COP29 International Climate Change Event Concept. Baku, Azerbaijan

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The deal may already be moot with Donald Trump returning to the White House

The international COP29 conference finished over the weekend with multinational pledges to spend billions of dollars over the next decade combating “climate change” in third world nations, amid expectations that the agreement will be rendered moot by former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Just the News reports that the conference, among the almost 200 nations who signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, ended with a mutual commitment to spend $300 billion every year until 2035 helping poor countries mitigate the so-called effects of “climate change” and transition to alternative energy.

India representative Chandni Raina wanted the conference to commit to $1.3 trillion a year, and lamented $300 billion as “abysmally poor” and a “paltry sum” that would not suffice to “address the enormity of the challenge we all face.”

Another group in attendance, the America-based Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), had a very different conclusion, as CFACT dissents from the green agenda of the international establishment.

“Nations such as China and India are given a pass on emissions reductions and paying out funds,” noted CFACT’s Craig Rucker. “This, despite the fact that China is the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases and boasts the second largest economy, while India’s economy is all the way up at number five.”

Regardless, the conference’s deliberations may already be moot, as Trump is widely expected to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement upon resuming office in January, which in turn would eliminate America’s share of the funding for COP29.

Trump formally pulled out of the Paris accords in August 2017, the first year of his first term, with then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley stating that the administration would be “open to re-engaging in the Paris Agreement if the United States can identify terms that are more favorable to it, its business, its workers, its people, and its taxpayers.”

Such terms were never reached, however, leaving America out until Trump’s successor, outgoing President Joe Biden, re-committed the nation to the Paris Agreement on the first day of his presidency, obligating U.S. policy to new economic regulations to cut carbon emissions.

In June, the Trump campaign confirmed Trump’s intentions to withdraw from Paris again. At the time, Trump’s team was reportedly mulling a number of non-finalized drafts of executive orders to do so.

Left-wing consternation on the matter is based on certitude in “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) or “climate change,” the thesis that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate and that such trends pose a danger to the planet in the form of rising sea levels and weather instability.

Activists have long claimed there is a “97 percent scientific consensus” in favor of AGW, but that number comes from a distortion of an overview of 11,944 papers from peer-reviewed journals, 66.4 percent of which expressed no opinion on the question; in fact, many of the authors identified with the AGW “consensus” later spoke out to say their positions had been misrepresented.

AGW proponents suffered a blow in 2010 with the discovery that their leading researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had engaged in widespread data manipulation, flawed climate models, misrepresentation of sources, and suppression of dissenting findings in order to make the so-called “settled science” say what climate activists wanted it to.