Hotel Prices Lead Countries To Consider Skipping COP30 Climate Summit (reuters.com) 39
Dozens of countries have yet to secure accommodation at next month's COP30 climate summit in Brazil and some delegates are considering staying away as a shortage of hotels has driven prices to hundreds of dollars per night. Reuters: Small island states on the frontline of rising sea levels are confronted with having to consider reducing the size of delegations they send to Belem, while two European nations said they were considering not attending at all.
COP30 organisers are racing to convert love motels, cruise ships and churches into lodgings for an anticipated 45,000 delegates. Brazil chose to hold the climate talks at Belem, which typically has 18,000 hotel beds available, in the hope its location on the edge of the Amazon rainforest would focus attention on the threat climate change poses to this ecosystem, and its role in absorbing climate-warming emissions.
COP30 organisers are racing to convert love motels, cruise ships and churches into lodgings for an anticipated 45,000 delegates. Brazil chose to hold the climate talks at Belem, which typically has 18,000 hotel beds available, in the hope its location on the edge of the Amazon rainforest would focus attention on the threat climate change poses to this ecosystem, and its role in absorbing climate-warming emissions.
Maybe just Zoom or Teams? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Maybe just Zoom or Teams? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats how you know they dont really believe in this - the folks preaching sacrifice for the masses have done nothing to change their own lifestyle.
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The way that you can tell that they do believe in this is the fact that there are always huge numbers of oil companies going there to interfere.
Which is also one of the reasons that it's important for people to be in place. It's a conference. The people that network effectively get other people to collaborate with them, follow their direction and help them to solve their problems. If those people are the oil companies, as happened in the COP in Arabia, then they are people who are more than willing to end h
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Why do leftoids single out one of many contributors? I have yet to hear one of you parrots rail against concrete or any other damager to the environment besides motor fuel suppliers. Like a broken record, its "oil bad, oil bad." Do you have some monetary incentive or are you just a useful pawn?
Re: Maybe just Zoom or Teams? (Score:2)
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don't see why it has to be yearly. once every 5 years should be good enough for an in-person conf with an annual livestream from several smaller local ones in various timezones
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To clarify, they don't believe in solving the problem. They absolutely recognize the problem, they just believe that they, personally, will be able to avoid the brunt of the repercussions. So, a similar delusion to the one that many regular people have.
Re: Maybe just Zoom or Teams? (Score:4, Funny)
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Just about any production or fabrication takes an enormous amount of energy, work, and inputs. It casts a shadow on the entire green scam. BRB lets make products to save the environment (more like lets ruin the environment to "save" the environment). Even recycling, look at how much heat they use, and all that burning plastic/etc going up in smoke. People probably think because stuff shows up in a nic
Re:Maybe just Zoom or Teams? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Maybe just Zoom or Teams? (Score:3, Interesting)
Im trying to imagine what productive purpose there is to collecting 45,000 people in one place? Maybe eight or ten of them can have discussion and the other 44,990 people can sit there and just listen?
If every attendee got two minutes to speak, as a way to justify the expense of flying them halfway around the world, the conference would take over 1,500 hours (45,000 x 2 / 60).
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If every attendee got two minutes to speak, as a way to justify the expense of flying them halfway around the world, the conference would take over 1,500 hours (45,000 x 2 / 60).
Most conferences are about meeting people who work in related areas and finding others to cooperate with.
What the talks really do is sort people out according to their interests, so if you go to one of them then the other people around you will be interested in the same topic and will be good people to meet.
There will be lots more conversations going on than just the talks themselves. That means that everybody gets many minutes to say something.
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Most of the work is done between civil servants in unofficial meetings. They hammer out a deal and then the political leaders sign off on it, or not.
It's obviously not great having to get 45k people together, but the real proof is in what deals they actually manage to do. Sadly those tend to be lacking, especially when it comes to Europe and the US.
Diplomatic class and NGO types (Score:2)
So thousands of people who live a 5 start diplomatic lifestyle as UN, WHO, NGO leaders, government leaders, presidents of think tanks, media elites all get together with others to tell the rest of the planet how to live, how much energy to use, how many miles to drive, how much meat to eat....
