It Could Happen Here - What Actually Happened at COP26?

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

The gang explains what was going on COP26 and the new climate goals.2 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy

Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or whenever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back. everything. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about, you know, the problems and stuff that are happening and how to maybe make them better.

And speaking of the problems that are happening and how to make them better. Garrison. Davis. Hi. Hello. Hey, Chris. That's a weird segue. I wanted to introduce this video by telling you guys that I just watched a movie that you should watch because it's pretty rad.

And it ties into all the things we talk about it's called the pizzagate massacre oh no it is a micro budget under a hundred thousand dollars film that looks great they did a really good job with the budget they had about um a an alex jones employee type person and a mass shooter who go looking for uh try to solve the Pizzagate thing. Oh, boy. It is a an actually very nuanced and I think deeply knowledgeable commentary on specifically like the Texan conspiracy scene. Like it's like a film there. Alex Jones character who's played by a woman in this.

They film in the original studio that he recorded in back at the time. That's funny. Like the filmmaker who did this gets like the culture in the area and kind of the relationship between the people who get radicalized and do shit

and the people who just profit from it. It's a very good. It's it is, by the way, a grindhouse horror movie. Like whatever you're expecting, it's not that it is like it is way, a grindhouse horror movie. Whatever you're expecting, it's not that. It is an incredibly gory grindhouse movie. But it's

pretty fun. What does that have to do with COP26? Nothing at all, but it has a lot to do with It Could Happen Here. Okay. Alright. Go watch it. Anyway, This Is It Could Happen Here here a show about how things are kind of falling apart and how we can maybe slow that down or prepare for a an uncertain future

um you want to do an episode about cops right i mean fuck them i mean we are we are planning an episode on washington uh state patrol um but no this is episode has been a different kind of cop, about just as useful. So, in the first five episodes of The Daily Show, or Season 2, which if you haven't listened to, you should definitely listen to those, as they kind of act as our show's

manifesto of sorts. But nevertheless, the first five episodes of the scripted Daily Show put forth a more realistic, non-sugarcoated look at what climate change will bring if we continue on our current course. But not just looking at the obvious environmental and extreme weather effects, but also like the socio-political effects. When I was helping Robert out with the research for those episodes, some of the best indicators of the mainstream conception of the scientific, environmental, and political status of climate change was at the United Nations past IPCC reports, which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the COP conferences. So, during the first few weeks of this past November, November 2021, the 26th annual COP conference took place

in Glasgow. And yeah, the name of the conference is kind of a decent indication on how useful these things actually are. But a COP stands for a Conference of the Parties. And for almost three decades they've been like the main international stage for countries and companies to what climate change is and what the people in power, how they are viewing it and how urgent they think it's worth addressing versus how much money they want to spend on it. So the most notable COP in recent memory was the 2015 one in Paris, COP21. This is kind of where the Paris Climate Accords were born. The commitment was to aim for 1.5 degrees of warming,

and it was signed on by nearly all major countries. Of course, the U.S. signed on, left, then re-signed on. But anyway, under the Paris Agreement, countries committed to bring forth national plans, figuring out how they would reduce their emissions. But they would do it by themselves, and they would be called NDCs, or Nationally Determined Contributions. And the idea was for every five years,

countries would gather up and present their current plans on the national stage. This was what COP26 was going to be. Now, it was delayed a year because of the pandemic, but COP26 was the time for countries to present their NDCs for their updated versions on their plans to reduce emissions. So most of the NDCs got submitted before the conference and kind of led the discussion of the conference. By like mid-October, I think about 70% of the countries or states that signed on to the Paris Agreement submitted their version of the NDCs. And those countries, about 140 of them, are responsible for the majority of global emissions. So that was what kind of led up to COP26 from happening.

The overarching aim of the conference, according to COP26 president, I'm going to try to pronounce this name, Alok Sharma, he said that the idea for the conference was to keep alive the 2015 Paris Agreement's target to keep global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels. So that was like the goal of the conference going into it was to kind of keep this idea of the Paris Climate Accords of still being achievable. And that's not what happened at COP26. No.

