Failure theaters continue to play in Dubai during the United Nations Climate Conference of Parties (CoP28).
To begin with, getting to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was more challenging than normal for some participants…as Germany experienced a record-breaking level of snowfall for any December in recorded history.
The airport in Munich resumed limited operations Sunday morning after being closed for nearly a day because of record snowfall that disrupted transportation across the region.About 17 inches of snow fell in parts of southern Germany on Saturday, an unusually large amount for early December, and what local news media reported was the biggest daily snowfall in Munich in December since records had been kept.
I recently blogged that the head of this conference, Sultan Al Jaber, the president of COP28 and chief of UAE oil giant ADNOC [Abu Dhabi National Oil Company], asked delegates in Dubai to “adopt a different mindset” and that fossil fuels needed to be part of the climate deal.
In a desperate bid to remain relevant, former Vice President Al Gore slammed the UAE, saying its position as overseer of international negotiations on global warming this year was an abuse of public trust.
The comments, made to Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the conference in Dubai, reflected skepticism among some delegates that COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber, head of the UAE’s national oil company ADNOC, can be an honest broker of a climate deal.”They are abusing the public’s trust by naming the CEO of one of the largest and least responsible oil companies in the world as head of the COP,” Gore said.
I also wrote that Climate Czar John Kerry looked dejected when an interviewer listed some of the falling green energy dominoes. So, to maintain his relevance, Kerry went on to target our nation’s coal plants.
“We will be working to accelerate unabated coal phase-out across the world, building stronger economies and more resilient communities,” Kerry said in a statement.”The first step is to stop making the problem worse: stop building new unabated coal power plants.”Kerry said America was joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance, a pact of nearly 60 countries that have promised to accelerate the phasing out of coal-fired power stations, except the very few that have carbon capture and storage.
I would be remiss if I did not include some good news in this post. Just before the conference started, I commented that the US was committing to a tripling of nuclear power over the next three decades.
It appears other countries are joining the move to a technology that can produce reliable, cost-effective energy on a civilization-supporting scale.
The United States and 21 other countries pledged on Saturday at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, saying the revival of nuclear power was critical for cutting carbon emissions to near zero in the coming decades.Proponents of nuclear energy, which supplies 18 percent of electricity in the United States, say it is a clean, safe and reliable complement to wind and solar energy. But a significant hurdle is funding….Britain, Canada, France, Ghana, South Korea, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates were among the 22 countries that signed the declaration to triple capacity from 2020 levels.
And an interview with host Sultan Al Jaber ends today’s post on a pitch perfect note.
The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal.Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”.
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