Glasgow, Scotland U.K.

The 26th United Nations Climate Summit began today on a frigid, 48-degree (Fahrenheit) overcast day in downtown Glasgow, with most of the thousands of attendees waiting on line to enter the venue wearing winter jackets and not a few with wool hats.

This first day comprised mostly speeches by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres and numerous heads of state, including our own President Joe Biden.

It is hard to tell who was the more hysterical of these two world leaders, with each proclaiming a litany of falsehoods.

CFACT engages as UN climate extravaganza begins 2Mr. Guterres’ theme was “enough.” Enough with “brutalizing biodiversity…treating nature like a toilet …burning and drilling and mining our way deeper” and “digging our own graves.” And there was this kicker, “enough with killing ourselves with carbon.”

This encapsulates the present-day climate politics, which lacks the maturity level of a college freshman, at least rhetorically. Evidently, the Secretary-General is unaware that carbon dioxide makes life possible, rather than “killing.” And, if electric vehicles (EV) are going to replace gasoline engines, which is on every climate agenda, we are going to have to do a lot more “burning and drilling and mining our way deeper” into Earth for the rare metals to make the EV batteries.

CFACT engages as UN climate extravaganza begins 4Meanwhile, President Biden touted his “Build Back Better” agenda and how much it’s going to do for the climate – even though Congress still has not passed this legislation, which already is a shell of its original multi-trillion-dollar self as first proposed by the president. For example, the president was forced to remove the centerpiece of his climate agenda, the Clean Electricity Power Plan, that would have forced businesses to use more so-called renewable energy instead of traditional oil, natural gas and coal and impose penalties if they don’t.CFACT engages as UN climate extravaganza begins 3

Still, Mr. Biden reiterated his commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by half the levels of 2005 in just nine years.

The Biden administration’s “whole of government” approach to combating climate change, of which he boasted, omitted the harmful reality of shutting off pipelines and blocking new energy leases. This has been a major contributor to gas prices doubling in the last 18 months and natural gas prices leaping by more than 50 percent this year. Also absent in the president’s address was his pleading with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to pump more crude oil out of the ground and onto the marketplace to lower prices.

President Biden could have boasted of America’s solid environmental record of the last half century since the first Earth Day in 1970, including enactment of landmark laws that have resulted in cleaner air and water, larger park and nature preserves, and lower pollution levels and carbon emissions, including from America’s hydraulic fracturing revolution.

The president could have shown the rest of the world that America for the last half century has been an environmental leader that other nations should follow. But such truth would have upset the delegates’ narrative that the U.S. is the climate malefactor, so he did not. Instead, he said the U.S. has an “overwhelming responsibility” to aid smaller countries to combat global warming and he repeated the colossal canard that it constitutes an “existential threat to human existence.”’CFACT engages as UN climate extravaganza begins 1

CFACT, for its part, was on the ground and reporting on the airwaves.

We spoke with Zac Goldsmith, Great Britain’s minister of The Environment at the Foreign Office, about whether the U.K. and other nations should make such an enormous financial commitment of more than $100 billion in annual aid. He hedged.

“There’s always a gap,” Secretary Goldsmith told us, between expectations and what is realistic, while acknowledging that the prior, one-time commitment of $100 billion by developing nations “should be fulfilled.”

Of course, no UN climate conference would be complete without the presence of former Vice President and Academy Award winner, Albert Gore. When CFACT’s Craig Rucker and Peter Murphy bumped into him, they asked him about his latest tirade that oil, gas and coal must be replaced. When he hemmed and hawed, we further confronted him directly about his home in Tennessee which uses more electricity in a month than average Americans do in a year. He refused comment and scurried away.

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, for his part, went on the airways reporting developments on One America News (OAN), the Joe Piscopo national radio show, and Washington DC’s talk radio station WMAL, among other media.

The UN Climate Conference (“COP26”) has just begun, and CFACT is on the case. We will continue our vigilance to assert climate sanity and realism.