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Joanne Nova
A prize-winning science graduate in molecular biology. She has given keynotes about the medical revolution, gene technology and aging at conferences. She hosted a children’s TV series on Channel Nine, and has done over 200 radio interviews, many on the Australian ABC. She was formerly an associate lecturer in Science Communication at the ANU. She’s author of The Skeptics Handbook, which has been translated into 15 languages.
What did I say? After the near collapse of climate talks, global leaders ‘rescued’ COP28 at the last minute, scoring top marks in Climate Bingo: the talks are “historic”, “landmark”, “unprecedented”, and use the actual phrase “transition away from fossil fuels” for the first time ever. Be still my beating heart.
A hundred billionaires met with 70,000 groupies, using millions of dollars mostly taken from other people, and have decided they need to do it all again.
The point of these meetings is to issue more press releases, reward the faithful underlings, arrange golden handshakes behind the scenes, and transfer billions of dollars from the riff-raff to the Private-Jet Class. This glorious goal is achieved when the Grand UN Performance of vague, non-binding Hopium is used to fool investors and voters in domestic theatres.
And so it comes to pass that all nations have finally agreed to do what they were doing anyway. But UN-speak translates the nothingness into hyperbole:
The agreement marks “the beginning of the end of fossil fuels” – UNFCCC
The president of the European Commission has welcomed the COP28 agreement, hailing it a “global turning point”. – more Sky News.
Despite that – the world continues on the transition to fossil fuels and away from wood and donkeys while everyone – except the patsies – plays the game and pretends to power themselves with sunshine and breezes.
Oblivious to the trillions of dollars being spent, 82 per cent of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels, and the new annual growth in fossil fuels is so fast that all the additional unreliable energy sources added this year cannot even keep up with it.
The theater of the absurd
The spokeswoman for a bunch of small islands told the world the deal was nothing much and got a two-minute-long standing ovation anyway:
The lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, Anne Rasmussen, criticised the deal as unambitious.
“We have made an incremental advancement over business as usual when what we really need is an exponential step change in our actions,” she said.
But she did not formally object to the pact, and her speech drew a standing ovation that lasted nearly two minutes. – Reuters
It doesn’t matter what she said, just like it doesn’t matter that 90 per cent of their islands are not sinking either. The islands are the token mascots and must be cheered. It’s a performance religion.
It’s the empty UN landmark deal that almost no one will achieve
Even the propaganda machine in Geneva has to admit that the “central outcome” is just a stocktake, which shows emissions *need* to be cut by an impossible amount, and people are not achieving it. This is as good as it gets:
The global stocktake is considered the central outcome of COP28 – as it contains every element that was under negotiation and can now be used by countries to develop stronger climate action plans due by 2025.
The stocktake recognizes the science that indicates global greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut 43 per cent by 2030, compared to 2019 levels, to limit global warming to 1.5°C. But it notes: Parties are off track when it comes to meeting their Paris Agreement goals. – UNFCCC
Only last month, the UN admitted that the world was going to crash through the Paris Agreement and miss, not just by a little bit but by a factor of two.
The UNFCCC hopes everyone will turn up with better plans next year:
In the short-term, Parties are encouraged to come forward with ambitious, economy-wide emission reduction targets, covering all greenhouse gases, sectors, and categories and aligned with the 1.5°C limit in their next round of climate action plans (known as nationally determined contributions) by 2025.
If your government is one of the ones sincerely trying to meet impossible, stupid targets, you know you live in The Patsy State.
