We had fun in Baku, Azerbaijan. Really we did. But our appetite for COP meetings is limited because repetition becomes repetitive for us. Others appear to feel differently; thus Climate Home News whines “Bitter end to Bonn talks” as the subject line on an email teasing to a newsletter that, in cool World Cup style, whines “In the midst of a war that has exposed the folly of relying on fossil fuels and summer heat that’s affecting the football World Cup, the Bonn climate talks scored a disastrous own goal.” New metaphor, same result. We genuinely do not know how they can stand to write, or even proof-read, prose like Bloomberg Green’s “Climate negotiations are picking up ahead of this year’s COP summit in Turkey. But talks are mired in a familiar issue: who will pay to help developing countries tackle global warming?” So yes, the talks went into “overtime” again, everyone there agreed that the weather was getting worse and it would be great if money fell from the sky, and we should do it all again soon. Count us out.

It gets worse. We understand that we and they disagree on what’s happening in the world and thus frequently disagree on how to interpret even agreed facts. But there is a limit beyond which they are simply misinforming their audience who, one hopes, would not appreciate the favour even if they understand the source. For instance, when this dismal thing started CHN actually said as if it were credible:

“Unlike last year’s agenda fiasco, today’s opening session at the Bonn mid-year climate talks saw a gritty resolve to get down to work. Delegates were reminded of the tough but ever-clearer imperative of shifting off fossil fuels to clean energy, as the Iran war bites.”

And then guess what? Same old same old windbag deadlock. Who saw that coming? Not them. But why not?

As to the war exposing the supposed folly of relying on fossil fuels, in point of fact it has exposed the folly of relying on fossil fuels that must pass through a narrow strait under the watchful eye of Islamist death-cult fanatics, which is not quite the same thing. Especially as it also exposed the folly of people thinking they no longer depended on fossil fuels due to their enthusiastic adoption of a “green energy transition” only to find that when gas became scarce they were in trouble.

And despite the summer heat affecting the football World Cup, we cannot help observing that soccer players seem just as capable of not scoring goals now as they were 30 years ago. Now let us explain baseball’s fascinating infield fly rule… uh, no.

Instead we return to the key point that it takes some kind of naïve enthusiasm to write stuff like:

“As negotiators sweated in a glass-box conference centre by the River Rhine, sustained largely by frozen yoghurt, the haggling dragged on close to midnight on Thursday but ended in gridlock and recriminations. Key areas for climate action - including work on the global adaptation goal and how to speed up emissions reductions - ended with no agreed text and were pushed to COP31 under the so-called ‘Rule 16’. In the last hours, the talks tried – and failed – to reach a deal balancing developing countries’ demands for reassurance on finance for adapting to climate impacts with richer nations’ focus on speeding up emissions cuts in line with science. The UN climate chief accused governments of ‘you-first-ism’ and ‘cherry-picking’ commitments they’d already made.”

Where have we seen that one before?

Oh yeah. COP29 in Baku. And COP30 in Belém though not first-hand due to the repetition issue. And at other preliminary talks to those and other COPs. And at other COPs. And at parallel talks to circumvent the futility of COPs with some other similar futility. (For instance Scientific American’s ridiculous headline “Scientists know how to phase out fossil fuels. Some countries are listening” at the instantly forgettable May gabfest in Santa Marta, Columbia.)

Richer nations may “focus on speeding up emissions cuts” in their rhetoric, but they don’t in their policies, at least not in the practical results. And poor countries, sorry “developing” ones, going around saying “Give me a dollar” over and over isn’t progress. CHN also wrote straight-type-faced that:

“It wasn’t a good look for faltering multilateralism which is under pressure to show it can still solve global issues like climate change. And it underscored how the UN climate process requires reform if it’s to deliver a low-carbon, climate-resilient future in the real world.”

As when it comes to actual evidence of, say, worsening weather, they’ve retreated into a fantasy world where what they say to one another takes the place of what they observe outside the echo chamber.

