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.

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Walmart, America’s largest employer, says it will remove sexualized and transgender products targeted at children, review all funding of pro-LGBT ‘pride’ initiatives, end ‘racial equity training,’ and stop participating in the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.

The campaign to “de-woke” corporate America has claimed its biggest win yet, with the news that retail giant Walmart is abandoning a broad range of “diversity” initiatives it had previously invested heavily in.

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck reported that Walmart executives detailed to him a range of policy changes the company has committed to, amid left-wing cultural causes falling more out of favor with the general public.

The company plans to stop participating in the LGBT pressure group Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, to “identify and remove inappropriate sexual and / or transgender products marketed to children” via third-party sellers on its website, to “Review all funding of Pride, and other events, to avoid funding inappropriate sexualized content targeting kids”; to “not extend the Racial Equity Center which was established in 2020 as a special five-year initiative”; to stop factoring identity quotas into arrangements with suppliers; and to discontinue “racial equity training” as well as use of the terms “LatinX” and “DEI.”

“Remember, Walmart is the #1 employer in America with over 1.6 Million Employees and they have a market cap of nearly $800B,” Starbuck said. “This won’t just have a massive effect for their employees who will have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected but it will also extend to their many suppliers.”

“Our campaigns are now so effective that we’re getting the biggest companies on earth to change their policies without me even posting a story outlining their woke policies,” he added. “Companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back. The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are now the trend, not the anomaly.”

Walmart is the biggest corporate scalp Starbuck has claimed yet, but by no means his first. With past campaigns, he has successfully pressured Jack Daniel’s, John Deere, Tractor Supply, Lowe’s, Toyota, and Coors to drop similar policies.

In recent years, left-wing activists have used “diversity, equity, & inclusion” (DEI) and “environmental, social, & governance” (ESG) standards to encourage major U.S. corporations to take favorable stands on political and cultural issues such as homosexuality, transgenderism, race relations, the environment, and abortion.

Political and customer backlashes to such activism has translated to business woes for companies such as Disney, Bud Light, and Target. Former President Donald Trump’s defeat this month of outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris for the White House has also been seen by many as further evidence of the general public rejecting woke ideology, which may have further influenced Walmart’s decision.

Exit polling by the pro-Democrat firm Blueprint found that the statement “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” was the third-biggest reason for why overall voters chose not to vote for her, and the number one reason why swing voters rejected her and voted for Trump instead.