Inside the Sausage Factory

The old saying is that one should not watch how politics are done, or sausage is made. I’ve seen the latter and it wasn’t too bad, but a visit to the cheese caves in Roquefort, France, put me off cheese for a long time. The smell was unforgettable. I imagine that I’d feel the same way about politics if I sat in on some meetings.

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In Honor of COP26

The COP26 meetings are over and they turned out exactly as expected. There were some particularly horrifying moments, such as when Nobel Price recipient Barack Obama, who earlier said:

“You wouldn’t always know it, but it [oil production] went up every year I was president,” he said to applause. “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas – that was me, people.”

… decided to lecture everyone about how bad fossil fuels are. You can’t make this shit up.

As I predicted, the aspirational goal of +1.5C is in the toilet: coal and oil producing countries are talking about “tailing off” new production, meaning “we’re going to keep drilling and digging and we’ll tail it off in a decade or two once it’s no longer our problem because we’re old people and we’re going to slide into our graves and leave you kids holding the bag.” +2.5C is the new aspirational goal and, frankly, I think humanity will blow that one, too.

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A New Recommended Book!

My official policy on book recommendations is, briefly: you will find it worthwhile or I’ll refund your money. [stderr] I note that nobody has ever taken me up on that offer in many years (I had a similar offer on my personal website before I started stderr here) so either my recommendations are awesome, or nobody cares. And, my official recommended books list, with this new entry, is [stderr]

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