The Bill for Damages gets sent to COP

Here there be dragons.

The COP this year flipped the usual order of things on its head. Normally the first week is for delegations of wordsmiths to hammer out text. The second week is for the Heads of State to arrive and make grandiose statements, then go behind closed doors and hedge on what they are willing to commit to before finally the host country pulls an all nighter and salvages something everyone can live with for another 12 months. Then they declare victory and go home. Not this year.

This year all the grandiose statements were made ahead of the meetings. The opening session of Heads of State was interspersed with dramatic presentations of world events and our place in the great history of our species as told by the mastery of David Attenborough. The usual national speeches were anticlimactic. Joe Biden’s could have been given 10 years earlier, apart from his ad lib at the end, when he said just before leaving the podium, “Those of us who were responsible for the deforestation and all the rest of the problems so far have overwhelming obligations to the nations who in fact were not…