COP26 is an obnoxious parade of hypocrisy by the global elite

Every measure they suggest will make ordinary people worse off. You won’t drive a car. You won’t go on holiday. Your house will be cold, your water tepid. Your bills will go up. You’ll eat insects, not meat. You won’t have as many children. Suck it up plebs, we’re all in this together.

But we blatantly aren’t.

In terms of sheer Marie Antoinette-style obliviousness, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, takes the biscuit so far.

This is the man whose predatory brute of a company killed our high street shops, filled our bins with excess packaging, and clogged the roads around us with delivery vans. But for personal use Bezos prefers his $65million Gulf Stream private jet.

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Never mind though, he has pledged $2 billion to “restore nature”. I’d be impressed, had he not spent almost treble this amount flying into space for four minutes.

Glasgow MSP Paul Sweeney calculates that as a percentage of Bezos’s net worth, this sum is the equivalent of the average Scot donating £1. But hail Bezos, the climate warrior.

HRH the Prince of Wales’s contribution is all the more nauseating because it is so self-congratulatory.

Charles has spent 50 years “trying to raise awareness” of climate concerns, he says. So only a churlish peasant would remind him that he and his wife have a carbon footprint 96 times higher than the average person, mainly from his private jet and helicopter flights. And all those palaces need heated, you understand.

And look, there’s Ursula von der Leyen, the European commission’s top schmoozer of the global bigwigs. She took 'air taxis' for 18 out of her 34 official trips – mainly Paris to London – since taking up the role in December 2019. She’s so important, she even has to travel 31 miles in a jet.

Boris Johnson warned leaders that they they can no longer afford to delay major climate action. More water off ducks’ backs. His audience knew that none of the impoverishment they are inflicting on the mass populace will affect them personally.

Then Johnson flew back to London when he could have taken a train. ‘Time constraints’ being the lame excuse offered.

Cue Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who brightened up Week One with a walk-on role, playing the common man, making an empowering suggestion. If you want to get people out of their cars, give them an incentive by lowering bus and rail fares.

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The vast majority of people could get behind that because they could see it could improve our lives, he says. Amidst all the end-is-nigh gloom, ideas like this inspire hope.

Meanwhile a friend in Glasgow’s west end watches a fleet of Mercedes – petrol and diesel, not electric – ferry delegates from city centre hotels.

“At just one hotel we counted 60 cars waiting.” The journey takes 15 minutes by electric bus or train, or 20 mins on foot, but stuff the climate, COP26 courtiers can’t be expected to walk.

Still, that’s on improvement on all the 20-minute flights shuttling between Glasgow and Prestwick Airports.

At least Greta Thunberg uses public transport. However, her sweary hectoring of her elders poses no threat to people like Bill Gates, who swan into COP26 and sit smirking in the front row.

Once Greta has guilt-tripped anyone over the age of 25 and terrified us with her Cassandra-like predictions, the world’s true rulers will move in with their “solutions” and “reset” us, inspired by that infamous mantra of Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum: “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.”

The “you” refers to the bulk of the world’s population, not “us”, the wealthy and powerful.

Nice work, Greta!

And now, a word from our sponsors, such as Unilever, with its empire of ultra-processed products masquerading as a healthy, progressive diet.

This transnational sponsor of COP26 got right in there on day two, lobbying against livestock farming and in favour of dramatically reducing meat consumption.

Unilever lobbies under its Vegetarian Butcher brand, a range of meat substitutes. Such multi-ingredient products are a ‘gravy’ train for corporates. With the aid of food chemistry, they add value to the cheapest raw materials, which yields bigger profits for their corporation.

Surely independent journalists will at least voice the contrary position? Might they quote all the farmers and traditionalists who say that it is simply lunatic for people in a country like Scotland to spurn the natural food produced on our doorstep – beef, lamb, dairy, fish – for a 20-plus ingredient packaged concoction that came out a Dutch factory, courtesy of commodity ingredients transported from all corners of the world.

Sky, another sponsor of the COP26 virtue-signalling fest, has abandoned all pretence of objectivity. Sky TV has entered into a collaboration with the government’s ‘Nudge Unit’, a team of behavioural scientists, called the ‘Behavioural Insights Team’, which is one-third owned by the Cabinet Office, to subliminally influence us and set the climate news agenda.

So Sky is now firmly in the business of pre-cooked, government-extruded propaganda.

Beavering away on her save the world project, Sky’s chief executive, Dana Strong, regularly commutes by private jet from her home 3,500 miles away in the US to England. Sky’s parent company, Comcast, operates a fleet of corporate aircraft.

No conflict at all there, because Sky will offset all that eco-damage by screening dramas that feature more ordinary characters like us buying electric cars or ordering vegetarian options in restaurants. Expect similar nudges from the BBC.

What a brazen circus COP26 is! These people are laughing in our faces.

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