Sask Party Government's Latest Expensive Hypocrisy: Climate Change & Another Dubai Junket

Scott Moe loves international travel on your dime, even to support causes he openly mocks and rejects. Enough is enough, already.

The United Nations COP (Conference of the Parties) is an annual conference organized each year in a different host country by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The UNFCCC is an international treaty that was adopted in 1992 to address climate change, ratified by nearly all the countries in the world. Currently, there are 197 Parties to the COP - 196 countries (including Canada) and the European Union. Each Party, or country, has the right to participate and negotiate at COP conferences. 

Negotiations at COP conferences led to the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which established binding emission reduction targets for industrialized countries. The Paris Agreement, adopted at COP 21 in 2015, set the goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 

The first conference (COP 1) was held in Berlin in 1995. Scott Moe’s first appearance at a COP conference was in Morocco in 2016, when he was Brad Wall’s Environment Minister. That was also when Moe got his first taste of global travel on the taxpayers’ dime.

On October 18, 2023, Scott Moe and his Cabinet Ministers signed off on an Order in Council directing payment of $765,000 government dollars to the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company PJSC (aka Masdar). The money is to secure pavilion event space at COP28, which is being held in the UAE from November 30, 2023 to December 12, 2023.