The only way they come out of this junket with value is actual measures to drastically lower the plastic dumped into the Pacific Ocean by the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Thailand, etc. and the plastic dumped in the
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I completely agree that there will be hypocrites wanting a paid vacation. But a serious question...
Global warming is a global problem. To tackle the problem, it requires international cooperation and government policies forcing changes. Individuals will never enact these at scale. Too many will just say "you first" - or won't really even believe that their actions are part of the problem (I couldn't believe when my sister told me that her voyaging all over the planet wasn't contributing to global warming -
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Meeting in person allows plausible deniability, while digital leaves fingerprints or entire content.
Horseshit! (Score:4, Interesting)
an anticipated 45,000 delegates.
So 230 people from every fucking country on the planet?
Or is it thousands of smog-spewing-shit-stains from a handful of self-righteous and hypocritical countries planning to tell us what sacrifices to make?
Fuck every single one of them with a hot poker.
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It isn't the national representatives; it is the people from all the other parties (oil and coal companies, etc.) that drive up the numbers (and their flunkies, of course).
Oil companies, coal companies, Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion, etc.
lower the base rate and hide the real rate in hidd (Score:2)
lower the base rate and hide the real rate in hidden fees
Re: lower the base rate and hide the real rate in (Score:4, Funny)
There's only one room for every three attendees, apparently the issue is the organizers had a faulty understanding of the law of supply and demand...
Wrong location for a climate conference (Score:3)
If you want to minimize the carbon footprint of conference-related travel, statistically Madrid is a much better option.
Clearly Not Interested in Reducing Carbon (Score:2)
If you want to minimize the carbon footprint of conference-related travel,
If they were even vaguely interested in reducing their own carbon footprint they would not have 45,000 delegates attending. There are fewer than 200 countries in existence which means the average delegation size is insanely large.
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Roughly. The percentage of people attending from each continent times the distance to a best-guess location, do the sum and see what works best.
It also doesn't allow for people taking trains or cars and assumes everyone's flying on the same kind of plane for the same fuel economy.
Probably for the better anyway... (Score:2)
We've seen how much meaningful progress they have made in the last decade of the meetings.
Nowadays this summit is just poor countries trying to extract "reparations" from richer ones some the climate change is impacting then more and environmental concerns mean they can't have the same period of industrial growth others did a hundred years ago. China and Western nations pulling up the ladder behind them on a nation-building scale.
The idea of taking action to mitigate a disaster is long past.
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I once heard that the best time to plant a tree was yesterday, and the second-best time is today.
Failure to take an action doesn't negate the need for that action. The process can still be arrested at the stage of "smaller island nations disappearing" before it progresses to "debilitating levels of inland migration on every continent".
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Sorry, I didn't write that last sentence very clearly. I wasn't saying I felt it was too late, I meant summit participant's intention to take action to avert disaster is very much a thing of the past. Years of having the fossil-fuel industry involved with it has seen to that. The governments of the world are overwhelmingly headed by people who don't want to change their lifestyle for the benefit of people they will never meet.
Mass tourism? (Score:4, Insightful)
45000 attendants for 195 nations, o average, each nations sends 230 representants, most likely by plane.
This is not a climate summit, this is mass tourism.
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45,000 delegates needs 100-200 plane-loads, and Belem only has one international airport. It'll be a crowded customs queue ...
I guess there'll be a lot of cheap airfares for outbound flights during the conference, because those planes will mostly be flying out empty.
But it's a 12-day event, and few people will stay the full 12 days, so I guess the load will be spread out a bit.
Cretins or grifters? (Score:2)
Doomed.
Where will they... (Score:2)
Where will they park all the jets?
The absurdity of 45,000 going to one place at the same time for anything other than a sporting event is off the charts. Didn't anyone of the COP30 organizers question the idea of flying in 900 747 flights to a town on the edge of the Amazon for a conference? (You know they could always clear out some of the Amazon rain forest to make room for the needed hotel space...)
Giving hosts too much power. (Score:2)
Is it really the prices? (Score:2)
$500 a night is cheap, compared to cities like New York or London or Paris.
Let's bulldoze a road through the rain forest! (Score:2)