Beautiful dawn for the first day of the Bonn Climate Conference which runs till the 15th of June. Looks like it will be hot.
The venue is to the right of the buildings you see here. The smallest one in the front of the two larger ones is the new office of the UNFCCC secretariat. Which came into being in the 1990s and was followed by the Kyoto Protocol.
COP 28 is due to be held in Dubai in December - somewhat controversially as the incoming President heads a massive Emirati oil conglomerate.
This meeting will host preparation discussions between the nations of the “Conference Of the Parties to the UNFCCC” from which COP gets… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Security is in place around the venue albeit at nothing close to what you see at a full COP meeting, which is typically attended by 10s of thousands of participants.
I will head down there shortly. It’s now 7am here.
Nice walk down.
Inside the venue. With registrations still underway and a big queue to get badges it looks like the main show will commence this afternoon.
Part of today’s program.
For me the interesting immediate issues will be progress on the landmark commencement of the Climate Finance and Loss & Damages initiatives adopted in Sharm-el-Sheikh (COP27) after a colossal United push from the Global South following significant disappointment in Glasgow (COP… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
For the major emitters the pressure will come on in the Global Stock Take (GST) stream of activity. A good place to get the real deal info on this is from the Climate Action Tracker website here >> climateactiontracker.org
Unfortunately at the moment the @climateactiontr Tracker results (aggregated NDC’s - Nationally Determined Contributions to lowering emissions) do not yet get us (humanity) to the stated goal of the COP process of holding the global rise in temperatures to 1.5o Degrees Celsius… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
In the end it is this gap between what is needed and agreed and what is being achieved that will top the agenda both here at Mid-COP and in December in Dubai at #COP28.
Ok so this is a bit weird, but in a kinda chill way so do bare with me and and I will be happy to answer questions afterwards. It’s about a castle on a virtual island in a massive online role playing game called Evony and it involves a possible but speculative discussion about @elonmusk and @X.
All will be revealed but first a picture or four actually from the game. More will come.
Ok. So here’s what I think is going on in a nutshell. I think elonmusk has invested in a MMORPG: a “Massive Multimedia Online Role Playing Game” which is a bit of a mouthful, called EVONY.
I liked its Twitter ads and finally clicked. It’s huge. Someone else can do the business story here which I am sure is interesting too.
But the this bit is weird.
The mysterious knight on the red horse arrived this morning beside my castle and he had some treasure.
I hadn’t a clue who it was so I grabbed the treasure and tried to kill the horse and rider as that’s what you do. But we got smashed badly.
This interview with working class Uk financial markets savant Gary Stevenson - who has just published an autobiography - is seriously terrifying. He now has a @YouTube channel it seems and I’ll post a link shortly.
James O'Brien meets Gary Stevenson | LBC via @YouTube
His prognosis for the collapse of social democratic nation state finances due to the very sharp rise in income distribution inequality in the UK is horrific.
The consequences of unfettered transfers of money over decades due to neoliberal economics initially and more recently quantitative easing driven transfers of wealth from the middle class to the top 5% of the population is the cause of his concern.
It’s very hard to imagine what can be done politically to rebalance this.
Thomas Piketty’s thesis which among other things warned about all of this based on long term historical analysis of wealth inequality appears to be colliding with Western Civilisation in a manner that threatens the very foundations of that civilisation.
Gary’s YouTube channel which addresses all this is here.
Well this was actually pretty good… very little crazy right wing stuff - none in fact - some light criticism of wokeness and a consensus that Hitler was a socialist or communist dictator not a rightwing liberal fascist - mercifully no discussion of Greenland Panama or Canada
The bit at the end was actually quite nice and agreement about ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Importantly and probably deliberately there was very little to zero overt electioneering - a little bit of criticism of Weidel’s Spitzencandidat competition from Weidle but nothing extreme.
So nothing imo that could be seen as being election interference IMO - nor any reason for the DSA to be concerned or to get involved.
I didn’t even hear any particularly overt endorsement that went beyond that you might hear in passing in a podcast interview.
It ended with a discussion of mars - Elon’s favourite subject of conversation - which was quite interesting including a reference to the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy series and Douglas Adams.
From Weidel’s point of view though there was a lot of positive moderate exposure of her party and probably around 200k + listeners. Which may give her a bounce in the polls.
Also the final segment talking about space was quite delightful and genuine and portrayed the AFD Leader in a positive light.
And I’d say the two of them have both found a new friend.
This is an update thread on this OCCRP story on @StateDept and @USAID funding for several large investigative journalism projects which has had a lot of downstream impacts it seems. Especially in Europe,
The underlying original story about govt funding for investigative journalism projects was initially flagged by @ryangrim.
This organisation - OCCRP that not many people seemed to have been aware of - was responsible for a series of outstanding investigative journalism consortia projects including the Panama papers.
This is a leaked rough cut of the NDR (German public broadcaster north west Germany) investigation into what happened With the OCCRP story.
It was never officially published but was recently leaked publicly by Wikileaks.
With the benefit of hindsight arguably Wikileaks ought to be the international organisation that coordinates these large investigative consortia, though it’s not clear that they want to do so.
What is clear from the fallout from all of this is that the system that was in place for running these consortia is no longer fit for purpose.