Ryan Bridge: The problem with COP29

Who's got a trillion dollars to spare this morning?  That's the value of our new climate change tab from COP29 – the climate change conference.  This year all the officials, the politicians, the experts, the industry, every man and his dog, has flown to Azerbaijan to lecture everybody not in the room about climate change.  And they're already cranking the classics through the stage:  We're at a turning point, the Paris Agreement’s at a crucial tipping point because Donald Trump's going to pull out, even though we've been through this crucial tipping point before.  This is the problem with COP-insert-number-here: no one really listens.  Every year they make the same pilgrimage and give the same speech, and every year we shrug our shoulders and wonder why doesn't the number ever match the year?  Shouldn't it be COP24?  Oh well, back to the mall for another coffee at Robert Harris. I also need to pick up some presents from Kmart for the grandkids this Christmas.  If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing every year over and over and expecting a different result, then these guys are beyond nuts.  The big push this year is finance.  They wanted rich countries, supposedly like ours, to pay $100 billion a year to poor countries to stop them from burning coal and adapting to climate change by 2020.  Well, we missed that goal and now they want a trillion dollars a year.  That's 1000 billion, or four Elon Musk's.  Despite all the talk, and flying around, and threats, and end of day speeches, global emissions went up last year reaching record levels.  Do we care about climate change? Yes.  Enough to change our habits in a major way? No.  We keep electing leaders to fix other things like inflation, and until that changes, or all of our houses actually do catch fire, we'll be at the mall down at Robert Harris not listening to Azerbaijan. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.