It wasn't some random impulse upon awakening that led to this morning's gentle mockery: "Climate nerds to tech execs, how Cop28 became the new Davos" (plus "How to write about pointless international organisations").
It was checking in on the The Conference of the Parties which seemed to have devolved into the Parties of the Conference and was much later written up by Reuters as:
COP28 forced into overtime as fossil fuel phase-out divides countries
So what to do?
Check in on the latest science of course.
From @sap, the journal of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues via Wiley:
Abstract
Globally, democratic politics are under attack from Electorally Legitimated Misogynist Authoritarian (ELMA) leaders who successfully use misogyny as a political strategy and present environmental concern in feminine and inferior terms. The ascendancy of such projects raise questions involving socioeconomic structures, political communication, and the psychological underpinnings of people's attitudes. We offer misogyny, conceptualized in a specific way – not simply as hatred or disgust for women, but as a way of accessing a gendered hierarchy whereby that which is labeled “feminine” is perceived as inferior, devalued, and amenable to be attacked – as a relevant transmission mechanism in how ELMAs like Trump may connect with public opinion by systematically investigating the interplay between misogyny, authoritarianism, and climate change in the context of the United States. Using a survey methodology (N = 314) and up-to-date questionnaires, we provide a concrete empirical underpinning for recent analytical and theoretical work on the complexity of misogyny. We analyze how misogynist and authoritarian attitudes correlate with climate change, adding to the literature on opposition to climate change policy. An additional exploratory aspect of our study concerning US voter preferences clearly indicates that Trump supporters are more misogynist, more authoritarian, and less concerned with the environment.And so, it is 100% clear that there is this toxic package or bundle of right-wing ideology, nationalism, exceptionalism, racism, sexism, anti-immigrantism, and anti-climate-change that goes with it. That is what drives many of them.
[Katharine Hayhoe, interviewed by Bjork-James & Barla, 2021, p. 389]Gender is a game-changer, like the Archimedean fulcrum, with the potential to shift economic logics from profit-exploiting systems of injustice to functional praxes of life-affirming care for ecosystems, human others, and planetary co-habitants.
[Glazebrook, 2015, p. 126]Sustainability is considered to be a ‘feminine’ project.
[in Cavaliere & Ingram, 2021, p. 13]Climate change is a man-made problem and must have a feminist solution.
[Mary Robinson, in Allen et al., 2019]
....MUCH MORE
"Glaciers, gender, and science"
From the journal Progress in Human Geography:
Glaciers, gender, and science
A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research
- Mark Carey, Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA. Email: carey@uoregon.edu
Abstract
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.
I IntroductionGlaciers are icons of global climate change, with common representations stripping them of social and cultural contexts to portray ice as simplified climate change yardsticks and thermometers. In geophysicist Henry Pollack’s articulation, ‘Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it crosses the threshold from solid to liquid. It just melts’ (Pollack, 2009: 114). This perspective appears consistently in public discourse, from media to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the ‘ice is just ice’ conceptualization contrasts sharply with conclusions by researchers such as Cruikshank (2005), who asks if glaciers listen, Orlove et al. (2008b), who analyze the cultural framing of glaciers, Carey (2007), who sees an endangered species narrative applied to glaciers, Jackson (2015), who exposes how glaciers are depicted as ruins, and Sörlin (2015), who refers to the present as a cryo-historical moment because ‘ice has become historical, i.e. that ice is an element of change and thus something that can be considered as part of society and of societal concern’ (Sörlin, 2015: 327).
For what it is worth, Al Gore is not happy:
I wonder if he'd feel better if he knew the work being done in the study of "Electorally Legitimated Misogynist Authoritarian (ELMA) leaders" and that "Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions."COP28 is now on the verge of complete failure. The world desperately needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but this obsequious draft reads as if OPEC dictated it word for word. It is even worse than many had feared. It is “Of the Petrostates, By the Petrostates…
— Al Gore (@algore) December 11, 2023
