Essay by Eric Worrall
The big gas COP28 boss expects tangible results and progress reports from the climate communists.
Cop28 president: world needs business mindset to tackle climate crisis
Exclusive: Sultan Al Jaber aims to use UN talks to set out how private sector can limit greenhouse gas emissions
Fiona Harvey Environment editorFri 7 Apr 2023 21.00 AEST
The world needs a “business mindset” to tackle the climate crisis, the president of the next UN climate summit has said.
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“We need a major course correction and a massive effort to reignite progress. This cannot be done by governments alone,” Al Jaber told the Guardian in a rare interview, his first with a global newspaper since taking on the Cop28role.
“The scale of the problem requires everyone working in solidarity. We need partnerships, not polarisation, and we need to approach this with a clear-eyed rationale and executable plan of action,” he said.
“Cop28 is committed to building on the progress made at Cop26 and Cop27 to inject a business mindset, concrete KPIs [key performance indicators, a cornerstone of most commercial strategies] and an ambitious action-oriented agenda.”
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Romain Ioualalen, the global policy manager at the campaign group Oil Change International, said:“This is a truly breathtaking conflict of interest and is tantamount to putting the head of a tobacco company in charge of negotiating an anti-smoking treaty.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/07/cop28-president-world-needs-business-mindset-tackle-climate-crisis-sultan-al-jaber
I find it amusing The Guardian felt the need to explain to readers what a key performance indicator is.
As WUWT recently covered, Sultan Al Jaber is presiding over a major increase in gas production. But in the article above, he also points to his progress building renewable energy in the UAE, which I suspect he plans to showcase at COP28.
Will KPIs for climate communists deliver results? I suspect not. Most of them in my opinion don’t want genuine emissions cuts, they just want to look like they care. Setting firm goals and expecting compliance is a trap many CEOs encounter, when they try to actively manage an organisation of volunteers, when they try to organise people who are not required by an employee relationship to answer to their authority.
Sultan Al Jaber might have been lulled into a false sense of security by his experience of organising climate action in the UAE. Inside the UAE Sultan Al Jaber is a member of the royal family. While the emirates have a centuries old tradition of respecting private property and encouraging commerce, and have been remarkably successful at preserving a balance between government and private interests, anyone living in the emirates still has to listen to and respect the wishes of one of the royals.
Outside the emirates, Sultan Al Jaber doesn’t wield the same level of influence. He has no power to command people from other countries, only to inspire and lead. And this means if someone doesn’t want to abide by his KPIs, or fakes the numbers, he has no real power to call them out. People can choose to simply ignore him if ignoring his requests is convenient, or they can lie about their compliance, and issue strong denials if he objects to those falsehoods.
Having said that, I could be wrong. Sultan Al Jaber has already demonstrated capability as a negotiator, by winning acceptance of his leadership of COP28. The muted public grumbling about the conflict of interest between Al Jaber simultaneously running a major petroleum extraction business, and running a major climate conference, is unlikely to seriously challenge his legitimacy.
Notice how The Guardian used the term commercial in place of capitalist in order to modify the tone of its messaging.
Meanwhile we have Big Joe dishing out newly created tax subsidies to oil companies after the Left railed against un-named subsidies for oil companies up to this point. It’s another daily reminder that the game in DC is all based on the assumption that Americans are dumb as a doornail.
story tip
Occidental Petroleum Plans to Suck Carbon Dioxide From the Air—So It Can Keep Pumping Oil – WSJ
About fifty miles southwest of Midland, Texas, deep in the oil-saturated Permian Basin, more than 100 workers are busy laying out roads and water lines, preparing to build an elaborate complex of fans, each as large as a tennis court.
When they start running in 2024, the fans will suck massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air. The carbon will be funneled thousands of feet down deep wells into geological formations, where it should remain for centuries.
The company behind this environmental moonshot is Occidental Petroleum Corp.,
one of the country’s most successful oil-and-gas producers. It hopes the enterprise will give it license to keep operating as a driller decades into the future.