Now, it's important to kind of point out that the commitments laid out in the Paris Accords don't come close to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, as it is said in the Accords. Like, they acknowledge that, which is what the kind of NDCs are for. But even still, those are just non-binding agreements. But anyway, so the Accords and the restrictions and goals, well, there's no restrictions, it's just goals. The goals in them don't come close to limiting to 1.5 degrees, and we've already most likely shot way past the point of that being in any way achievable. are we are already on a certain path so in in asking nations to set tougher targets by uh next year for cutting climate warming emissions the new agreement at glasgow acknowledged that the commitments that were in place are inadequate and if rigorously followed the the the new national pledges so include the stuff including the par Accords and the new Glasgow Pact,

and all of the individual NDCs, if all of those are followed, the world is now on track for 2.1 to 2.4 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century, and that is the lower estimate. As we'll see later on, higher estimates were also shown at the Glasgow conference. So the idea was to hopefully keep it to 1.5, and already we're pushing that back by almost a whole degree if we're going to 2.4. So one of the main impacts there is like just totally kissing 1.5 goodbye. Like no one even is going to view that as a possibility at this point. So I don't know how many people were still looking at that as really a goal. Apparently some of the planners of COP26 apparently were.

But I mean, I know for us, we've been aware of that. And I'm not sure how, you know, really what mainstream liberals were thinking before this. But hopefully at the very least, maybe COP26 made them realize that maybe it's there's a this kind of it's maybe worse than what you were thinking. kind of, it's maybe worse than what you were thinking. But so there are other things did happen at Glasgow that are worth looking into. So the main quote-unquote achievements of the Glasgow deal, besides like revisiting the emissions cutting plans to try to keep stuff down, which of course were, you know, not met and shot way past. But we also had the first ever inclusion of a commitment to limit coal use. Now, the way phrasing is going to work here is going to be really interesting, because the reason why this deal got passed is because some very specific

shifts in their phrasing around coal use. The other thing that COP26 tried to do was increase financial help for so-called developing countries and provide funds and assistance for climate disasters. So when extreme weather events happen, have a set of funds set aside to help countries in these disasters. Now, that is a good idea, but as we'll see later, the way COP26 actually did it is not actually doing it. It's like they're postponing this kind of goal, but they're just making it a prospect.

But back to coal. So the Glasgow Climate Pact was the first ever climate deal to explicitly plan to reduce coal, which was one of the worst fossil fuels for greenhouse gases. And coal really can be phased out. Coal can be phased out by electric power really easily. It is the easiest one.

It's way easier to phase out coal than it is natural gas or other... Sorry, what's the... The other main one. There's three. There's coal, natural gas... What's the last one? Regular gas? I guess so, yeah.

Petroleum-based stuff. Because coal is mostly used for heat, electrically generated heat is way easier than those other two. So coal really should be phased out as soon as possible. But the commitment to phase out coal that was introduced in earlier negotiations led to some fighting, specifically among India and China who were in strong opposition to the phrasing

and the actual constraints of the deal. And a lot of this is the argument that if these countries are still developing, it's not fair to them to remove this resource when other developed nations had it. So we see that argument a lot around like climate change stuff is like oh you you're just going to stop other countries from developing because you you you got to get to this certain point of being a successful like wealthy nation um and like you know with all this like industrial

development on the back of fossil fuels and stuff. But now you're going to remove that opportunity for other countries. Now, there is a lot of stuff around degrowth frameworks that address this issue and specifically try to get fossil fuel savings, like a decrease in emissions, and be able to use some of those gains to assist countries in getting stuff set up to a decent standard of living. But that is going to be addressed on a whole other scale around capitalism and how countries intervene in other countries. That's part of a bigger political question. But anyway, India and China did not like the coal deal.

