Climate zealots and world leaders are gathering at the United Nations’s COP28 climate conference in Dubai this week to discuss how to make ordinary people’s lives miserable in the name of fighting climate change. It is a gathering that is full of ironies.
The United Arab Emirates, host nation and a U.N. member, plans to increase its oil production by 25 percent by 2027. Many wealthy and powerful people descended on Dubai in their gas-guzzling private jets this week. Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Foreign Secretary David Cameron, and King Charles III apparently cared about the climate so much that each jetted to Dubai separately. The only silver lining for conference organizers aiming to keep the conference carbon neutral is that some attendees couldn’t make it to Dubai yet because their private jets had been covered in snow and frozen on the runway at Munich airport.
Among all the climate zealots’ hypocrisies, what bothers me most is their call to drastically cut back meat consumption while they themselves enjoy prime ribs and smash burgers from the conference’s “1.5° C-aligned menu.”
I know a thing or two about being forced to eat less meat. Growing up in communist China, the government imposed a strict food-rationing system that limited individual food consumption every month. We received ration coupons for rice, flour, and meat. With meat coupons, each person could only purchase two pounds of pork monthly. But widespread food shortages meant that the meat counters at grocery stores were often empty. Due to a lack of
