The World Today for December 12, 2023

Listen to Today's Edition

NEED TO KNOW

A Heater in a Fridge in a Desert

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

An oil man oversaw the United Nations summit on climate change, which ended Tuesday.

Sultan al-Jaber was recently both the president of the 28th UN Conference of Parties (COP28) as well as the chief executive of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) as delegates to the climate talks met in his native United Arab Emirates from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12.

It was an odd juxtaposition that hinted at a conflict of interest, noted climate journalist and non-fiction filmmaker John Sutter on CNN. The sultan’s paycheck depends on greenhouse gases.

As the Telegraph noted, however, the UAE is hardly the poster child for the fight against global warming. The Persian Gulf country is a wealthy petro-state where the rich live wasteful, luxurious lifestyles, it wrote. It hosts a snowy indoor ski slope, for example, where the newspaper found a space heater running shortly before COP28 began.

“It must be one of the only patio heaters in Dubai. It sits on the balcony of a chalet halfway up an indoor ski slope that is kept at a cool -4°C in a country where temperatures reached a record of 49°C last July,” wrote the British newspaper. “It is essentially a heater in the middle of a giant fridge in the middle of the desert.”

The sultan then put his foot in his mouth as host of the world’s preeminent environmental gathering by saying during an online forum that there was “no science” behind efforts to phase out fossil fuels, added Axios. He might have meant that the world has no outstanding plan to finance and build the massive renewable energy infrastructure necessary to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions anytime soon. The American envoy to COP28, John Kerry, “shrugged” off the comments, according to Politico.

But then, many have been shrugging at the choice to pick an oil kingdom to begin with as host of the COP, Eco-business.com wrote.

Still, when COP28 opened, the BBC dropped a bombshell, reporting that the sultan was preparing for ADNOC to ramp up production at the same time that COP28 delegates were agreeing on cutting fossil fuel emissions overall. He denied the report, but a cloud hung over his presidency during the proceedings, wrote the Associated Press.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch recently found that air pollution in the UAE was dangerously high, the Guardian reported. The sultan might not have noticed because migrants who represent 88 percent of the UAE’s population are the ones who work outside.

During the conference, environmentalists complained that the conference has become a big “lobby fest,” and grown so large it’s not getting much done anymore. A record 84,000 people are in attendance at COP28 in Dubai, in part because of a large influx of business executives and lobbyists, the Washington Post wrote. That’s in contrast to 1995, when it was a small summit that attracted fewer than 4,000 diplomats and scientists.

This year, the main breakthrough touted by negotiators at the summit was an agreement on a “loss and damage fund” to compensate the Global South, which did little to cause the climate crisis, for the pain and suffering they are experiencing from changing weather patterns, storms and other problems.

While many hailed the agreement as finally hearing the pleas of poor and vulnerable countries, others said the math doesn’t add up: The $700 million pledged by wealthy nations most responsible covers less than 0.2 percent of the estimated minimum of $100 billion needed every year.

Other agreements included the creation of a $30 billion, private market green investment fund, an agreement by 50 oil companies to advance decarbonization across the hydrocarbon industry, and a pledge by 119 countries to triple their renewable energy use.

Still, many are looking ahead now.

Next year, an East European country is supposed to host COP29. But disputes between Russia and the European Union have prevented the bloc from deciding on where to hold their next conference, explained Reuters.

That might suit many in the oil industry just fine.

THE WORLD, BRIEFLY

The Majority, the Minority

INDIA/ JAMMU AND KASHMIR

India’s top court upheld a government decision to strip the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region of its special autonomy status on Monday, a move criticized by local stakeholders but hailed by Hindu nationalists, the BBC reported.

The Supreme Court ruled that the federal government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, did not overstep its powers by revoking Article 370 of the constitution, which granted the territory its own legislature and symbols.

In 2019, Modi fulfilled a campaign promise by splitting the 12-million-inhabitant state of Jammu and Kashmir into two separate entities and centralized power in the federal government. The government claimed the aim was to bring the region onto an equal footing with the rest of India.

After the 2019 constitutional amendment, the government ordered a crackdown on local activists and politicians, with the latter two groups claiming that federal institutions did not have the right to remove statehood without the consent of the Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly.

But in its verdict, the Supreme Court countered that “the state of Jammu and Kashmir does not have internal sovereignty different from other states.”

Even so, the judges called on the government to restore statehood and hold elections in the coming year.

Once a princely state, Jammu and Kashmir joined India in 1947. Through Article 370, its parliament granted privileges to the state’s population over other Indians. For example, Indians from outside the state faced a ban on buying property.

The region has been the subject of an everlasting territorial dispute between Hindu-majority India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, both nuclear powers that have engaged in two wars since the independence of both countries after the end of British rule in 1947.

Meanwhile, Kashmir is the sole Muslim-dominated region in the country.

