Greetings. It is Election Day Eve, and I'm wearing camouflage, not because of the election,

but because of this coat is the best windbreaker. It is 63 degrees here in northern Wisconsin

in the middle of November. So I went for a bike ride. And I had these

reflections, which will be this week's frankly. I would like to talk about the COP 27 in Egypt,

which I expect will fail like the prior 26 convenings of parties, at least insofar as

reducing emissions and mitigating the default climate trajectory.

And I'll explain why in a moment.

Last month, I did, frankly, on the seven stages of climate awareness, which basically

was stage one. There is an environment. Stage two, climate is part of the environment. Stage

three, the climate changes and that's due to CO2. Stage four is that fossil fuels are the biggest driver of climate.

Stage five is that energy is vital to human civilization.

Stage six is that we're part of a system, economy, growth, debt, climate, all that fits together.

And stage seven is that we're not going to be able to directly solve for climate.

Climate is a symptom of a much larger problem, and therefore we have to look two or three

steps ahead.

In thinking about that,

I realize there are other categories with which we view the issue of climate from different

perspectives. One of them, which I'm going to talk about today, is what we care about. And then

in the not too distant future, I will also talk about

various climate scenarios and also various interventions as individuals or as society. But first of

all, what's going on in COP 27 and Egypt, the reason that it's failing is because we're trying to optimize three things.

We're trying to optimize climate change and emissions.

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