So in the end, the countries did agree to phase down coal rather than phase out coal. So that is the phrase that they ended up using, is phase down. People weren't super happy about this. The COP26 president, Alok Sharma, said that he was deeply sorry for how these events unfolded and like focus on coal is good it's responsible for about 40 percent of annual co2 emissions

but also like just focusing on coal leaves a really big lack of discussion on oil and gas like there's those are also like very bad and arguably we should be focusing on those a lot like those are those are the main ones we should we should get rid of coal yes but if we just focus on that then there's a lot of other stuff going on so that is that is a lot of coal talk uh you know who also uses coal our sponsors yeah we're entirely sponsored by Joe Mansion big friend of the pod

thank you for always having our back Joe anyway here's some ads welcome I'm Danny Thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.

One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight,

that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back talking about uh cop 26 and there is there is a decent there stuff stuff did happen so i don't know it is going to be more of a sciencey and numbers episode but it is worth actually figuring out what what happened there because all everyone just kind of had the perception like oh cop26 was a failure, because yeah, it was. But it is good to know what actually is going on at things like this,

because if we're going to get some kind of, you know, liberal change, this is where it's going to happen. So it is good to keep an eye on what these types of people are thinking. So we left off on talking about how there are plans to phase down coal, and there was like a general lack of focus on oil and gas. And it is interesting. So there was a group of activists led by this, I think it's an NGO called Global Witness, assessed the participant list published by the UN at the start of the meeting. And they found that there was 503 people with links to fossil fuel interests

who were accredited members of the Climate Summit. And they were like delegates. So COP26 delegates associated with fossil fuels outnumbered national delegate numbers for every other country. So there were more people representing fossil fuel interests than there were representing any individual country at COP26. So you're thinking, huh, maybe, I wonder why this stuff's not going too good. Oh, it's because it's being run mostly by fossil fuel companies? Yep. That's, uh, huh.

That's an interesting little thing there. Yeah, so the other kind of notable thing about COP26 is it led to a quote-unquote breakthrough in the rules for government-led carbon markets. So this is the thing that the neoliberals are really excited about, is this idea of carbon markets, because it's a way to make more money kind of off of removing carbon and just to create a lot of red tape and bureaucracy around this idea of lowering emissions. So I guess one of the ways to describe carbon markets, if you're kind of unfamiliar with this idea,

is that countries that do not meet their emission reduction targets in their national climate pledges are penalized for this. are penalized for this. So countries that don't meet their emission targets or want to just pursue less expensive emission cuts, what this deal set out to do is that instead of actually lowering emissions, they can purchase emissions reduction tokens and credits from other nations that have cut their emissions more than the amount that they pledged by moving to low-carbon energy and various stuff. can like purchase purchase credits to represent emissions that you didn't cut but wanted to is that this can potentially unlock trillions of dollars for protecting forests expanding renewable energy and other projects to combat climate change um so the idea here is that the

money used to purchase these credits is going to get put into other things that will help fight climate change but all of this is non-binding and speculative and it just furthers this whole carbon market concept which i'm not thrilled about um yeah we should we should do like a full episode on carbon markets but the the thing so i i i i this is you know this is the thing i studied academically in college and is incredibly important for everyone to understand that carbon markets are fake and do not work at all ever no one has ever gotten one to work no one's ever gotten a national one to work no one's ever gotten an international one to work uh implementation of carbon markets like china had a big thing they're gonna implement a carbon market. It was fake. It didn't work. Their carbon emissions still increase.

Very, very important. Like how fluffy carbon markets can be. So you get carbon credits if you're a business like Tesla that makes no emission electronic vehicles. And Tesla, for a lot of its earlier history, made a significant chunk of its profits selling carbon credits to polluting industries. And basically saying, you guys keep polluting we got your back like the the fact that we're putting electric cars out onto the street means you guys can keep emitting at the same level like that's that's like literally how how kind of the the business can work it's it's not the best way to fix the problem yeah so there was, so a lot of talk was around carbon markets because

that's, of course, what the neoliberal establishment is going to focus on because it still is within their worldview. How do we monetize the rot? Yeah, how do we make money off of the world ending?