It is spending more than $1 billion to build the first in a planned fleet of plants using direct-air capture to pull the CO2 out of the air, a budding technology with fuzzy economics. Bolstering the move are generous tax incentives included in the climate package President Biden signed into law last year that cover up to 45% of Occidental’s expected initial costs per metric ton.
And without generous tax incentives?? What might the outcome be?
“the fans will suck massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air”
What’s their carbon footprint?
“COP28 is committed to building on progress made at COP26 and COP27.”
There was none, so will be none, Sultan.
Just a tad ironic that your country also just announced a major expansion of its vital oil and gas business, making it easier to fund your hosting of COP28.
It should be a requirement that EVERY COP meeting by powered solely by Renewables and have no grid connections and no FF back-up generation. Stand alone and prove concept or fail and fall. Further, there should be no Farmed Meat (beef, pork, chicken) served any place in town during the weeks long event, only Bugs and wild caught fish. Then, there should not be allowed any farm grown vegetation consumed that required fertilizer or insecticides. Nothing should be cooked over gas or. propane only Wood, Ding, or Electricity sourced by the aforementioned renewables
The COP participants can have their steaks and caviar as long as they travel to and from the conference exclusively on foot or ox-drawn carts.
oops- you beat me to it- didn’t read your comment first
The events should be way out in the desert with the only way to get their is by walking or camel.
More virtue signaling. KPIs are nothing more than goals that have already been met, in process, or are just plain pie in the sky and it won’t change PPM in our atmosphere one iota. How much longer will fossil fuel producers play this cat and mouse game with environmentalists? As long as it keeps the wolf away from their door.
We have a KPI—Mauna Loa Observatory. And it shows exactly zero performance over the past 27 COPs. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over (27 times) while expecting a different result.
KPI is nothing more than a symptom of what I have been calling “Management-By-Book-Of-The-Month-Club” since the 1990s. Governments and other large bureaucracies all go through faddish phases, none of which are based on rational thinking; many of which have lasting, seriously negative consequences. All of you can name your personally favorite example(s).
There is an engineering basis to the process of Six Sigma, and KPIs follow from analysis of variance and are designed to meet statistical process control objectives. This all requires strict system definition and evaluation of measurement tools and system variables
If applied honestly and correctly, it will be found that nothing we do makes any difference at least on a timescale that could produce predictable results. Therefore, the whole futile exercise should be curtailed.
“How much longer will fossil fuel producers play this cat and mouse game with environmentalists?”
Until they have achieved corporate governance over nation states. They can then throw the eco wack jobs under the bus because their ridiculous activism has no basis in empirical reality.
My take is the KPIs are like little land minds on the terrain.
Nobody knows who will step on them.
Of course everyone knows what KPs are – they’re nuts
so far in this century the world has spent 6.6 trillion in green energy subsidies and the net effect is a 1% increase in renewables percentage of total energy used – so to achieve the net zero goals the world will first go bankrupt
Its the science! Politics plays no role in
global warmingglobal heatingdangerous warmingclimate changeworrisome climate changecatastrophic climate changeexistential climate changewe’re all gonna die! Unless we eat bugs and own nothing, that is.COP28, led by an oil despot, will solve all the world’s intersectional problems which are all caused by the climate scare de jour. Trust us this time.
“Cop28 is committed to building on the progress made at Cop26 and Cop27…”
_______________________________________________________
Zero plus zero is zero
But its a sincere zero.
“… an elaborate complex of fans, each as large as a tennis court. …”
The technology could be put in places near Los Angeles, Mexico City, and other sick cities with rank air and be beneficial.
I wonder what these folks think the proper level of CO2 in the atmosphere should be.
Anyway, TheClimate™ won’t care.
I wouldn’t believe a word of what he says or promises.
The green economy cannot build itself. It doesn’t produce enough energy to manufacture the millions of new solar panels and windmills required to go green. This energy can only come from fossil fuels.
