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27th Annual UN Climate Negotiations Start, And The Disinfo Is Already Stale [1]

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Date: 2022-11-07

Every year for the past 27 years, thousands of UN diplomats and climate activists from around the world assemble for two weeks to negotiate on climate action. And pretty much every year, the fossil fuel industry's professional deniers try to mess it up. This year's no different, as we can already see the first wave of attacks on COP27, the 27th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

One issue is always that people have to travel from around the world to atten​​d the conference, and that means emissions from flights in. Fox News is leading the way on that stupid supposed hypocrisy, with not one but two pieces on it last week. The first was that John Kerry will not use his family's private jet , and will instead travel to Sharm El Sheik, Egypt on a commercial jet. But since criticisms here were never sincere, that didn't make a difference, and Fox still had Republican insurrection-fister Josh Hawley on to say that "Biden’s cabinet is jetting around the world wasting the same fossil fuels they say they want to ban."

And that's exactly the issue! The whole climate problem is that modern society runs on fossil fuels, and we need to enact systemic solutions because no individual action will suffice.

But that logical reality escaped notice for the second story by Fox's newest climate denier Thomas Catenacci . This one focused on a quote from a UN spokesperson saying they'd offset the carbon emissions from COP27, and that the conference "allows for virtual participation." That's basically the entirety of the quote, which Catenacci then "balanced" with quotes from former Tobacco lawyer turned climate denier Steve Milloy.

Despite the fact that Catenacci had, the day before, written that John Kerry would not be using a private jet, and in that very story notes that the UN is offsetting emissions, he decided to run Milloy's quote saying that it's "going to be like Davos, where you see all those private jets lined up … here you have these clowns flying around wherever they want, staying in these nice places with a huge carbon footprint."

We can certainly expect to see more of that line of attack, and that and other examples can be found in a great Media Matters writeup by Ilana Berger . Other disinfo narratives we can expect are: the energy impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine means we should expand oil and gas; developing countries should use fossil fuels; and fossil fuels alone can get those in poverty connected to a stable electricity source. All the same sort of stuff we've seen in past years, but with the occasional update for 2022.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/7/2134251/-27th-Annual-UN-Climate-Negotiations-Start-And-The-Disinfo-Is-Already-Stale

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