Which I guess we're going to see a lot more of that in the next few decades. The other thing that they decided on is next year, there's going to be, again, so they decided to procrastinate, which is just a general theme of COP conferences. I mean, it's what we've been doing, it's what everyone's been doing about climate change since forever. So yeah, the main thing they do is decide to procrastinate. So next year there's going to be a UN committee to report on progress towards

delivering $100 billion per year in promised climate funding. This was after rich nations failed to deliver on the 2020 deadline for said funds. And then financing is going to be discussed again in 2024 and 2026 at those conferences. But this deal left a lot of more vulnerable nations who were going to rely on this promised funding, kind of just, they just left them with nothing. So the whole idea was that, like, yeah, we need this funding to help people in these disasters and different losses and damages and to help, you know, start start making more renewable energy technology in lieu of doing tons of tons of coal mining and that's where this money was going to get used for and it's not happening um so

this this promise was initially made at a un uh conference on climate change in 1992 and we're still we're still pushing it back year by year so this pledge is older than i am yeah it sure is another pledge made in 2009 to provide 100 billion dollars to emerging economies was supposed to be made in 2020 that also was missed um and it was it was designed to help nations uh adapt to climate effects and make the transition to clean energy um and uh the the uh cop 26 president said that around 500 billion will be mobilized by 2025. So, cool. Thanks for saying those numbers, which mean nothing.

It's fun how you can just talk and say things, and it doesn't actually matter. It's one of the things that's so frustrating about this, is trying to get a handle on how a lot of these solutions are supposed to work. So like one of the articles, if you're trying to actually, uh, if you're not just taking our word for it, which you never should, and trying to research like carbon credits and carbon markets and like how they might work or might help. Like one of the articles you're going to come across is, uh, an article in nature.org called making carbon markets work for faster climate action. And this is very much obvious at least from 2021.

So it's pretty, it's pretty recent and it's not at all a climate denial piece. It's, it's just kind of laying out a case for how carbon markets could be very effective at reducing emissions. But you have to grapple the whole time you're looking at this with the fact that like they, they haven't that global haven't global global emissions are still she and they they provide a number of like options for how this could work and it's one of those things where i'm not going to say it's impossible i'm certainly not an expert on this and you can read through the article um if you want but it it's it's certainly certainly the

thing you can say right now is that carbon markets have not led to a global decrease in emissions because we have not had emissions decrease other than that little dip we had when COVID did its sweet little dance. Yeah, that one month where we could actually see the sky again. Yeah, that was pretty rad. But yeah, there's I mean, you can check that article out for kind of the pro-carbon markets case. It all seems, I mean, one of the things that's frustrating to me about it is it all, it's all like, yeah, here's how it might work if, you know, everybody got on board the Paris Climate Agreement and also all of this worked ideally. climate agreement and also all of this worked ideally, but there's, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of, I, I just don't see any evidence that like they've shown that this is actually likely to be helpful. Um, it's more just like, yeah, this, this could, this could work if, if we do these other things, um, which is frustrating. That's like all, all of the kind of shit that you get at COP26, where it's like,

yeah, I guess theoretically, if you were to do that, or if that were to work the way you're saying, or if that were to work with the assumption that like, all these other factors don't grow over this period of time, then this might help. But we also know what's happened with emissions and global attempts to reduce climate change, which is not to say that like, like emissions in the United States, like there have been there's been a lot that's been done to curb emissions from the United States. Now, the thing that's often left out of like the discussion of these different things and how they impacted our emissions is like, well, a lot of those emissions got pushed off to other countries that are now making the things that we were making

for us. Like, that's the big thing when people argue against degrowth and they're like no you can you can still keep growing your economy while lowering emissions like yeah one country can but we still want the stuff so we're just moving it to other countries to produce so like we're not actually lowering it on a global level you can lower you can lower it on like an individual country level but not totally globally because we still want to consume the thing this one of the single most frustrating things about talking to people about climate change is that okay you know if you talk to the sort of neoliberal carbon market people right if you talk about literally anything else right the only thing they ever talk about is how the entire world is interconnected how the entire economy is interconnected how we're more interconnected than ever.

