicians still mouth the platitudes of net zero, but they are retreating from the strategy at an ever faster rate of knots.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has recently pulled back from unpopular targets for increasing the sale of electric vehicles and installing heat pumps to replace gas boilers.

But he’s still insisting that more than one in five cars sold next year is battery-powered, and four out of five by 2030.

Yet Britain, which accounts for less than 1 per cent of global CO2 emissions, is still bizarrely doubling down on reducing that by even more. It has yet to dawn on our political or media elite that the only real beneficiary is China.

Along with much of the West, we have been prepared to deindustrialise in pursuit of the chimera of net zero while China has used it to mount a second Industrial Revolution.

We have just lost our last blast furnace and one of our six oil refineries. Our aluminium smelters and fertiliser factories disappeared some time ago. But it’s worse than that.

Politicians from Gordon Brown to Boris Johnson to Keir Starmer talk airily about hundreds of thousands of new green jobs. It’s not true to say they never materialise. They do.

In China, which now produces more than 75 per cent of the world’s solar panels, most of the world’s wind turbines (including those installed in the UK), 75 per cent of the lithium batteries used in electric vehicles — and one in three of EVs sold in the UK. The hallmark of Britain’s net zero strategy is not a lack of realism. It’s stupidity.

There is another way, though it’s getting late. Climate change discussions are marred by green zealots constantly resorting to the most extreme predictions of global disaster. They scare the young but they are not backed by the science.

That said, there is a need to reduce CO2, best done by investing in the necessary technology, which means large-scale battery storage for renewable power generation and capturing and storing carbon when burning fossil fuels.

Unleashing our technology resources and expertise on a grand scale in these directions with massive public and private investment would carry public opinion and be far more palatable than the hair-shirt approach of the Cop process — especially when those keenest on hair shirts have no intention of wearing any themselves.