The And then. Hello and

welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood, the regulation two guests today.

We'll hear from the environmental journalist Tina Gerhart on the recently

included COP28 conference, and then the historian

Forrest Hilton will fill us in on Argentina's new president, the eccentric

Libertarian Haviie Malay.

COP28, the acronym for the 28th Conference of Parties, UN Speak for the Giant Annual Meeting on Climate

Change, was held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates from November 30th to December 13th.

As I said in introducing my first guest commentary on last year's edition, it was not

without achievement, but its accomplishments were just not up to the task. Same thing this year. Fossil fuels are named

as a culprit for the first time in almost three decades of these shindigs,

but the words phase out or eliminate were nowhere to be found.

That the meeting was hosted and led by one of the world's largest oil exporters probably had something to do with that,

though it's not like Biden's government was eager to squeeze those words into the Klizikminike

either.

Once again, funds needed for poorer countries to recover from the damage done to them, mostly by us and the rich countries, and to finance a green transition there were not forthcoming.

But while it's easy to mock these extravagances they're actually far from meaningless.

For more here's the climate journalist Tina Gerhart.

Her writing has been published by Grest, The Progressive, The Nation, Sierra Magazine, and the

Washington Monthly. She was last in this show in May to discuss her book

Sea Change, an Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean published that month by the University of

California Press. Tina Gerhart. How did this year's event compare to the last few versions of it?

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