And then the moment you start talking about climate change, they go, oh, well, it's all individual country, individual country, individual country. The economy is not connected at all. It's all about the individual policy makers in the country. It's like, no, it's not. It's about like all of the emissions are foreign direct investment driven. It's about it's about it's about where investment money is going and you cannot and you know this this is why cop in some ways like this is why it doesn't work and even though it's the only frame rate that

could work right you have to have an international response it has to be coordinated it has to be working across national lines because again that's how the economic system works but it doesn't because a states individual states can't and will not ever solve this and then b cop is like okay so here's here's our international framework but also we're just going to have you know the actual the the actual international framework is going to be just essentially hammered up by a bunch of fossil fuel companies and so it's just you know it, it's the worst of both worlds. I mean, you can see there's some kind of acknowledgement at the fact that this is an international problem

in like the basic idea of carbon markets, which includes the idea that like you can, companies that emit less and don't use up their carbon budget can like sell carbon credits and you can do this across international lines. If we hold companies to different emission standards internationally based on things like the Paris Climate Agreement, then that will cause the carbon credit system to work better. There's that acknowledgement that it is an international problem, but again, I just don't, I don't see, I don't see evidence that it's working. And they, they, they like none of the evidence that I I've read makes it seem like there's a very good case that this is going to, at the very least that

this is going to provide the kind of emissions reductions that are necessary to forestall the worst case scenarios that are coming. Um, and if we're going to be, again, to be completely intellectually honest here, we can talk about degrowth all day long. I have a similar problem with that, that I do to a lot of these, the different kind of targets that COP26 introduced, stuff like carbon markets, where it's like, I don't see that solving the problem either. It's like a theoretical. Yeah, if we were to get people to – if we've gotten people on board with degrowth, then you've already fundamentally shifted the very nature of global society and also the way in which Americans and people in other Western nations conceive of economics at a fundamental level.

and other Western nations like conceive of economics at a fundamental level. And so it's, it's one thing to say that like, yeah, if people accepted that and, and got on board with a lifestyle that is not based on this, this kind of capitalist notion of endless growth of, of ever increasing extraction from the world in order to create value, then we could, we could actually stop emitting at the kind of levels that are going to lead to these horrible consequences.

The question is, I think you can argue that degrowth is more realistic in that, yes, that would absolutely work as opposed to carbon credits and other things where it's like, well, theoretically, it might work if they do all this other stuff. Yeah. It does. It does revolve to it. It does revolve on the cultural notion of America and the West completely changing.

It's a big, it's a big ask, you know? Yeah. And I mean, like there is, there is smaller steps, like totally like reorganizing how cities work.

So we do not use cars. Like, like, like re redoing a public transportation um like sector uh in you know uh making make making like uh solar panels and renewable energy a required part of like city infrastructure right there's a lot of ways to push us towards that thing but there's not one thing we can do right because it is in large parts a cultural change stuff Stuff will help with emissions. Like if we redesign cities around public transportation

and make it so stuff is not as far apart, then yeah, that's going to help lower emissions. If we require all these other types of renewable energy projects to be built into buildings and added on to our current cities, then yeah, that is going to help lower emissions. But there's not one big step that we can all do at the same time. And I think that that's, I don't know.

I have two minds about it. One part of me says, that's absolutely the most intelligent way to go about it is focusing on things like reducing the use of, like really all ending car culture in cities. Yeah. Cause it's not even a reduction thing. It has to be like that, that has to die.

