Mike Hosking: Cop this - no one on global stage cares what we do

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with, from left, ministers James Shaw, Damien O'Connor and Kieran McAnulty, announcing the new farm emissions plan. Photo / Mark Mitchell

OPINION

This weekend the charade that is COP 27 begins in Egypt.

Once again carbon footprints to make your eyes water will be laid down by the increasingly virtuous and nauseating disciples of climate change, to gather for a fraught series of days in which they will expel an astonishing amount of hot air - which will ultimately lead to nothing.

But they will, for a short time anyway, slap themselves on the back that all those all-nighters and last-gasp last-minute deals were of some importance.

The clue that this is all a charade is in the number, as in 27.

We are having COP 27 because the other 26 went nowhere.

Prior to the meeting, i.e. the days in which we are right now, you get the pre-show whining about how we are going to hell in a hand cart and the pledges made so far, which allegedly keep the world temperature increase at 2.8C, are woeful, and we need to now ... before it’s too late (small note here, it’s been too late for about 50 years) to make some more pledges which get the increase below 2 per cent.

We, as has been well documented of late, are leading the world in things like emission targets and taxes to meet those targets down on the farm.

We are assured by our “nuclear moment” Prime Minister that by “leading the world” the world will now line up and follow us. So I’m assuming that COP 27 will be a hit as a large selection of nations, so inspired by our recent move on farmers, arrive in Cairo emboldened ready to pledge themselves into a new bright and clean tomorrow.

Or, none of that will happen because we sadly are delusional, and the cold hard reality is no one gives a monkey’s what this country does, and self-interest will always win over the theorists, the likes of which run this country. It is well documented and widely accepted that we are as good as it gets when it comes to producing food.

All we have done is hamper our ability to excel in the world of growing things to eat.

We are also making it hard to grow things to eat, by allowing astonishing amounts of land to be sold off and planted in trees.

Although they have to be the right trees, because if they are not, they become the wrong trees, which is why sequestration was yet another cock up in the overall cock-up that made up the Government’s response to the He Waka Noa report.

But for the trees that are the right trees, i.e. pines, you can’t plant enough of them apparently, even though you can, and we are.

And the sad reality is, the world is not one jot better off because of it.

But we are losing productive land and when we lose it we don’t get it back.

There is another aspect to the land conversion debate, how much of it is foreign money versus local, but either way planting trees to offset carbon is the lazy but entirely predictable way to address, or appear to address, the problem.

The reason it is so popular is the carbon market, which is a Ponzi scheme if ever there was one, whereby the price is jacked up to a point where you’d be an idiot not to plant trees for credits.

It sits at a bit over $80 a credit, the back up market is sold out and the prediction is the price will rise to $200 plus.

And that’s before you get to the new apps like Xpansiv, which allow you to trade them, like coffee, orange or pork futures ... it’s the SkyCity of climate change.

Never has so much time, energy, money and carbon been spent and expelled on going nowhere fast.

Never have we seen so much hyperbole and, if you are generous, good intention go on treading water.

I’m not sure what the greater crime is, attending 27 meetings to say a lot of stuff you have no intention of doing.

Or pretending the latest version is going to be any different. Either way, this country is still a full-blown paid up sucker for it all.