Essay by Eric Worrall
UN Chief: “… I see a lack of ambition, a lack of trust, a lack of support, a lack of co-operation and an abundance of problems around clarity and credibility …”
Leaders gathered for nine days of climate talks. It took them eight to agree on an agenda
Nick O’Malley
June 16, 2023 — 3.55pmOf all the world’s leaders, it is the United Nations’ Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who has come to speak with the most force on our failure to rise to the threat of climate change, and so it was when he spoke as the Bonn Climate Change Conference came to a close this week.
“I see a lack of ambition, a lack of trust, a lack of support, a lack of co-operation and an abundance of problems around clarity and credibility,” he said in a speech made in New York on Wednesday that was aimed directly at Bonn, where 8000 people had gathered for the last major climate talks before this year’s COP28 conference in the United Arab Emirates.
“Countries are far off track in meeting climate promises and commitments.
“The climate agenda is being undermined. At a time when we should be accelerating action, there is backtracking. At a time when we should be filling gaps, those gaps are growing,” he said.
It is not surprising that Guterres was so blunt.
In Bonn, negotiators spent eight of the nine days arguing about the meeting’s agenda.
…
Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/leaders-gathered-for-nine-days-of-climate-talks-it-took-them-eight-to-agree-on-an-agenda-20230616-p5dh1h.html
You have to admit Gutteres has a point.
Perhaps climate leaders need to work out a designated negotiator system, so the delegate who draws the short straw gets to make speeches to an empty room, while everyone else can duck out and live it up with Germany’s 24×7 abundance of adult entertainments, or whatever it was they were doing while the underlings “negotiated the agenda”.
I mean, it’s kind of embarrassing when nobody at all wants to proceed with the big meeting.
“The shellacking will continue until enthusiasm improves”.
Kind of reminds me of managers who would hold a meeting for the purpose of planning the next meeting.
You have perfectly summed up the whole point of the COP meetings.
Defund the COPs
Why do I instantly think “NHS” when I read the above?
Once you hold a meeting to discuss the agenda for an upcoming meeting, you have covered all the issues to be discussed at the subsequent meeting.
Oh, and happy Juneteenth all you former Texas slaves. Government employees get to take a day off from torturing us.
Day -3) fuel up Gulfstream (7230 gallons) x 450 private jets flying to the conference…32M gallons of a gas
Day -2) Fly to destination and take limousines to hotels
Day -1) relax at poolside enjoying Kobo Prime Rib, Kobo Filet Mignon, Crabs and Lobsters flown in from other countries
Day 1) 8:00-8:30am opening keynote speaker delivers first speech highlighting need to stop eating beef
8:30-12:00 something happens
12:00-2:00 Lunch more flown in beef and seafood served
2:00-???something happens
Day 2) Lather rinse and repeat
…
Day 10) go home and tell your populations THEY need to eat bugs
…
Agenda issue solved
LOL 🙂
It’s only about getting nations to reduce carbon dioxide and that’s not going to happen
and reducing food, and people, and mobility, and privacy, and not obeying implicitly and completely, without questions, and …
Yes, the UN Chouriço General is very ticked off that his tinpot dictatorship is on hold.
The UN Chief is turning the climate change scaremongering up to 11.
All the yelling in the world isn’t going to prevent CO2 levels in the atmosphere from climbing. it’s time for the UN Chief to get real. Of course, he’s not paid to get real, so that’s not going to happen. He will keep on screaming and yelling.
Yep, he does look like an over-done chorizo.
The good news is …
“The climate agenda is being undermined. At a time when we should be accelerating action, there is backtracking. At a time when we should be filling gaps, those gaps are growing,” he said.
The Bad news is …
It will take 10yrs to stop the climate gravy train.
“The climate agenda is being undermined” ….by reality. Interruption of Russian gas to Europe was the “king has no cloths” moment for the energy transition.
At least.
Climate train hits reality wall just before plunging off cliff.
The only thing that could me make me laugh more would be the Chinese naming their latest coal power plant Antonio Guterres A.
If that ever happens for once I’ll say something nice about Xi Jinping
or maybe their next aircraft carrier
ONLY eight days? It normally takes that long to decide the color of the cocktail napkins.
Plus another week for the shape of the table. I begin to see where their lack of ambition is – they really should have allowed 2-3 weeks to set the agenda, etc. just not good enough – try harder.
Talks about talks….
As we used to call it
Story tip:
LABOUR’S climate change chief Ed Miliband praised Extinction Rebellion’s “exciting” activism and called for it to be “sustained”.
He hailed the law breakers’ work as a “fantastic success” and wants it “deepened”.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22728964/labour-ed-miliband-praised-extinction-rebellion-activism/
6th form stuff
I wonder who’s lining his pockets
People like Dale Vince.
