Essay by Eric Worrall
The COP website has a “low carbon” toggle which has been criticised as having minimal impact on the site energy usage.
United Nations COP28 climate summit reworks website following greenwashing allegations over ‘low carbon’ toggle
By Tom Williams
Organisers of the COP28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have reworked their event’s official website following allegations of greenwashing over a “low carbon” toggle which was found to have a minor impact on the site’s energy usage.
Key points:
- The website of the COP28 climate conference was modified after it was accused of greenwashing
- A toggle for a “low carbon version” of the site was found to have little impact on the site’s energy use
- Site updates were welcomed by a web sustainability consult, but they said “more needs to be done”
…
The toggle’s effectiveness has been criticised by experienced website developers who have accused COP28 organisers of greenwashing — a term referring to making misleading or false claims about the environmental sustainability of a product or service.
ABC News initially found that when the “low carbon” toggle was switched on, the COP28 site did not display some of its images, but still downloaded all of them in the background — offering only a minuscule amount of energy saving.
…
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-31/un-cop28-climate-summit-accused-greenwashing-website-low-carbon/103020978
I tried the toggle, the website then appeared to malfunction until I reloaded it. The malfunction might have been due to my less than perfect internet connection.
The main impact of the toggle appears to be to switch off some of the annoying animations, which includes pictures of solar panels and large concrete structures.
The ABC criticism may be a bit unfair. High resolution graphics animations can actually burn a fair bit of electricity, that is why computer graphics cards often need fancy heatsinks. But frankly I can’t be bothered to work out something so ridiculously trivial, whether the burn from running an on screen animation is significant compared to the energy required to push information halfway around the world.
Yep, for sure these people are going to save the world this time.
COP should just ‘toggle’ itself off for the maximum amount of climate and taxpayer benefit.
Let’s see if they break the private jet attendance record
What’s the over/under betting on the air conditioning bill?
Meanwhile local climate change groupie goes begging for airfare to COP28 https://x.com/kaiviti_cam/status/1719888720613216405?s=20
If it’s that important he should spend his own money.
It’s not important
What a joke! Since the UN IPCC science work shows that extreme weather globally is not becoming more frequent, intense nor of longer duration over the past 120+ years, what is this existential threat of climate change? Since there have been no change in the normal annual and decadal variations in hurricanes, major storms, floods, tornadoes, droughts and wildfires since the end of the 19th Century the Leftist politicians in the UN and Western governments and profiteering crony capitalists are left screaming lies of climate doom and gloom that the venial medial gleefully amplify.
Rod should do his readers a favor and don’t go. To those interested, he could provide a Zoom link.
Aw Eric, you’re such a
cynicrealist.The ABC page has a link to another article headed “ANALYSIS: COP27 achieved a win [sic] with a climate change compensation fund, but the hard work lies ahead” and attaches a photo of steam billowing from cooling towers but shot against the sun so as to look menacing; an image search reveals it is actually a power plant in Jänschwalde Germany.
A Greenpeace article on that plant features a similar photo captioned: “The power plant is producing 3000 megawatt … Smoke coming out of cooling towers“.
To your typical ‘greenpeacenik’ smoke = CO2.
It may be trivial but the so-called ‘climate crisis’ is built on such fakery and deceit.
They be cauldrons, double, double, boil and trouble.
Right so no toil then? And you’ll not be wanting the eye of newt and wing of bat, I expect?
Think about this….. that’s water vapor coming out of those towers. Artificial clouds…reflecting incoming sunlight back to outer space. The dream of geoengineering advocates….
Does the power generation company get any CO2 credits for running this experiment ? They should, it would cost a fortune to have a fleet of ships aerosolize enough sea water to do the same thing….
Look at that incredibly lush green field.
A nice peaceful green. !
Greenpeace have previously openly admitted* that for them the message is more important than the facts.
*After they were found to have exaggerated the quantity of pollutants aboard the decommissioned Brent Spar rig when campaigning (successfully, as it turned out) to stop it being sunk as an artificial reef.
Toggle this!!
That hurt my brain… 🙂
As Garage Logic puts it, what you cylinder count.
As that old saying goes – pride comes before a fall!
As Joe Biden sez – a sandbag comes before a fall.
The ‘minimal impact’ angle in relation to CO2 reduction is even more ridiculous in the U.K. where politicians on both sides of the House of Commons are supporting the destruction of the highly-successful domestic gas boiler industry.
The reason for wanting to destroy this industry is that gas boilers produce CO2 and therefore must be replaced by heat pumps. There are a number of boiler manufacturers and literally thousands of highly-trained engineers who install and regularly service these boilers. Probably more than 30,000 skilled jobs on the line.