But we're a lot closer to that than ending the idea of like capitalism. Yes. Yes. Because there, and number one, because there are capitalists, very capitalist countries that have, that do not have a car culture that like stopped that. And that actually like had one at one point and then reworked there. So that's, that's, and that would, yeah, that is a significant, that's probably go, that would probably lead to larger emissions reductions than any kind of carbon credit system could ever lead to. could ever lead to. I also, and so, yeah, I think that that's on an objective level. Yeah. That's,

it's smart to focus on stuff like that, where you're all, you are arguing for reducing growth, but you're also arguing it for like, Hey, your life will be more pleasant if you live in a city where you can walk everywhere and you're not at risk of getting run down by, you know, two ton trucks anytime you cross the street. And like, you're not dealing with smog and pollution and horrible, like hour and a half long communes on these crowded nightmare highways. But it's also, it's still incrementalist, you know? Absolutely. we are talking here. We are kind of like walking through here. Um, all of the, the best incremental solutions and, and what is the most realistic of those? Um, and I think that's fine. I think that's kind of where we have to be because that is what's most likely to actually happen to make the problem better. Um, but it is, we have to acknowledge it is incremental. Like we're not, we're not solving the, it would be very arrogant to say like here's how we

solve this problem once and for all you know i just want to i think sometimes when you talk about stuff like degrowth you can get into this you can kind of it can come across as if you're trying to like simplify like and if we do this like it'll be perfect it's like no this would be like the hardest thing no that's that's like saying we have to can fix it by all doing a revolution it's like yeah yeah it's not okay okay cool yeah i mean yeah that would fix it but anyway uh we have to do some ads and then we'll be back to finish up kind of their closing expectations on cop 26 and the other kind of things happening in the periphery um here's ads. Welcome.

I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. El will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you

to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking,

yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight,

that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. Okay, we are back and we're talking about kind of what happened towards the end of COP26. So we already kind of discussed how the deal was made, what was in the deal, what things were talked about. Now we're kind of going to talk about, you know, the other the other closing thoughts around it.

In the lead-up to COP26, the United States Special Presidential Climate Envoy, John Kerry, he's supposed to be our climate guy. He also said the goal of the summit was to hope that we can limit stuff to 1.5 degrees. And he called this the last best hope for the world to get its act together. But by the time COP26 came to the end, his language and attitude had kind of changed. After two weeks of debate and negotiation, his final remarks reflected kind of the points we've been talking about.

Final remarks reflected kind of the points we've been talking about and said the government energy policies currently in place around the world are projected to result in about 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels. And government pledges to cut climate emissions with limit warming to 2.4 if they are met. So again, we're just launching way past this mythical fantasy of 1.5 degrees. And the other scary thing is that we're getting a lot closer to large-scale feedback loops. Feedback loops are things like, once we have reached a certain degree of warming,

environmental effects will be triggered that will cascade and produce exponential growth in warming. It's not purely theoretical, but it is mostly stuff that we still probably can't prevent, and we really need to get on it ASAP, because once these things start happening, they are very hard to reverse.

One of the biggest ones that are already being affected is photosynthesis by plants on land, and how that is decreasing its ability to suck up carbon. About 30% of our annual carbon emissions are removed by the air, by photosynthesis, and the rest of which are dissolved in the ocean, causing ocean acidification, or that you just hang around in the atmosphere, which causes, you know, a bigger thermal blanket. So photosynthesis has like a thermal maximum beyond which carbon can only be taken so much of it in, and then the process which by plants give off carbon and water actually increases. And we are already at that point in a lot of places. And we achieve the warming required to get to that point a few times throughout the past decade. So land-based carbon uptake is projected to decline

by nearly 50% as early as 2040. And these effects have not been included in any of the published pathways leading to lower degrees of warming. And again, this isn't just speculative. The biggest example of this that we can point to is the Amazon rainforest, how that is now a net emitter because it is no longer sucking up enough carbon to offset the amount of carbon it actually shoots out. So we need to stop deforestation and keep planting more trees, essentially, because that sucks. And also just as a general kind of indicator of the cascading effects

that are happening. And we are still on the path for kind of large-scale disasters in a lot of places around the world. Around 19% of the Earth's land area is in pretty dire risk. On our current emission pathway, the Marshall Islands, the Maldives, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Middle East, parts of North Africa, and Central America, overall around one-third of the land humans occupied are predicted to either drown by sea level rise

or become too hot for human life just by the end of this century alone. So that'll cause, you know, migration panics and wars and all like a whole bunch of bad things that we can't, we can't limit that. Like that is something that we need to limit now. And if we don't, it's still, it's still happening. So these are the other kind of things talked about at the end. So that was kind of COP26 as a whole. The one last thing I want to mention is just how evil Facebook is. So kind of an aside, but Facebook's vice president of global affairs talked about of Global Affairs talked about Facebook's efforts to combat climate misinformation as the Glasgow Summit began. But as this was happening, conservative media outlets like Newsmax were running ads on Facebook calling global warming a hoax, gaining hundreds of thousands of views.

