Sunday, January 15, 2023

Co-Optation Double-Down...UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC, COP 28).

Orwell
ShrugsVille



The next UN conference on climate change, COP-28, will take place this fall in United Arab Emirates.

If you recall, by the time we got to COP-27 last year many of the 'delegates' were fossil fuel industry lobbyists:

...There are 636 lobbyists from the oil and gas industries registered to attend the (COP-27) UN event in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. At Glasgow, the figure was 503, which outnumbered the delegation of any single country. This year the only country with a larger delegation is the United Arab Emirates, hosts of Cop28 next year, which has 1,070 registered delegates, up from 176 last year...


Well, as you may have already guessed, that was nothing.

Because this year the uber-duber big boss of COP-28 is a bonafide captain of the industry itself:

...Ahmed Al Jaber was named as president-designate of this year’s UN climate summit, COP28, scheduled to take place November 30 – December 12 in Dubai. Al Jaber is the UAE’s special envoy for climate change and also serves as the country’s Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology. He is the founder and CEO of a renewable energy firm called Masdar. But it is his role as the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world, that is sparking condemnation and conflict of interest allegations...


Honestly.

Even pretending to still call this thing a 'climate change conference' is beyond double-speak.


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4 comments:

Evil Eye said...

The world has the best governments money can buy.

RossK said...

Or, in this case, a monied government that's best for those of certain kind...

Anonymous said...

Amazing isn't it? Like holding an animal cruelty conference at a factory farm and putting the farmer in charge of deciding what's cruel.

Scotty on Denman said...

And the fox is among the pigeons.

That’s how they do it. So how do the rest of us undo it? Why, for example, do Canadian Green parties do so poorly when citizens now consistently put environmental concerns at par or above economic ones which used to own the top spot for a long time? The Island community I live in might have one of the highest per capita number of EVs; solar panels on the roof of our community hall sell surplus to the grid to pay for the installation, cover building and property maintenance, and provide four EV-charging stations, two hight-speed, free in front of the library. Many private homes are going solar. My dove and I ran a plant nursery for several years, never sold any pesticides or herbicides—and nobody ever asked for them; after 40 years of wood stove intimacy, I switched to electric heating about ten years ago; when I came here almost 34 years ago, almost every house on my street (I’m in my 4th place on this block) heated with wood: now there’s maybe one smoky chimney left. Every year, volunteers collect tons (literally) of plastic flotsam from our beaches; marauding volunteers eradicate invasive non-native plants (except the Himalayan blackberries which, I swear, will subsume me one a these years). We recycle: there’s a regular-hours Free Store, a 24/7 Free Shack, a food bank, and an extreme-weather warming/cooling centre. Et cetera. And yet environmental degradation and catastrophic consequences are increasing and, with respect weather, there’s little I or all my fellow Islanders put together can do about it: there’s not enough of us to make a dent on a global problem.

The problem is we keep getting relegated to individual action (like EVs, blue-boxes, &c) and community cooperation which, in the big picture, apparently doesn’t even slow the descent down the dark ladder. All very good, but only big government can come to grips with such a huge problem. Obviously citizens—including the electorate, are ready to support the large-scale action needed.

But for the foxes…