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.
This is pathetic from @realDonaldTrump he’s lashing out like an angry teenager. Jerome Powell says he’s included a the costs of a building that was completed years ago in his very public attack on the FED Chair.
Trump has completely lost the plot. The single most damaging thing that he could do to undermine confidence in the U.S. dollar (which he publicly claims to want to deflate and there by make all Americans poorer - is to attack the Federal Reserve and the SEC.
@realDonaldTrump Trump is setting fire to the dollar to distract from his Epstein mess what a complete baby.
I attended the Bonn climate talks. They were very disappointing to everyone. The elephant in the room was (of course) the U.S. decision to withdraw from the talks altogether.
Unfortunately.. perhaps intentionally in advance of the continuation of climate talks regardless of #US_Disintigration the talks were also very sparsely attended particularly by activists and NGOs. The reason for this was @elonmusk destroying @-USAID.
@elonmusk As you can see the USAID Twitter account is now dead - deleted which is an appalling act of vandalism executed by Elon and his tech-bro team of teenagers.
This article is deeply depressing. For my part at Scoop.co.nz it is clear to me that:
1. The Govt has a deliberate strategy - probably not official but nevertheless operative to destroy NZ media. 2. This is not going to change any time soon. thespinoff.co.nz/politics/02-07…
& Sadly from what I discerned last year the @nzlabour opposition is both apathetic and indifferent to the plight of media. Also the @NZGreens. And have always been so for as long as I can remember.
This is extremely disappointing
@nzlabour @NZGreens I will be returning to NZ in August to ensure continues to function in these very difficult times for NZ media. We have faced numerous big challenges recently and thank our supporters and readers for their support.Scoop.co.nz
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.