Miliband is still trying to prove himself to his dad even though the latter has been dead for some time 🙂
I would love Miliband to be “deepened”, too, with the debris of a wind turbine as “trophies”…
And we have a (self selected) group of people who are:
Paralysed by self-importanceIll-educated, poorly researched and forgetful (they don’t even know what they’re talking about)Timid, fearful and paranoid that they may ‘get something wrong‘Puritanical and finger-wagging (i.e. everyone except them is doing something, often trivially, wrong)Each personally timid/paranoid but especially ‘Projecting‘ = that everyone else is out to hurt themAppealing to authorities they’ve not themselves read/understood (Grasping at Straws meets The Consensus)Well there’s a mish-mash of the symptoms of almost Every Mental Health Disorder there is (currently) known to mankind.
Then how many commentators here have remarked that they’re only really there to reinforce that madness/disorder/insanity via the food & drink and ‘extra-curricula activities’ they get when on these jollies?
Should that read: Pilgrimage?
It is the self-reinforcing death-spiral of Chronic Chemically Induced Depression.
Not ‘Sadness or Grief induced Depression‘ – the sort of depression that means you’re unsafe to drive when drunk.
(Try not to fall into it but if you do, wrap up warm. Hell is a cold place, in every way.
Check with Brandon or BoJo if in any doubt)
Random factoid:
We all recall the/a President of Mexico (fairly recently) lamenting how he wished his people didn’t eat as much Corn (maize) as they do. He asserted that is made them lazy, stupid, obese and generally: Really Rather Unhealthy and prone to dying.
Of course he was roundly slapped down from all quarters. “Maize is a Staple Food” – how could anybody be so stupid/ugly/wrong to say anything bad about Maize?
Yet the things he described are exactly those of (in combination) Mercury and Sugar Poisoning.
It is that, if me/you/anyone wanted A Plant to selectively remove Mercury from a landscape/farm/field or soil anywhere – you could not make a better choice than to grow Maize on that land.
Maybe we understand the Aztec/Maya and their little ‘demise’ a little better.
Junk Science Climate Change didn’t do it, they poisoned themselves and went on to make (ultimately fatal) political and societal choices/changes/actions.
What about Indigenous Folks up in the North West corner of North America – dependant on eating as much Salmon as they did?
Next time you ‘Reach for the Popcorn‘ – think twice.
While you still can ‘think’
What do they do with the plants once they’ve taken up the Mercury, Cadmium (so-called phyto-extraction etc)?
“After the plants are harvested with the metals concentrated in their tissues, they can be burned”
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-09-26/use-plants-to-clean-up-toxic-waste/
Well, it isn’t Carbon neutral.
Random factoid:
‘Looking for the Drowned Dead: With a Loaf of Bread and Mercury?’ | Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hsp.org)
“Pilgrimage?” Only to Sodom and Gomorrah.
You don’t say Sherlock I wonder why people would doubt you
BS eventually gets found out your time is up
Fire the lot of them, get a new lot in. Rinse and repeat until they either get the message or you run out of people who want the job.
Sure sounds like the nonsense movement is losing momentum. Hard choices for no reason can do that.
“Ah slight mistake there – you want the nonsense committee meeting down the hall, this is the prevarication committee!”
We started with an agenda of forty items, by the time we’d finished, we’d narrowed it down to seventy.
dude just cant take a hint obviously
It sounds to me like the natural course of action when a large group of incompetents strive to achieve the impossible.
Isn’t this a sort of metaphor for everything surrounding this “cliate crisis”? Things like cover hundreds of square miles of territory with wind turbines, kill wildlife and blight scenic views to replace a power plant sitting on less than one square mile?
Guterres sounds like a schizophrenic off his meds who can’t understand why everyone else can’t hear the same voices and won’t join in the same delusion. Doesn’t he know this is all a charade to benefit a few wealthy elites who are bored with reality.
I see
a lack of ambition,a lack of trust, a lack of support, a lack of co-operation and an abundance of problems around clarityand credibility …Fixed it for you
I’m surprised he didn’t say “I find your lack of faith disturbing”. There is a disturbance in the Farce.
LOL 🙂
All visas/passports etc connected to the UN must be withdrawn. All UN members and their families must return home. If they prefer the US to their country they can apply to immigrate. This sorry POS organization needs to leave the US sooner rather than later.
+42X42^42
Sorry, Eric, but from your post I’m still not sure that 8 days of a 9 day meeting was spent on the agenda. It was only a ways into the article that I began doubting my initial impression that it was 8 days discussing the agenda before the 9 day meeting. It was only after reading the SMH article that it became clear that the agenda consumed 8 days of the 9 day meeting.