Highlights have never been so Low Level.

"Limiting methane emissions, preserving forests and helping South Africa reduce its reliance on coal were among key initiatives announced by several countries Tuesday as more than 100 world leaders, including President Gee, I Joe, met for a second day at the COPout26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland."

That's the best they could come up with? This is what tens of thousands of junketers jetted in to achieve? And exactly what is so earth-shattering about these proposals that they couldn't have been arrived at via a simple Zoom conference? Why are these pathetically meager results been presented as if something substantial has been achieved?

The limiting of methane emissions, for example, is a farce. The shrinking output from the US fracturing of the earth and new demands from the investors in the sector that it actually show a profit have everything to do with the reduced methane emissions promised by the US. Instead of the pell-mell "drill, baby drill", that drove US output toward the 13 million bpd of production and the bounty of natural gas it produced, hydraulic fracturing operations in the US have been pretty much capped at 10-11bpd, so the peak of methane production, which, without a cap on flaring, only means that instead of simply letting it seep into the atmosphere, the US will simply do as the Russians and increase its flaring, which results in the addition of more CO2 and water vapor to the atmosphere, so there's a kind of highlight in that in that the high lights of the flares can be seen from space. Have been seen from space for more than 20 years now, from No. Dakota's Bakken to the Marcellus shale, from the Texas Permian to California's Monterey shale, so much methane has been flared that it is as though an entire country's emissions have been left unaccounted for by the Glasgow conference. Yet this low level of achievement goes even lower. 

"US Vows to ... " The promised reduction is only as good as the longevity of the Biden administration, which several pundits have already decided is a one-term presidency. Whether that's true or not, the fact remains that the trumpery of such promises has already been demonstrated to the entire globe by the previous administration to be worth less than the paper it's printed on. With no input from Congress, no vote by the America public, a new chief executive can still walk in and unilaterally, with no justification nor the need to provide the least bit of scientific evidence to buttress the claim, declare climate change to be just a hoax, and abrogate any and all commitments to, well, anything, even signed and ratified treaties with other sovereign nations. So of what good are vague promises of "limiting methane emissions" from a country as feckless and internationally unaccountable as the USA? It's like trumpeting a promised reduction of coal combustion from one country while another two, home to almost half of the entire global human population, have already penned contracts with Russia to increase their own importation of coal to keep their citizens warm/cool, and maintain their growth rates? 

And as Joan Rivers would've said, "Oh grow up!" If the US is going to "donate" wads of cash to South Africa to wean it from coal, that cash will be earmarked for the construction of a LNG terminals to receive Permian gas. You know, the "transition" fuel, that bridge to the green future. 

But it's not just the USA. Every country in the world will jettison any climate pledges they have made as soon as they start to impact the ruling clique's hold on power, which, since there is no known technology that can deliver the same level of ease as the sine qua non of an automobilized society, every country in the world faces their own Gilets Jaunes' explosion of popular discontent as soon as they impose the only really effective method of energy use curtailment: substantially higher energy prices. What they called "Pain at the Pump" in the seventies. Sign whatever you need to to make us look like good global citizens, but don't you dare ask us to spend a nickel more to fuel our "Let them eat yellowcake" jet-set lifestyle. 

The United Nations has held the "Conference of the Parties' Poops," or COPout, every year for close to three decades, with this year's being the 26th meeting. During that time, despite the urgent need evidenced to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, those emissions have skyrocketed by over 62%, one of the major emitters going to such ludicrous lengths as to bald-facedly claim that "climate change is just a hoax" for the specific reason of cloaking its own acceleration of emissions in order to funnel the proceeds from its fracking rampage across a continent into the pockets of less than a dozen high-flying executives, while one of the other CO2 Champs builds castles in the air and apartment complexes on the ground that are so shoddily constructed they are simply dynamited to dust, while yet another, one we hear little about, Japan, builds an airport in the middle of rising seas that was proven useless even before it was completed. 

Okay I made that last part up, it's fully operational after a slight cost overrun that ballooned its price from $4bil to $20bil, but the point is that  it was built in another part of the world that is dependent more or less exclusively on imported oil as arbitrage for the products of their labor force. Energy in, used to massage other resources into tradable products, merchandise out. Only what's happened in the last two generations is that the global economy's most profitable products have become somewhat ethereal, and those producing them are no longer serfs; so the working class has been severely downgraded in their skill set, becoming the serving class to the deserving class's cyber workaholism. Their only way to burrow into the fount of fortune is to sell their labor, not to industry, who bars their way at every step, but to the New Economy's successful individuals, doing their nails, inking their skin, stretching their muscles, scrubbing their toilets and weeding their lawns.

Kai Tak Airport (Getty Images)

So the fossil-fueled regime of industrial production  and mindless consumption isn't a paradigm one can take the coward's way out of by pointing at Exxon, or whatever other boogieman you may conjure. Japan is an entirely different political entity that has, despite being just across the strait from where the Kyoto Protocols were drawn up, embarked on this mega-project after the turn of the century that not only had a carbon footprint exponentially larger than that of any other airport in the world, its continued existence would, by design, have to depend on its continuing in that vein, imprinting a larger carbon footprint than any of its counterparts by sheer virtue of the ever-more-desperate extents it must go to to fight off what was already known to be a relentlessly rising ocean. One that constructing airports in the middle of only makes rise that much faster.

And that's just one of myriad examples of societies around the globe living by the maxim that "Building Bigger's Best" while simultaneously promising to reduce, reduce reduce. 

If you look at the photo above, what's most striking is the location pile-up, in the midst of open land, of the humans. It's as though "But where are the peasants, I  mean people, going to live?", came as an afterthought. Whereas the machines are afforded vast swaths of empty space, the human population has been silo'd on top of one another in highrises that leave many of them unable to get in or out during power outages. All that land has been usurped from the peasants by the elites as infrastructure necessary to fly themselves and their eye candy from country to country. Like that small triangle of trees between the highways in the pic, the humans have been bull-dozed over to the periphery, sequestered out of the way of the machines whose relentless appropriation of not only the land, but the very air we breathe, reduces humankind to slaves laboring for a Wehrmacht whose fumes are poisoning everything it holds dear.

And then there's India.

Modi: "These choices, made by billions of people, can take the fight against climate change one step further."  

Well you see, problem is, that's exactly wrong. There are billions of people on this planet. Of Earth's 7 billion, only 1 billion, mostly those populations in the OECD nations of the world, create close to 80% of the GNG's in the atmosphere. As inequality rises, as it has been for decades but has now been accelerated by the pandemic, the gulf separating us promises to grow ever larger, enabling a shrinking proportion of the world's humans to blow an ever-expanding cloud of exhaust gas into the rest of humanity's collective face. Modi's assertion completely ignores this. But looking at how the pandemic has been handled by the world community, how it has made the rich FAR richer, further concentrated economic power, and left 5 million dead in the wake of an economic Boom that has, far from "Lifting all ships in a rising tide",  instead left millions choking in the swell of its noxious wake, the wealth of the insanely wealthy has grown beyond the beyonds.  In the blink of an eye we have gone from a world where suddenly "We are all in this together", to one where you can already hear them chortle among one another sipping their dirty martini's at a Margo Largo cocktail party and ponder how to further game the virus to increase their Bloat:

"What do you call five millions dead from Covid?"

"A good start."

It's called Capitalism. And we (none more than Modi's millions of minions) LOVE it.

Even unto death.