Climate farce.

THROUGH the course of this week, the rest of the world has been talking a lot about Pakistan. The setting is the idyllic Egyptian resort town of Sharm El Sheikh, and the occasion is the 27th Climate Change ConferAence (COP27). Our devastating tryst with floods this past summer is on everyone's lips.

Most of us have no idea that this summit is even taking place, our media and political mainstream concerned only about the never-ending political drama around Imran Khan, the appointment of the army chief and so on. The brutal truth is that the palace intrigues that monopolise our attention will count for nothing as we, and the world at large, hurtle towards ecological breakdown.

Read: 2022 floods, a living nightmare

Indeed, it is a huge indictment that while the rest of the world continues to talk about the millions whose lives have been completely uprooted due to unprecedented rains, the Pakistani mainstream appears to be totally unconcerned.

In case anyone still has any doubt: the question of climate change is the single most important issue of our time - and will be for generations to follow. Yet if mainstream Pakistan is yet to even acknowledge this, then the global 'experts' and governments that claim to be way ahead of the game are doing farcically little to actually arrest the downward slide.

Most of us have no idea that COP27 is even taking place.

It was in the Brazilian metropolis of Rio de Janeiro that the first truly global gathering to discuss environmental breakdown was organised 30 years ago. What has since become known as the Earth Summit featured a declaration which emphasised the imperative of curbing carbon emissions and taking other steps to limit what everyone acknowledged would be the ultimately unbearable effects of uninhibited global warming.

There are have been 26 summits since, and this year the words being uttered suggest greater urgency than ever. But the facts speak for themselves. In 1992, close to 90 per cent of the world's energy production was supplied by fossil fuels. Today, after 30 years of climate conferences, all sorts of pledges, enormous rhetoric about saving humankind and the planet, we have cut that figure by barely five percentage points - it is now 84pc.

There is no rocket science here. Companies like Shell and Mobil are amongst the most profitable in the world. To cut down carbon emissions requires a move towards renewable energy sources like wind and solar. But this effectively equates to limiting...