On the eve of the big climate conference Global News moaned that “Canadian support for climate change initiatives lags ahead of COP27: Ipsos” Dang. “Ahead of the COP27 forum, Canada appears to rank near the bottom of 34 countries when it comes to public support for measures to help tackle climate change, a new poll suggests”. When people were asked how they felt about the usual green money pits like “subsidies for clean technology and providing incentives to invest in green financial products, Ipsos polling of citizens from 34 countries indicates support among Canadians ranks between the 27th and 31st spots.” The pollster responded by insulting the public. “‘These results are shocking,’ Sanyam Sethi, vice president of Ipsos Public Affairs, told Global News. ‘Canadians are not as engaged as they should be in the climate debate.’” But we can’t take all the credit. “Support among citizens in the United States, Germany, France and Brazil also ranked low when it came to the policies proposed, Sethi said.” Maybe sanity is going global.

Or maybe people elsewhere have already had some experience of what climate change policies do in the real world. Among the persistent delusions on the climate file is that rich western countries are about to give all their cash to poor non-western ones in a flash of climate heating guilt. In their windy incapacity to understand real-world consequences, many Western governments heading into COP27 really did help encourage expectations of climate reparations in the trillions of dollars. Before the conference the New York Times’s “Climate Forward” claimed that “This question will be at the heart of a showdown at COP27” while Reuters “Sustainable Switch”, which like NBC’s “Climate in Crisis” rather bakes the slant into its very name, then lamented on the final scheduled day of the conference that “COP27 draft deal published, no proposal yet on ‘loss and damage’ funding”. Finally, in the second day of overtime, Western delegates pretended to give in and other delegates pretended to believe them. Such is the state of modern climate negotiation.

Sleep deprivation is actually recognized as a form of torture more efficient, as well as less messy, than physical pain. Reuters claimed on Nov. 18 that “The overarching deal text, time-stamped at 03:30 AM reflecting the intensity of the final negotiations, reaffirmed key points in last year’s COP26 deal in Glasgow and the Paris 2015 agreement on limiting the rise in global temperatures.” But in fact the time-stamp reflects the amateurishness of the whole business of gathering tens of thousands of people to revamp the whole world economy and its ecology in less than two weeks without any effort to make sure you knew how to do it, and what you were going to agree to do, before you stepped into the limelight. And forcing exhausted, badgered delegates to cobble together a pseudo-deal only feels like triumph until torturers and tortured alike have had a chance to sleep and reflect.

The planning was so bad, unless it was part of the pressure tactic, that by the end not only food, water and coffee but even toilet paper was running out. Along with clarity of thought. In its story on the “historic” compensation deal unaccompanied by progress on the supposed urgent problem of emissions, the Telegraph started out “Vulnerable developing countries will receive compensation for the impacts of climate change after a historic deal was secured on Sunday morning at the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt.” But there is no actual money in the fund and no guarantee that any will go in, let alone the hundreds of billions the reparations enthusiasts demand. And it matters.

Back on Nov. 7 in a Reuter’s piece with “highway to climate hell” in the headline it enthused that “delegates from nearly 200 countries kicked off the summit with an agreement to discuss compensating poor nations for mounting damage linked to global warming, placing the controversial topic on the agenda for the first time since climate talks began decades ago” before gritting its teeth and conceding that “So far, only two countries have offered funding for loss and damage. Denmark committed 100 million Danish crowns ($13 million), and Scotland pledged 2 million pounds ($2.28 million)…. By comparison, some research suggests climate-linked losses could reach $580 billion per year by 2030.”

Then came the grim reality that nobody was going to pay up, accompanied by slack-jawed astonishment by the enthusiasts. Again.