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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/nov/07/i-am-going-to-cop27-in-egypt-but-can-the-un-climate-conference-deliver>
"Greta Thunberg is not a fan of Cop27, the climate conference that got under
way in Egypt overnight on Sunday. She reckons it’s just a chance for the
powerful to get away with “greenwashing, lying and cheating”, and that the
annual summits of national governments, policy experts, spruikers and
hangers-on aren’t working. She’s not going.
She might be right not to go. As a privileged middle-aged man from a generation
that has failed to do enough to address the climate crisis – more than half all
historic emissions have been in the past 30 years – I’m not here to say she’s
wrong.
There is plenty to be cynical about. The Egyptian hosts have named Coca-Cola,
which uses fossil fuels to produce about 120bn throwaway plastic bottles each
year, as a sponsor of the conference. In Kenya, a civil society group has
pointed out that nearly half of the plastic bottle waste in its country can be
traced back to Coke. It’s a similar story across the developing world, where
plastic rubbish clogs cities and waterways.
There is a tradition of this sort of thing across 27 years of UN climate
summits. As reported in last year’s
Australia v The Climate podcast series,
some conferences have been sponsored by coal companies. Last year, an
Australian government pavilion in Glasgow gave over its main display space to
Santos, a still-expanding oil and gas company.
The problems going into Cop27 are broader than this. Tens of thousands of
people are expected in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, but protesters are
not welcome. Instead, civil society has been offered a pen far from the
conference centre where they will be allowed to express their views behind a
fence in the desert sun."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
