The Glasgow Climate Change Conference is about to begin as 30,000 spongers descend on the city. My Glasgow office tells me Glaswegians are not well pleased at the inconvenience to them on a number of counts. A daughter living in my Glasgow home tells me she’s fleeing to my Parisian home for the conference duration, understandable as no 21 year old female wants to find herself awash in 30,000 James Shaw types everywhere. As a consequence, I imagine the Glasgow Lesbian Enrolment Centre will take on extra staff to cope with the sudden huge demand from local females giving up the ghost on men, and who can blame them?
Green Party leader James Shaw is attending at tax-payer expense, with nine other bludgers. To do what? Well, to listen to speeches and announce some token gestures. But why a party of ten? And why go when like us all they can read the speeches here without travel? We all know the answer, namely that major quest of all MPs, specifically international travel jaunts at tax-payer expense.
Pre-Covid, Glasgow pulled two million tourists annually on architectural tours. For building lovers like me, no city anywhere in the world matches it for architectural diversity.
You can safely bet, as with all conferences, that delegates will take advantage of the opportunity to explore the city rather than endure the appalling torturous tedium of listening to hand-wringing blow-hards all day.
The Australian Prime Minister is going and presumably will secure a speaking slot. That will be amusing. The sole reason he is Prime Minister is with the election in the bag for Labour last time, Labour’s then leader, with a few days to go before the vote, felt it safe to announce plans to end coal mining, the nation’s major export earner.
Queensland where most coal is mined, promptly turned against Labour and against all odds, Scott Morrison found himself Prime Minister. Well, he’s got another election coming up and his assurances to the conference will be avidly followed in Queensland. So expect a promise to wipe out coal-mining in the vaguely distant future. Anything too explicit will cost him government.
I certainly don’t make light of global warming but this Glasgow bean-fest is nonsense, if for no other reason than the ridiculous 30,000 “delegate” attendance.
The sole reason this conference is in Glasgow is that Boris Johnson, concerned about the Scottish Independence movement, worked overtime to secure it for the city. That simply showed how out of touch he was pre-Covid, as the sheer volume of foreign tourists in Scotland was driving everyone mad and particularly in Edinburgh in which they made life intolerable.
9 Comments
How can 30,000 stuffed shirts pontificating solemnly about stuff they know absolutely nothing about be anything but a hugely expensive farce?
Whatever problems climate produces will be solved by unknown engineers and entrepreneurs with little or no help from the talking heads.
Hmm, I wonder why business folk are pushing so hard for the reopening of the border so that they can undertake meeting with their clients and prospects if everything can simply be done by zoom. Neither are trade agreements agreed to by zoom.
To my mind that’s because face-to-face meeting are far more productive. You could argue that inter-governmental talk fests as haven’t achieved anything in the past and it would probably be a fair point. However I have no issue with trying to achieve some sort of agreement on setting emissions limits.
The problems will never be solved by emissions limits. They will only be solved by better ways of doing things. Emissions limits will just invoke endless disputes about applicability nd equity.
Next, lets do a ‘private jets in Glasgow’ headcount. I recall last time around there were a staggering number of these private jets from all over the globe. Saving the planet…
And the point of setting emission limits, when the Germans are building a huge pipeline to bring in Russian gas and the Chinese and Indians are burning more coal than industrial England x 10, is?
There are any number of valid points above.
Personally I don’t think there will be a rush on at the Lesbian Collective as no one will mistake James Shaw for a man.
Joking aside-the trivialisation of climate change through this type of lunatic festival (let’s call it what it really is) does irk me.
Give each of those 30,000 delegates a shovel, and some saplings and tell them they have to plant enough trees to offset their carbon emmissions before they can go home, and the next “conference” can be held in a phone booth.
You’d think they could have achieved everything needed with a reasonable amount of pre-reading, making sure they brushed their hair and made at least an attempt to wear clothing for the Zoom meeting (microphones on mute, please) and a thorough review of the draft minutes before they were released for public consumption.
30,000 attendees at a conference on… climate change?
Even the Queen has pulled a sickie so she doesn’t have to go
With limited time left, one can ill afford to waste it of a meeting that will achieve nothing other than a huge cost to the rest who are paying for it.
James Shaw is hoping people would have forgotten about this by election time.