It’s a gray day here at #COP29Azerbaijan as the 29th Meeting of Nations to address what is now a #ClimateCrisis enters extra time, day one. THREAD.
Civil Society is preparing for a big day in the COP29 venue till the Closing Plenary is convened most likely fairly late Saturday. Here are letters sent to the largest Developing block of COP Nations G77+ China and several developed world nations last night.
This came after new texts were released on the Core remaining issues in this Climate Summit:
Finance - specifically the NCQG - the draft text contained the first number placed on the table 250 Billion, which is not even an inflation adjusted upgrade on the 100 Billion a year in finance agreed in Copenhagen in 2009.
The number of attendees will drop massively now with only delegates, media and observers remaining. Meanwhile the food and coffee vendors have all packed up now as COP enters its final hours.
Following the very broad rejection of draft texts released shortly after midday yesterday on the final scheduled day of COP29, the incoming Azerbaijan Presidency has now commenced a series of meetings with cop constituency representatives to discuss a broad range of areas around which there is not yet any agreement
[Images of last nights trip home. Presidency shuttle buses from the venue have now ceased operation.]
There is a broader range of issues/texts yet to be completed, and under intense dispute at COP29 more than at the end of Cop27 in Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt in 2022.
That COP finally commenced its closing Plenary at 4am on Sunday morning. Hopefully it will not take as long here
But it’s worth Noting also that the last COP that ended on time was 20 odd years ago
Still outstanding:
1. FINANCE & NCQG (New Finance Goal replacing the 2009 100 Billion a year) 2. ADAPTATION (which is also finance related - but in an area- public infrastructures for climate change resilience - where it is very hard to get private investment ) 3. The GLOBAL STOCK TAKE (an audit of of nation states’ efforts to reduce emissions
& 4. JUST TRANSITION (how to enable nation states to evolve and protect citizen and worker rights)
Comparisons are now being discussed among delegates with the very hotly contested COP held in Paris in 2015 at which the Paris Climate Agreement was agreed under which many of the Agenda Items currently in dispute were agreed by the @UNFCCC parties.
@UNFCCC /ends but coverage continuing….
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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.