- Correction: In previous editions of this newsletter we made an absurd claim that some 70,000 people would attend COP28. But that number turns out to have been wrong. As Robinson Meyer writes in Heatmap Daily, “If you count delegates, staff, other attendees, and day visitors, more than 100,000 people will go to the climate conference this year, the UN climate director Simon Stiell announced yesterday.” CDN regrets the error, the waste, the whole thing.
- If your reaction to the previous item was “Simon Who?” we’d like you to know that “United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres appointed Mr. Simon Stiell of Grenada as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on 15 August 2022. The appointment was made after consultation with the Conference of the Parties through its Bureau.” If your reaction to this item is wow, what a lot of jobs for the boys and girls, (and apparently the salary is a stingy $207,000) what has he actually done to save us from sinful bad weather, well, uh, there you have us.
- Irony can be quite ironic. It turns out a major reason for the bloated quality of this year’s event is that the UAE is using COP28 as, of all things, a fossil fuel trade show. As CFACT observes, Nigeria has sent 1,411 people to the conference including 422 on the official state payroll. Again we say, with friends like these…
- Out Siberia way it’s gotten as low as -58.7°C which is cold even for them. And the National Post reports that “temperatures below -50 Celsius have spread across the region in recent days. Most of Russia is predicted to endure temperatures much below average through the next week. The coldest conditions relative to normal will tend to drift toward the central and western parts of the country.” But naturally it’s just weather. Even the bit where Ozero Iema (don’t try to say it with frozen lips) in the Sakha republic some 4,800 kilometres east of Moscow, set records for low temperature on Dec. 4 and Dec. 5, the latter being “the lowest December temperature in 40 years”.
- As if to prove that an amateur economist is nearly as dangerous as an amateur doctor, though how an amateur got this job is hard to understand, we give you Kristalina Georgieva, who “holds a PhD in Economics and an MA in Political Economy and Sociology from the Karl Marx Higher Institute of Economics” who is now, by some sinister turn of events, the head of the International Monetary Fund. “Diverting the trillions of dollars by which the world subsidises fossil fuel production each year,” she says, “and putting an implicit price on carbon emissions, would generate the vast amounts of cash needed to tackle the climate crisis.” Wow. Money falls from the sky in unlimited amounts. A Marxist you say? We’re astonished. Why is she head of the IMF again?
- And from the “if that’s victory” file, Heatmap tells us “Offshore wind has gotten off to a bumpy start in the U.S., but a few projects are still forging ahead. Today, one of them achieved a historic – though at this point largely symbolic, milestone. It started delivering power to the mainland.” Wow. Like historic symbolism, man. And symbolic historicism. Just not power generation you can use. Even if the one lonely turbine “was installed just two weeks ago with union labor” and “New York aims to have 100% clean power by 2040… Once the 12 turbines that make up South Fork are completed, it will be 0.01% of the way there.” So more of an inchstone really.
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13 Dec 2023 | News Roundup
0.01% of the way there?Sure that isn't a typo?