For instance, multiculturalism isn’t “under pressure to show it can still solve global issues like climate change”. It manifestly cannot do so and never could. What “global issues like climate change” do they suppose it solved in days of yore? Italy invading Ethiopia? Japan invading Manchuria? Iran’s proxies raining missiles on Israel? Or a shortage of gluten-free cookies in the “Olympic Stadium“ in Baku, which has never hosted an Olympic event, never mind an Olympic Games, but is on a Boulevard named for the ex-president whose son now coincidentally rules the place with an iron fist? Or of pompous rhetoric?

We nearly succumbed to narcolepsy on reading:

“There were some bright spots. Progress was made towards putting some flesh on the bones of a new mechanism to ensure a just transition for countries, communities and workers. And there was a buzz around a new goal proposed by Türkiye to boost electricity to 35% of the world’s energy mix by 2035, which is outside the formal negotiations for now.”

If that’s a bright spot, please draw the curtains. On the hearse, possibly, as they continue immediately:

“But the scant progress overall, with so many big issues up in the air, has left a lot of heavy lifting for Türkiye and Australia to make COP31 a success.”

Gad, it’s déjà vu all over again… again… again. Even for them, possibly, with this tedious add-on:

“Meanwhile, in neighbouring France, the G7 leaders’ summit was similarly underwhelming on climate action, not least because the hosts wanted to get warming-denier Donald Trump in the room. Still, as Chloé Farand reports, they agreed to boost cooperation on easing the reliance of the powerful club of nations on China for their transition minerals supplies.”

Agreeing to boost cooperation instead of actually doing anything is precisely what makes these gatherings a nightmare of futility, self-aggrandizement and repetition. (And cowardice since evidently the French hosts decided not to mention climate lest Trump frown at them.)

Speaking of narcolepsy, an earlier CHN newsletter tried to keep the excitement alive only to demonstrate that you cannot keep something in a condition it never achieved:

“A few hours ago, dozens of negotiators and climate campaigners from diverse parts of the world put on matching T-shirts reading ‘science is not negotiable’ and filed into a press conference room in Bonn. Clutching a colleague’s baby, the Marshall Islands climate envoy Tina Stege shouted out that there was no space for them all on the stage and they should line the room, where a sparse group of startled journalists with their laptops were soon surrounded. The coalition spanned governments and civil society, and developed and developing countries, with the EU and Switzerland speaking on stage alongside Nepal, Fiji, Panama and Sierra Leone. It was the most powerful moment so far of the otherwise low-energy talks.”

Make our soy latte a double… please. There should be plenty as even journalists were as sparse as original thoughts or performance theatre. As for science, wake us when some shows up.

Now we’re all for perseverance, and hope. But how do they do it under these conditions, even with the frozen yoghourt? We don’t even understand how protestors stay awake while burning a Tesla and smashing UN windows in some kind of “anti-G7 march” in Geneva, though we do savour them turning on the UN as a running dog of capitalism and “multilateralism”, which evidently doesn’t have many friends left. Or why they stay awake for this stale show of being pro-humanity and anti-bad things or whatever it is. But yet another CHN snoozer said:

“With climate change impacts mounting and rich nations cutting back their finance to help vulnerable people adapt, developing countries could really do with the steady stream of grants the UN’s Adaptation Fund specialises in. And, while rich governments have contributed less than the fund was seeking in recent years, it’s supposed to soon be able to access a steady revenue stream – a 5% share of proceeds from carbon credits sold in the Paris Agreement’s new market. But for the fund to get that money, governments need to approve at COP31 the fund’s transition to ‘exclusively’ serve the Paris Agreement. If it sounds routine, it’s not proving that way.”

Gah. Forget impacts mounting. What’s the logic of believing that as rich nations are “cutting back their finance to help vulnerable people adapt” (and again it’s hard to see how you cut something you never pushed forward) they’ll suddenly ante up big time in a “carbon credits” market that only fools would trust? Or that these kinds of negotiations could deliver anything other than fancy fast food eaten by an international elite as isolated from the realities of “vulnerable people” as from the facts of climate science or economic logic?