As a result, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has been accused of pushing for the dissolution of the predominantly Muslim region to gain more power for Hindus there.

For example, critics say the lifting of the property-ownership ban for non-Kashmiri Indians could transform the region’s demographics.

Barricading the House

GUATEMALA

Guatemala’s electoral court confirmed this week that President-elect Bernardo Arévalo was the winner of the country’s elections in August, a ruling that comes amid ongoing efforts by authorities to prevent the anti-corruption candidate from taking office, Agence France-Presse reported.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) said the results of the August presidential runoff are “validated, formalized and unchangeable.” It added that elected officials must take office in January as planned, or else there would be “a breach of the constitutional order.”

The court announcement came shortly after the prosecutor’s office said investigations concluded that the election of Arévalo, his vice-president and parliamentarians was “null and void” due to counting “anomalies” in the first round in June.

Arévalo, a dark horse candidate who pledged to fight graft in the Central American nation, surprised voters after coming in second place in the first round of voting in June behind his opponent, former First Lady Sandra Torres. He then had a landslide win in the second round in August.

But since then, Guatemala’s Attorney General Consuelo Porras, senior prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche and other officials have launched a series of legal challenges against his election victory, including suspending Arévalo’s Seed Movement party.

Porras, Curruchiche and Judge Fredy Orellana – who had ordered the suspension of Arévalo’s party – are all on a United States’ list of “corrupt actors.”

Arévalo has criticized the efforts as a “perverse coup d’état” by authorities to prevent him from taking office on Jan. 14. The post-election crisis has prompted many Guatemalans to take to the streets to demand the resignation of the three officials.

Meanwhile, the US, the European Union and a number of international organizations have expressed concern over the events, as well as condemned the efforts by Guatemalan prosecutors.

The Washington-based Organization of American States described the recent attempt to annul the results as “the worst form of democratic breakdown and the consolidation of a political fraud against the will of the people.”

A Dash of Fear

EUROPEAN UNION

The European Union warned that the war in Gaza has increased the threat of terror attacks over the holiday season, a statement that comes following a recent deadly attack near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the New York Times reported.

EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson said that both the Oct. 7 attack carried out by Hamas in Israel, and the Israeli government’s deadly military response, had triggered anger throughout Europe that has already escalated into violence.

On Dec. 2, a man armed with a knife and a hammer murdered a German tourist and injured another two near the Eiffel Tower. Authorities questioned the man’s mental stability, though he expressed distress at the death of Muslims, including in Gaza, and pledged allegiance to Islamic State.

That follows another deadly attack in October, when a French teacher was stabbed to death and two others injured in Arras, northern France, the Wall Street Journal reported.

As a result, France and other European states have heightened anti-terrorism security levels. An EU official told the New York Times that authorities were staying alert to both antisemitic and anti-Muslim threats. Johansson said a $32 million fund will be used to counter terror threats, including for religious sites.

Prior to the war in the Middle East, Europol reported that Islamic terrorism was considered the biggest threat in Europe. Nonetheless, attacks by white supremacists have also occurred in recent years.

Still, Europeans are skittish, remembering the period from 2014 to 2017 that saw hundreds killed in France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, among other countries in terror attacks.

DISCOVERIES

Some Nerves

Marine scientists recently discovered that dolphins have a secret ability to hunt the seas, the New York Times reported.

Researcher Guido Dehnhardt and his team explained that newborn dolphins have hair at the top of their jaws. But once they are weaned, these whiskers fall off and leave pits in that area.

Initially, they suggested these structures served no purpose, but a close analysis of Guiana dolphin species showed that these holes were packed with nerve endings.

The researchers said that these follicles resembled the electricity-sensing structures on sharks and found that one dolphin responded to electrical signals. This prompted them to explore whether the ability to detect electricity was also present in other cetaceans.

For a new study, the team trained two bottlenose dolphins to rest their jaws on a platform and swim away when experiencing sensory cues, such as sound or light.

The findings showed the marine mammals successfully detected electrical signals, promptly and accurately responding to these electrical signals, showing they had also learned to react to specific sensory cues.

This ability to perceive electric fields is similar to the platypus, which uses it for foraging.

The researchers believe the dolphins are also employing this sensitivity to hunt down prey – particularly that which hides on the ocean floor.

While this ability is similar to sharks, scientists noted that this electro-sensitivity is not as strong as that of the apex predators. It’s also not clear whether this ability is actually used in the wild.

Still, knowing that dolphins are able to sense electrical signals opens a whole new world of exploring their behavior in the oceans and how to better protect them.

For instance, fishing fleets have employed electromagnetic devices on their nets to keep sharks at bay. The same can also be used for dolphins, despite their lower sensitivity.

Thank you for reading or listening to DailyChatter. If you’re not already a subscriber, you can become one by going to dailychatter.com/subscribe.