“[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake…. It’s just worthless words.” ( – James Hansen, below)
COP30, a CO2-fest of sorts, is failing. Major emitters have not shown up. Virtually all nations and regions are in serious noncompliance with their Paris Agreement goals according to Climate Tracker, and the gap is widening. The new pitch is less about emissions as about the fantasy of cheap wind and solar and batteries heralding a new energy era. Yet the energy transition has been demoted to energy addition (Daniel Yergin) and now energy duplication. Think rising energy prices from climate policy….
Hansen on Paris
James Hansen is a realist when it comes to the United Nations’ global warming negotiations; wind and solar energies; and the lobbying frenzy surrounding the issue. His statements should be remembered as the Paris Climate Agreement, the successor to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, turns ten years old this month.
In an interview with The Guardian in late 2015, the father of the climate alarm startled the rejoicing Progressive Left with this verdict post-COP21:
[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: “We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.” It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.
Continue with these pronouncements from Hansen in the same year:
Watch what happens in Paris carefully to see if all that the leaders do is sign off on the pap that UN bureaucrats are putting together, indulgences and promises to reduce future emissions, and then clap each other on the back and declare success.
Big Green consists of several ‘environmental’ organizations, including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), each with $100+M budgets, each springing from high-minded useful beginnings, each with more high-priced lawyers than you can shake a stick at. EDF …was chief architect of the disastrous Kyoto lemon. NRDC proudly claims credit for Obama’s EPA strategy and foolishly allows it to migrate to Paris.
Other Hansen Views
In previous posts, I have noted Hansen’s recalcitrance toward cap-and-trade, whether federal, state (California), or in another country (Australia or Quebec/Ontario). He lambasted Copenhagen (COP20) for its interest in cap-and-trade too. Ditto for the Paris agreement, Obama’s signature climate achievement.
Hansen wants a global CO2 tax, complete with ‘border adjustments’ (tariffs per country) to prevent ‘leakage’. Fat chance. He knows wind and solar are too problematic and not scalable as are nuclear fission plants (which he supports). As he stated: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”
Hansen’s Doomism
The father of the climate alarm will not back down from his outlier, all-bad predictions of the human influence on climate. CO2 fertilization is neglected, and anthropogenic warming is not divided into positive, benign, and negative to reveal a real-world metric.
To Hansen, the world is on fire from the enhanced greenhouse effect (what Michael “Climategate” Mann calls Doomerism). In 2006, Hansen gave this ultimatum:
We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.
Well, a decade later, the die is surely cast where adaptation is the order of the day. But no…. Consider this update from Hansen in 2023 in The Guardian [“‘We are Damned fools’: Scientist Who Sounded Climate Alarm in 80s Warns of Worse to Come,” (July 19, 2023). Oliver Milman began:
The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because “we are damned fools” for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s.
Hansen is then quoted:
There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts. These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality – we knew it was coming…. It means we are damned fools. We have to taste it to believe it.
And continuing:
Things will get worse before they get better. This does not mean that the extreme heat at a particular place this year will recur and grow each year. Weather fluctuations move things around. But the global average temperature will go up and the climate dice will be more and more loaded, including more extreme events.
And the doomism dance continues….
Emissions are out and renewable fancies are in at COP30.
“Now we talk about solar panels, electric cars, regenerative agriculture, stopping deforestation, as if we have always talked about those things. Just in one decade, the topic changed totally. But we still need to speed up the process.”
– Ana Toni, the summit’s executive director. Quoted in “Past promises haunt Brazil’s climate summit” (Sara Schonhardt | 11/17/2025)
“We have miserably failed to accomplish the objective of this convention, which is the stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Additional promises mean nothing if you didn’t achieve or fulfill your previous promises.” – Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s climate envoy and lead negotiator. Quoted in “Past promises haunt Brazil’s climate summit” (Sara Schonhardt | 11/17/2025)