In a panicked tweet, former vice president Al Gore—a champagne-socialist climate scold with a pedigree even more distinguished than John Kerry’s—warned that COP28 was “on the verge of complete failure.”

For those of you with real lives to worry about, COP28 is the short-form name of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, the 28th such event to be held, where the great and good elites of the world gather to make ever scarier prognostications and tell the rest of us why our lives are going to have to get worse in the name of progress.

Except the consensus among those elites as the conference headed into frenzied last-minute negotiations on Tuesday was that the prognostications and prescriptions weren’t scary enough, mainly because a draft report did not call for the complete end of fossil fuels. Or as Gore put it, it was a document “Of the Petrostates, By the Petrostates and For the Petrostates.”

That’s a reference to the fact that COP28 was held in the United Arab Emirates and, credit to Gore, he sees the irony here. Governed as a federation of absolute monarchies, the UAE is a collection of fiefdoms kept afloat, both literally and figuratively, on........

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