Some 23 million homes in the U.K. rely on these boilers to heat homes and produce hot water for showers etc. – about 80% of the nation’s housing stock. Just about everybody you meet in the U.K. has a gas boiler.
The amount of CO2 produced by these boilers amounts to 0.000002% of the earth’s atmosphere. Yes, that’s six places to the right of the decimal point. And in order to save the earth from this our loony tune politicians are going to ban the use of a system that reliably and economically produces heat for most of the nation’s families.
At the same time, the U.K. has 50 years of gas beneath its surface which we are unable to access because the government has banned fracking. It’s as if British politicians have a deathwish for their own country and the people they are supposed to represent.
And MPs on both the left and right of the political spectrum support this policy. Not one of them has carried out a cost-benefit analysis on the proposal. No MP speaks out against the madcap drive to Net Zero. It has never been put to the British people at a General Election.
So there is no point – literally no environmental or economical point – in dismantling the gas boiler industry. And no political party that folks can vote for to stop it happening.
According to Creepy Joe Brandon, all those workers can go learn how to “code”.
Probably more than 30,000 skilled jobs on the line.
As the automobile was adopted huge numbers of livery stable workers, coachmen, farriers, etc. became redundant. That’s a part of progress that the above statement ignores and is unrelated to the simple-minded love affair with heat pumps, which will require even more maintenance and workmen to perform it.
As is typical in the energy field, decisions are being made by people with zero technical expertise in the subject. The EPA requires any one involved in the use of refrigerants to have a certification in their handling. Do you suppose Michael S. Regan, the head of the EPA, has any such training or evidence of knowledge that would enable him to hold a certificate that is legally required of a lowly pipefitter?
To add insult to injury the current cost of gas to the consumer in the UK is 7p per kWh whilst electricity is almost 4 times as expensive at 27p per kWh (Both inclusive of VAT).
Government also seems to think they can install 600,000 heat pumps a year from 2028 even though there are nowhere near enough installers and the industry itself has told them so on numerous occasions and that it would mean training more installers every year than already work in the whole industry.
But dimwit politicians carry on regardless!
Politicians love to virtue-signal with other people’s money. COP28 sees various government ministers and bureaucrats writing cheques their captive taxpayers can’t afford.
It’s page 1 of the socialists hand book – spend others money feverishly, try not to leave a visible trail
How will a ‘low carbon toggle’ save energy if no one looks at the COP website anyway?
As Ron White puts it “you can’t fix stupid” I never have cared for how many advance degrees someone has or how smart they think they are. I work in computer technology all my life, did hiring for a community bank and found most of the people that have all the certification you could want more often than not, you don’t want near your network or servers.
Great comment! 👍
“Waste” heat is only waste if you have to open the doors and windows to get rid of it. It is November 2nd and here in the UK I still haven’t turned on my heating, in part because my good and useful devices are also keeping me slightly warmer.
That won’t motivate me to watch the hi-res video on the COP 28 site though.
I could use some waste heat this morning. I would put it to good use, warming my bones.
Really, if these people truly believe atmospheric carbon is such a catastrophe, why are they fiddling around with trivial time wasters like this? If we’re all doomed by 2050 unless net zero, there’s only time for one thing: build nuclear reactors very quickly, there’s no time at all for petty virtue signalling.
But of course- it’ll help save the planet! 🙂
A “web sustainability consult”.
What exactly does that mean, anyway?
It means that relatives of the COP organizers are fully employed.
These COPs (Clandestine Oppresive Policies) are just a self serving, indulgent orgy of virtue signallers, beneficiaries and grifters milking the system for all its worth – the only thing they’re generating is vast wealth for themselves at taxpayer expense
From Scott Adams in the 90s, “Those bold fonts look like they’re eating up the ole electricity”.
Maybe holding a virtual meeting?
When I worked for the City of Las Vegas the City Manager’s office loaded the home page with an 8 photo revolving presentation. The morons set the photos at the MAXIMUM pixels possible.
The computer I was provided COULD NOT download all the photos due to limited RAM so I could NOT open the City web page to get to department information I needed to search. (business license records) It took me a while to find a work around to get directly to what I needed without hitting the home page.
I did try to get the idiots at IT to reduce the megapixels of the photos. NO computer monitor OR TV could use all those pixels. IT told me to get my Department (Fire and Rescue) to just get new computers. Like we had the money for that.
My point, JUST REDUCE the data rate from their fancy BS pictures and videos to 4 K max and the power reduction will be apparent.
Instead of all these jet-setters burning thousands of tons of kerosene to meet in one place (usually at an expensive hotel in a tropical paradise), why don’t they hold a virtual meeting on Teams or Zoom, and drastically reduce the CO2 emissions required to attend the meeting?
Then they could “toggle” with the Mute button…
What an overblown, irrelevant issue in light of all the fuel and energy wasted on the event itself.