Stuff like, you know, Candace Owens and Daily Wire were spreading climate misinformation. views, stuff like, you know, Canada So-and-so Daily Wire, we're spreading climate misinformation, but, you know, as Facebook is bragging about its ability to combat misinformation around climate change. The UK-based think tank Influence Map, which identified misleading

Facebook ads from several media outlets around COP26, also found that fossil fuel companies and lobbying groups spent half a million dollars on political and social issue Facebook ads during the summit, resulting in over 22 million impressions, including content that promoted environmental effects under what we would call greenwashing. Stuff like the American Petroleum Institute putting an ad out over, like, a natural landscape

as it, like, touts its efforts to tackle climate change. So all of that kind of stuff. So I just think it's really dumb because Facebook brags about its ability to combat climate misinformation as it's running ads saying climate change is a hoax and then doing general, like, greenwashing is more common but still it's frustrating and yeah just as a

note like we talk about this in the Facebook episodes of Asterix that dropped recently but like the number one spreader right now of climate disinformation on Facebook is Breitbart which a lot of the Facebook papers have gone on to like the extreme lengths Facebook executives went to keep Breitbart as one of their like trusted

news partners and continue putting their stuff out to a huge audience because it goes very viral. It was good for engagement on the platform. And that's the decision Facebook's like, whatever they say, this is like when we're talking about carbon credits, we're talking about like the different proposed solutions. I'll do a bit of waffling because I don't want to come across as too certain about what the right way to go forward is. When it comes to how Facebook has handled climate disinformation, it's very black and white.

They enabled it for direct profit and they talked about it. And people within the company were like, hey, we're deliberately enabling climate change misinformation in order to make more money. It's a it's a it's a very easy case to make. Yeah. So that wraps up my my report back on COP26. I know a lot of stuff was like, there's a lot of headlines like before the summit even ended, before the deal was even finalized. It was like, COP26 is a failure, which is like, yes, but I think it is worth actually relearning what happens at these things because i think we have this idea that they're like some like mythic secret gathering of people to discuss plans and it's like no like you

can actually like see everything they're talking about like it's it's all out in the open like you can actually see what what the plans are it doesn't need to be all shrouded in it doesn't need to be like shrouded in mystery so i just wanted to give people like a rundown on what the actual people in power, how they're discussing climate change and what their expectations are and how expectations have, the past five years have risen by basically a degree.

Because in 2015, we were like, we can do 1.5 and now we're like, we can do 2.5. So that is what we've done in five years. That's what's happened. And I think that's what just've done in five years that's what's happened and i think that's what justifies the kind of blanket pessimism about anything coming from cop 26 about anything being suggested by like a state actor or an international organization which is that like we've all watched

the last 20 years like they've said a lot of great stuff about what could work it's like that nature article about like okay well like you've got a bunch of math here arguing about how it might work. But we've got the last 20 years of policies to say, but it probably won't, right? But it's almost certainly not going to work, right? So we can say, like, yeah, theoretically, this might be helpful. But like, realistically, nothing, everything you guys have argued about in the same way has been a miserable failure pretty much well that wraps it up for us you can follow the show on Twitter and apparently Instagram

at happenherepod and coolzone media we got a new coolzone media show dropping soon Megacorp that's pretty exciting yeah check it out it's about how we love Amazon and you should pay the money I don't think that's what it yeah check it out it's about how we love amazon and you should pay the money i don't think that's what it's about but anyway um yeah so i'm gonna buy some carbon

offsets from amazon and with that free and with that we're closing the show it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonezonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.

Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died

trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new

Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands

or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything.

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