The major oil companies have all dome the math. Creating a green economy while keeping the current economy going will significantly increase global demand for fossil fuel over the next 30 years. So of course they are on board with promoting renewable energy. There is no conflict of interest.
All of these guys are out of their cotton picking minds. They have been battling to save the earth from climate change since the 1990s. What was/is their plan? To reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. So how successful have they been? Complete failure, CO2 has risen the same as it was before we were being saved. We have wasted untold billions even trillions of dollars for what? Zero emissions have been been reduced, we are all still alive and doing well. I am frankly tired of being saved, stop it and give me my money back. You guys suck at what you do.
In a sane world there would only be two key performance indicators:
1. how much global temperature (increase) has been reduced
2. how much sea level (increase) has been reduced
Because these are the only supposedly “existential” threats from global warming. Everything else is obfuscation. Warming supposedly causes unbearable living and working conditions in already hot environments for hundreds of millions of people as well as secondary effects like melting glaciers which raises sea levels. (Never mind that a 1 ⁰C temperature increase over a century when it’s 30 to 40 C outside is not going to make any difference in discomfort.) Sea level rise supposedly threatens hundreds of millions living near coasts.
Unfortunately the madness has so gripped the frenzied minds of climate alarmists that they are not rational. They think that measuring how much carbon dioxide and methane emissions have been reduced is a suitable measure of performance. It’s not. At best it’s a proxy but because we don’t know how much those emissions contribute to warming they are in fact unsuitable metrics. Neither is measuring how much power is generated from “renewable” or “green” energy sources. Only global temperature and sea level are. And they know that the reduction in either from their mitigation strategies is so immeasurably tiny that the public would wonder what all the fuss is about, so they resort to nonsense metrics like gigatons of ice, tons of CO2 emissions, etc.
Roll on with KPIs. For many of us, they were an amusing component of the “human resource systems” period of a few decades ago. Everybody fiddled their results, and helped others to fiddle their results who lacked the skills and imagination, or were simply too busy to be creative. One risk was the “manager” of each department would get their full bonus entitlement without doing any work, but the manager of the managers would step in to make sure that didn’t happen. There was an element of back-stabbing.
How can a KPI be introduced without knowing what the ideal temperatures are for every climate zone and sub-zone or how much people actually contribute to CO2 increases or where the so called tipping point will be?
This is all a scam used by a relatively small number of powerful people to massively enrich themselves but impoverish billions of people. The damage they cause will be a thousandfold that of any climate changes.
We can adapt to climate changes and weather conditions at a tiny fraction of what has already been spent on foolish climate engineering.
More Climate BS – the nonsense prattling of scoundrels and imbeciles on Climate and Covid.
There never was any Climate emergency – we published that clear statement in 2002.
And so it goes…
Biden Signs Republican-Led Bill Ending COVID-19 Emergency | The Daily Caller
For the record, there never was a national Covid-19 health emergency. The Covid-19 illness was no more fatal than other winter flus and was less serious than some recent ones.
The real Covid-19 emergency was the scary false propaganda, the needless harmful lockdowns, and the ineffective toxic “vaccines” that killed 13 million people worldwide to end 2022 and will kill another 6 million by end 2023.
None of this carnage was justified – I identified the Covid-19 scam in Feb2020 and published my first warning on 21Mar2020 here on wattsup. Nobody listened.
100,000 needless Canadian deaths and 1.6 million needless American deaths later…
KPIs are so 1980s.
Does any big, successful company still use them?
Their main past use was to provide Human Resources departments with excuses to dismiss people.
Three cheers for the memory of times before both KPI and HR.
Geoff S
I will run that up the flag pole and see who salutes….it could be a win win.
‘Twas brillyg and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gabble in the wabe’
Al Jabber Wokey
Lewis Carrol clearly knew what was coming, when he penned the original nonsense Jabberwocky.
A perfect COP press release that can be written before the upcoming jamboree even happens.