With President Donald Trump mocking the climate "con job" and top global-warming alarmist Bill Gates easing off the hysteria, many experts and analysts are predicting the upcoming United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) climate summit in Belém, Brazil, will be an expensive flop. However, the UN, governments, and climate activists are not giving up yet. Instead, they are doubling down.  

Officially, UN leaders and Brazilian authorities are promising major "progress" on saving the climate from the alleged dangers of human carbon dioxide emissions. Among other priorities for action at the 30th annual summit, all governments are supposed to bring a set of fresh "commitments" under the Paris Accord to slash CO2 emissions. A major push is on to build up the UN's enforcement power, too.  

Climate activists, meanwhile, are busy demanding trillions of dollars from taxpayers to save the world from CO2 — the supposedly dangerous gas exhaled by human beings — as if nothing was different this year. As usual, they are arguing even more vociferously than the previous year that time is running out. In short, they say, freedom and prosperity must be limited to help rein in emissions of what leading scientists call "the gas of life."